This morning I finished reading the third
of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy, Flood of Fire. Although it
didn't tire me, my first response would be to say that the book disappointed.
Of course, this response may not be echoed by all: being a regular and eager
reader of Ghosh's works, I have come to expect a few things in his writing which in my opinion are characteristic of him at his best. It is
perhaps in having missed these for the most part of the narrative that my first
impulse was to say the book disappointed. As in a way the whole of the trilogy
does, in spite of its many marvelous achievements.
But let me leave that bit for a little
later. The most appreciable and outstanding part of this mammoth project -- for
that is what the Ibis trilogy is more
than anything else, -- is its deep, detailed and palpable critique of the
peculiar kind of hungry, zealous but utterly composed and self-assured tyranny
that came to be embodied by British colonialism. Of course it is widely
acknowledged now that this domination of a staggeringly large part of the world
by one nation was a remarkable collusion of capitalist greed, racial superiority and
military strength boosted by scientific advancement, and one which was often
articulated in terms of a religious fervor. We have all read our Edward Saids
and the numerous theorists after who have peeled off the many layers of this
grand phenomenon. But Ghosh's story brings it all out in visceral human detail,
and that of course has been the great strength of his fictional engagement with
history, something I have followed with admiration over the last couple of decades. In
fact, one could even say that there has been a steady progression and
deepening of Ghosh’s historical insight as his canvas has broadened from The Shadow Lines of personally familiar places and
occurrences to the Ibis trilogy, whose task is ambitious to
say the least.
The parodic and slightly mythical facet of
the narrative seems to me an interesting modification of the hyperbolic style
that is recurrent in Ghosh. But I didn't quite take to those instances in the
trilogy where this is most pronounced. I prefer the Nirmal version of it,
infused with poetry, a raw lyrical quality and dreamy idealism. But here it is
more cinematic, with visions and shrines, lores and sudden dramatic escapes. It
has an important role to play in the narrative and the import (or rather the
impact) of the novels, no doubt, but this wasn't among what I could enjoy in
reading them. Of course, this is in part my own preference for an old fashioned
realism from which I seem to permit only certain kinds of deviation.
Coming to Flood of Fire in particular, I thought that the first half of the
book was a bit of a drag. Zachary's escapades with Mrs. Burnham and the page
after page of discourse on 'onanism' researched a bit too painstakingly almost
made me wonder if some of it was just meant to add pages of titillation to the tome. The
descriptions of warfare in the second half are similarly long-drawn and
although to someone interested in details of combat these may seem
particularly striking, there seems to be a tendency to lapse into minute findings of research
here. (My own inability to reconstruct a vivid mental picture of the terrain described added to my distress in reading these pages.) Of course the full horror of the war in all its mundane everyday ugliness
had to be brought out and Ghosh does a good job of it, but fiction writing
is stretched in the process into mind-boggling lengths of detail.
As for the 'story', that disappointed me
too. It was all a bit too simplistic. Zachary' story of steady fall from
innocence, visualized in Baboo Nobo Kissan’s scheme of things as the Kaliyug, becomes sinister capitalist domination represented as tame allegory (in fact the
joining of hands between Burnham, Reid and Chan reminded me of the ending of Animal Farm). Mrs. Burnham and
Captain Mee are conveniently disposed of in a manner that certainly doesn’t
evoke pathos as Bahram’s death does at the end of River of Smoke. By this point in the novel, I was just
impatient to be done with the wrapping up that was happening with a rapidity
that contrasts awkwardly with the dull pace of the first half. (The ships tips
over, so to speak.) I was left with a sense of an epic that had suddenly shrunk.
It is the character of Neel that surprised me. Each of Ghosh’s novels has this intellectual observer-chronicler
who becomes the author’s alter ego in the narrative. I am curious to see how
this character develops in his future work.
