Drugs are bad, mkay?
Dec. 16th, 2024 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
This had been on my to-read list for many years; in fact I forget how it came to be there. As such, it was a genuinely unexpected gift.
I found the structure unusual: several apparently unrelated plot lines are interspersed, yet they inexorably spiral together in misfortune. Deeti's husband works in an opium factory in rural Bengal; Neel Rattan Halder is a Raja in Calcutta; Zachary Reid is a carpenter bound for adventure from Baltimore; and Paulette Lambert is the orphaned daughter of a French botanist estranged from his homeland after its revolutions. In a strangely dispassionate way, Ghosh shows how India had been ubiquitously distorted and corrupted by the opium trade: not only the disastrous health effects brought on by addiction, but also the military-industrial complex of its time, the economic and agrarian ruin wrought by bending everything to be subservient to producing a monoculture, and the calling in of real debt when imaginary money suddenly becomes unavailable. Benjamin Burnham, of course, sees it all in terms of Free Trade - and that freedom must be forced upon China, if necessary. The Ibis is a former slave ship, and there's little doubt that Burnham would have run the ship for those purposes without compunction, in an earlier age.
There are some characters in the book who do seem to be bad people, but there's an ambivalence to more of them, and yet more are simply victims of their circumstance. Ghosh gives humanity to them all, which is effective and at times unsettling. This book is from 2008, but if anything some of the themes of exploitation, division and injustice seem even more relevant and urgent through the lens of today; I suppose a sign of the timeless quality of the writing. So much is connected: this clearly relates to Babel, which I was reading about a year ago, as well as to the more recent The Silk Roads.
This had been on my to-read list for many years; in fact I forget how it came to be there. As such, it was a genuinely unexpected gift.
I found the structure unusual: several apparently unrelated plot lines are interspersed, yet they inexorably spiral together in misfortune. Deeti's husband works in an opium factory in rural Bengal; Neel Rattan Halder is a Raja in Calcutta; Zachary Reid is a carpenter bound for adventure from Baltimore; and Paulette Lambert is the orphaned daughter of a French botanist estranged from his homeland after its revolutions. In a strangely dispassionate way, Ghosh shows how India had been ubiquitously distorted and corrupted by the opium trade: not only the disastrous health effects brought on by addiction, but also the military-industrial complex of its time, the economic and agrarian ruin wrought by bending everything to be subservient to producing a monoculture, and the calling in of real debt when imaginary money suddenly becomes unavailable. Benjamin Burnham, of course, sees it all in terms of Free Trade - and that freedom must be forced upon China, if necessary. The Ibis is a former slave ship, and there's little doubt that Burnham would have run the ship for those purposes without compunction, in an earlier age.
There are some characters in the book who do seem to be bad people, but there's an ambivalence to more of them, and yet more are simply victims of their circumstance. Ghosh gives humanity to them all, which is effective and at times unsettling. This book is from 2008, but if anything some of the themes of exploitation, division and injustice seem even more relevant and urgent through the lens of today; I suppose a sign of the timeless quality of the writing. So much is connected: this clearly relates to Babel, which I was reading about a year ago, as well as to the more recent The Silk Roads.