Flood of Fire: Impressions

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.