RIVER OF SMOKE: AMITAV GHOSH

This is the third book I have read by Ghosh in the last couple of months, the second in his trilogy, the first being the SEA OF POPPIES.  This one is set in Canton, China, unlike the previous novel, which began in northern India, then Calcutta and ended up at sea.  Here, we see the range of inhabitants in the foreign part of Canton, Fanqui town, as no one who is not Chinese is allowed inside the city proper.  The center of the novel is the merchants who have gotten rich selling opium, basically an illegal substance, to the Chinese, who have basically turned a deaf ear to what has been going on.  Unfortunately for the capitalists, the Emperor has decided  that this drug has been the bane of his people, from peasant up to the ruling class and has decided, once and for all, to stop the trade.  This means, of course, that the East India Company, along with many other nations will lose the main vehicle of their wealth, their opium trade with China.  We see the conflict through the eyes of Seth Bahram, an Indian trader, his scribe, Neel, whom we saw in the early novel, the fallen Prince, and both Paulette, the English spinster who manages to masquerade as an immigrant in the early novel, and Robin, her childhood playmate.  Robin writes mainly of his love of painting, the doors it opens for him in Canton and its society, and Paulette writes of flowers, as she along with Penrose, master English gardener, seek and find various rare flowers which they  bring back to Great Britain.  We learn much of what is going on from the letters Robin writes to Paulette, who is living in Hong Kong, at that time a fledgling port and community.

Ghosh makes this as realistic as possible, using journals, documents as well as various books written on this period in history, the decade that leads up to the Opium Wars.  The foreign powers, when presented with an ultimatum to stop trading opium and turn over all the opium on their ships, react angrily but they are at the mercy of the Chinese, as British troops, if needed, are months away.  They refuse to accept the offer, and they are then basically barricaded from the rest of the world, no servants, no movement, little if any communication until they give in, which they eventually and reluctantly do, thinking that the Chinese will get their comeuppance once the British government gets behind them.  And they are right, as the Opium Wars follow, most likely the final novel of this trilogy.  This novel ends with loose ends, though Seth Bahram, the major protagonist, an opium merchant, succumbs to the drug and falls into the sea, while on a opium high, a fitting ending for Seth, though he is the most likable fellow in the novel.  The guts of the novel is the back and forth between the merchants and the Chinese, as the merchants fight for their rights, for 'free trade' as they see it, and the Chinese, seeming the most reasonable, try to get the sellers to see that what they are doing is morally wrong; the selling of opium illegal in western countries, so why should it be done here in China.  The Chinese come off well, whereas the Brits and Americans seem greedy, interested only in profits, using the excuse of free trade to get what they want.  And they are all hypocrites for the most part, knowing the lethal world of opium yet justifying it with their profits, dehumanizing of the Asian,  and banner of capitalism.

Many of the main characters in SEA OF POPPIES have minor roles in RIVER OF SMOKE  Deeti, for example, the heart of SEA OF POPPIES,  hardly appears in this novel.  We learn she survives the ship journey, lives on as a kind of matriarch but this seems incidental to the story, as she lives on the Mauritius Islands, where Neel and friends are shipwrecked. They eventually crew on ships which take them to Canton, and that's when the real story begins.