Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh
FSG, 515 pages.
By Hephzibah Anderson
Bloomberg News
A devout Hindu mother is bathing in the Ganges when a schooner hulks into view with dazzling white sails and a figurehead of a long-billed bird. She has never seen such a ship. Terrified by this apparition, she rushes home to sketch the image and place it in her puja room of gods.
The two-masted Ibis unites the fates of a Dickensian cast and their multiple, overlapping stories in Amitav Ghosh’s “Sea of Poppies,” the clamorous first installment of a shipboard trilogy and a finalist in this year’s Man Booker Prize.
Built to transport slaves, the Ibis has just sailed from Baltimore into Calcutta, where its new owner, an evangelical Christian named Benjamin Brightwell Burnham, plans to refit her for exporting opium to China.
His timing is terrible, even though opium wraps its tentacles around most of the characters in this restless story, from the lowliest addict to the wealthiest merchant. The year is 1838, and an opium glut has driven prices to $450 a chest, half the going rate a year earlier. The Chinese are cracking down on the trade and have taken to beheading opium sellers at the gates of Macau.
A trade war is imminent, though Burnham refuses to view the showdown in those terms. Asked if the British Empire will really wage a war to keep the Chinese hooked, he insists that the conflict won’t be about opium.
“It will be for a principle: for freedom — for the freedom of trade and for the freedom of the Chinese people,” he says, anticipating that the Ibis will eventually join a British fleet in bombarding Chinese ports into submission.
With time to kill before the coming conflict, Burnham kits out the ship for a new mission — transporting hundreds of coolies to Mauritian plantations. By the time the Ibis leaves Calcutta, she has acquired an eclectic band of crew members and passengers. The schooner offers each a new start, despite its history as a slaver.
Deeti, the superstitious mother from the opening scene, is aboard. So is a bankrupt fellow named Raja, who is being transported in chains to a penal colony in Mauritius. The second mate is Zachary Reid, the ivory-skinned illegitimate son of a black freedwoman and her white master. Burnham’s ward, a plucky lass, is traveling incognito below deck.
Ghosh conjures up each character with alacrity, fixing even minor players in the reader’s mind with a few deft words. A stout Englishman has “beefy cheeks and liverish lips.” His plump wife’s face hangs “like a setting moon, under a great cloud of henna-red hair.”
The narrative rolls along to the rhythms of the sea, seasoned with salty language and bawdy badinage. Its characters speak in exotic farragoes of English, French and Indian dialects, yet you don’t necessarily need the glossary provided in the U.S. edition of the book.
“It’s easy enough to jin if you put your head to it,” the fleshy Englishman tells Zachary.
In some respects, this is a deeply old-fashioned novel, not burdened by postmodern trickery and driven by plot devices Robert Louis Stevenson would have loved: Grudges must be avenged, debts paid off, pasts hidden. As love, greed and ambition hasten the pace, more nuanced themes of faith and ideology languish, though boundaries of class, caste and race blur subversively once the Ibis leaves for Mauritius.
At more than 500 pages, “Sea of Poppies” crams in storylines enough for a work twice as fat. Ghosh is, of course, laying the foundations for volumes two and three, though he does so a tad too conspicuously.
As for the ending, it fairly screams “to be continued.” After accompanying the Ibis this far, the reader deserves some resolution, however fleeting.
