River of Smoke

Amitav Ghosh, 2011

I finished reading the first volume of the Ibis trilogy surprised at the abrupt ending and eager to find out more about the complex lives of the characters that Ghosh had introduced his readers to. That storyline is so lightly glossed over here that I still want to know more about them; but that’s not how I feel about the characters in this book. The richness of character and setting that I liked so much in Sea of Poppies shifts to a new location with only a few of the original characters remaining. And some of the characters show up briefly at the beginning of the book never to reappear. I guess they are just holding space until they come back in the third volume, although perhaps it too will jump into something new.
  There’s still a lot of period detail, although more than once I felt that Ghosh was piling on details from his research that didn’t contribute much to the novel. There are some interesting items – the life of the traders in Canton before the Opium Wars, for example, and the elaborate gardens of the wealthy Chinese. But these are rather slight compared to the first novel. More serious, however, is the fact that the characters are, to me at least, less interesting and more contrived. Some of them, such as Neel, the Indian prince reduced to pretending to be a Bengali secretary, or Robin, the painter who seems to be there simply to narrate conversations in a voice other than the author’s, were never convincing or sympathetic. Only Bahram, the Indian opium trader who has risen to the elite of the Canton bourgeoisie, is interesting for his own story, and its end is a slow anti-climax.

  What is good here is Ghosh’s detailed depiction of the machinations and rationalizations of the British opium traders when the new Chinese governor moves to block the import and sale of opium. Ghosh reports on historical figures and gives them arguments from period texts. The convenient new philosophy of the invisible hand of free trade justifies a vast drug trade and wealth. Anything in violation of trade is anathema, in spite of criminal laws or the effect of drugs on the populace, in spite of the complete prohibition of similar trade in Britain. It’s interesting to see that a few traders argued against the trade on moral grounds, making their profits in other goods, although their objections are forcefully overruled by the majority. And while the traders demand that the Chinese government stay out of the market, they don’t hesitate to call on the British government to send gunboats to enforce their access to the market.

  The opium trade is the central issue of the book, but it also touches lightly on a variety of other moral issues, from family relationships, true identities and forgeries to the sex trade, all within the larger context of imperialism and commercial exploitation. But what is the convoluted storyline about the golden camellia? The unattainable, perhaps non-existent, mystery of the Orient?

  As in the first volume, the use of language adds an interesting note to the storyline. From nautical slang to the pidgin English that different groups of traders use to converse among each other, the language itself represents the complex relationships between the Indian, Chinese, English and international traders and labourers. The language both unites characters across cultural barriers, and divides them from each other and from a deeper understanding that comes with a shared language and culture. While I enjoyed sometimes stopping to look up unfamiliar words – to find, for example, that the non-Chinese are restricted to living in Fanqui-town, or White-ghost Town – the sense is clear enough that the language doesn’t slow down the narrative.

  So overall, some of the elements that made the first volume so interesting are still here, but I found the first volume much more engaging. I’m not sure I’d be looking for the third volume if this was the only one I had read.