You are getting very sleepy

Prufrock works up a lather over which brown man won the Desi Booker Prize:

Adiga has an idea, he has a scathing bluntness, but he is not half the storyteller that Amitav Ghosh is. Even if one penalises Sea of Poppies for the irksome dialects (especially the endless Anglo-Indian cant), it’s infinitely more informative, has far more empathy and several times the imagination, and is generally a far far better book. [Prufrock]

I’ve attempted three of Amitav Ghosh’s books now and made it through only one. It’s no coincidence that the one which grabbed me was the genre work, because thrillers demand a certain narrative velocity. The Glass Palace was slackly written. While Sea of Poppies is far tighter, with more imaginative plotting (a mountainous man is forced to violate a mare; a woman is impregnated in an opiate stupor), it still meanders. What recommends it is its florid pidgin improv; what damns it, its pace.

The problem is twofold. First, encyclopedic stories are better done as non-fiction and rarely work as novels (cf. The Enchantress of Florence). The author is far too tempted by a cavalcade of historical facts to pare to the narrative meat. The fragile flame of reader attention needs to be tended carefully lest the novel become an exercise in self-stimulation.

And second, someone writing novels in serious, old-fashioned narrative, unadorned by modern fiction’s tricks — timeline trickery, the slow reveal, synecdoche, layers of metaphor, a clever narrative vehicle — has both the advantage and curse of being all about plot. Dickens was penning longer, tamer penny dreadfuls; the format is built for imaginative happenstance.

And while Poppies is certainly ambitious in scope, wrapping its arms around the global opium trade, it just does not move. Ghosh throws overboard the innate advantages of the genre. Like its protagonist Kalua, the novel is large, slow and inclined to slumber.

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