Book Review #57 - Sea of Poppies

A definite labor of love, this is the kind of book that I can blame when I suffer and finish a bad book. Because I did not enjoy this for hundreds of pages. Hundreds. I'm glad I was patient.

Sea of Poppies begins with Deeti, an Indian woman, harvesting her opium crop in her small Indian village with her young daughter. While working, she has a vision of a large ship - the kind she has never seen nor imagined, ultimately revealed as the Ibis, a former slave trading vessel. She immediately returns to her home and draws her vision, including the occupants of the ship. This sketch foreshadows the rest of the novel and is the bone that Ghosh throws his readers to stick it out until the end.

Even though the characters, who are complicated, fleshy and the kind you want to bravely endure with, are separated and seemingly unrelated for much of the book, it works. It works because Ghosh had a vision of an epic story and didn't allow himself to cater to the impatient reader. The variety of his characters voices, who range from an ignorant villager, to an Indian Raja with Americans, English and Chinese stuffed in between, are so delightfully unique, that I felt I was witnessing the spectrum of an 1830s India I didn't know I was interested in. This is historical fiction at its best.

There is a good-sized chunk of pages at the end of the book full of the unique vocabulary Ghosh uses. It's a vernacular that has an Australian feel, or pirate or...something that I am not familiar with. Truly, there were whole sentences, nay, paragraphs that I skimmed because I knew that I didn't have the patience to decipher their actual meaning. Instead, I read it a la The Jabberwocky, hoping I'd pick up the gist through its surrounding context. However, if you happen to be more patient that myself, the author offers the opportunity to painstakingly look up each word. If that's your thing, then, good luck.

If the story has an Achilles heel, it is the budding romance between several of the novel's characters. Considering Ghosh's patience in other matters of his story's development, I was surprised and disappointed that these particular scenes were so rushed over. However, the rumor is that this is merely part I of a planned trilogy, so, perhaps that flaw can still be remedied.

Difficult, interesting, historical, rough, and not for the faint of heart, I have to admit to enjoying this wildly complex book.