by Amitav Ghosh, 2015 (November 2019)
Flood of Fire completes Amitav Ghosh’s colourful trilogy of the linked histories of China, India and the colonizing forces, particularly Britain. I enjoyed it more than the last book, which got bogged down in ideological argument, but perhaps not quite as much as the first, which revealed a detailed story of people and places in the opium trade. This novel takes us into the early phases of the British invasion of China now known as the Opium Wars.
Looking at the history from a South Asian perspective, Ghosh brings in the Indian traders who hoped to profit from the opium sales and Indian soldiers who had to fight the wars, as well as an educated noble class that found itself disposessed from its former privilege in India. The character of the mystic gomusta, Baboo Nob Kissin, adds a slightly comic viewpoint as he helps bring all the forces together for what he hopes will be a destructive cataclysm that will launch a new spiritual world. The British, the Chinese and the Americans all have characters representing their viewpoints, but the main focus is the characters from the Indian subcontinent.
I found the clash of these varying national and personal interests brought a lot of interest to events that I knew of only as a historical note. Ghosh describes home life, ship life and warfare in concrete detail that gives a real sense of what’s involved and what’s at stake for the characters that he chooses for his story. (Except for a few soldiers, he chooses only relatively wealthy middle and upper class characters.) The Indian soldier Kesri, for example, lives the farce of military bureaucracy as well as 19th century cannon fire and hand-to-hand combat in conditions where food, water and ammunition had to be carried to soldiers by hand. The advantage of modern weapons over traditional ones is violently clear.
Each character’s personal motivations also develops and plays into the broader historical forces. Zachery becomes a key character as he develops from a naïve and generous American sailor with mixed-heritage into a self-interested businessman who wants status and wealth. He finds his way to prove his merit by making vast profits in the drug trade. In this, he follows the model and the moral justification of the British. They regard him as a useful tool in facilitating their own acquisition, and his anger at the emotional and social costs he has to pay is key to his motivation. However, it is Zachery that Baboo Nob Kissin is thinking of when he envisions the destruction of the world through greed. Pointedly, Zachery sees the bombardnent of Canton as the high point of rational civilization, where technology and science come together to project modern comercial values on a recalcitrant country.
There are some things in the novel that, for me, don’t entirely fit. The characters are all drawn to travel together on the Hind in their passage from ancient India to modern Hong Kong, but somehow they are all connected through the Ibis, the schooner that was at the centre of the first novel in the trilogy. The Ibis was carrying its characters to a range of new lives in Mauritius when it was hit by a storm. The ghost of a key Indian trader appears on the Ibis before another storm sinks the ship in Hong Kong harbour. This is all a bit mystical and I’m not sure what it adds to the story. Modern transport and communications are the instrument that links new and old and brings about their destruction? It is obviously a factor, but it’s not the only one or the most powerful one, and it doesn’t act in a mystical way.
Nevertheless, the narrative is a gripping way of looking at the history of southeast Asia. It shows not only the economic and political forces at work, but also their impacts on individuals of many classes. The narrative and the characters are interesting and keep the story moving along through its considerable length.
