A Brilliant Sea of Poppies

When I finished reading Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, I went to his website to read a little more about him, and I was delighted to learn that this is the first book in a trilogy. While it’s hard to imagine a book better than this one, Ghosh has such a fertile imagination and writes so beautifully that I’m certain he can pull it off. And what a fascinating group of characters he has created; a schooner called the Ibis being the central character around which the epic story revolves. The setting is India during the 19th century, with Britain and China gearing up to fight the opium wars. On a voyage from Calcutta to Mauritius, the stories of people from all walks of life and diverse cultures intertwine, revealing the best and worst in people, with humanity winning out.

This is another book that is rife with hard-to-understand language. Take this passage:

’Malum must be propa pukka sahib,’ said the serang. ‘All lascar wanchi Malum be captin-bugger by’m’by.’

Interestingly, the novel is followed by a something called The Ibis Chrestomathy, which serves as sort of a glossary, and is supposedly written by one of the main characters some years after the events unfold because of his obsession with language. Reading this book on my Kindle, where I couldn’t easily flip to the back of the book, I didn’t know of the existence of the Chrestomathy until I finished the book. And although the Kindle has a search function so I could search for a word, all uses of the word are flagged, making it essentially useless to look up the meaning of a word. In any case, over time I got used to the language and could almost understand it, and I loved the authenticity of the many languages spoken by this rag-tag group of people on the ship.

Beyond his masterful use of dialogue, Ghosh writes amazing, deeply intimate prose, such as this:

Then his own face began to smart and he realized that his eyes had welled up with a substance that was as corrosive as acid, tinged with the bitter gall of his betrayals of his wife and child, and with the bile that came from knowing that he had spent all his years as a somnambulist, walking through his days as if his life mattered no more than a bit-part in a play written by someone else.

There is a lot to love about this book. In fact, I intend to read it again because I'm sure I have merely scratched the surface with the first read.