Flood of Fire

The Opium Chronicles

Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy is a masterwork of research, historical fiction and all the small things that make for the big picture. The range of characters, the breadth of imagination, the flair for multiple dialects, the detailing—all wrapped in a very entertaining package.

Flood of Fire, the last of the trilogy, comes out after Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, tying up all loose ends, giving all (or almost all) main characters a proper narrative arc and a kind of closure, while telling the sprawling tale of events leading the Opium War (1839-42) between China and the UK.

Of particular interest to India readers is the contribution of Indian sepoys and Mumbai’s Parsi traders to the spread of the East India Company’s (EIC) influence that had once ensured that the sun never set on the British Empire. In spite of their intolerable racism and air of superiority, the British knew how to lead men, how to fight the enemy with military might or subterfuge and their absolute faith in profit and Free Trade, even if it meant fighting wars, exploiting the poor, or ruining a country by getting its people addicted to opium.

Sea of Poppies, focused on how the people of north and east India were forced to cultivate poppy and produce opium. Deeti was a heroine, who escaped being killed on her husband’s pyre and sailed to Mauritius on the Ibis, along with other indentured labourers or ‘girmitiyas’.  River of Smoke moved to Canton to see how the opium business flourished— a Parsi trader Behram Modi taking centrestage here, as one of the tiny community that built its foundations of fabulous wealth on the opium trade  What links the main characters in their connection to the Ibis.

In the third part, the strands that overlap involves Deeti’s brother Kesri Singh, a sepoy in the EIC’s army, who becomes a volunteer or ‘balamteer’ on the EIC’s China campaign; Behram’s widow Shireen, who is forced out of her sheltered life and into the hurly burly of international intrigue; and the most interesting character, Zachary Reid, the lowly ship’s mate turned carpenter or ‘mystery’, who buries his sordid past and reaches a position of wealth and power grabbing every opportunity that comes his way, biting every hand that feeds him.

The chapters on his affair with Mrs Burnham, the wife of a powerful trader, are over-extended, but amusing for their bawdiness and the Anglo-Indian patios used by the British in India-- Hindi words acquiring their own pronunciation and spelling. (The phrases uses to describe various sexual acts are laugh-out-loud funny). Reid is just the kind of unscrupulous man who would rise to prominence in the new world created by the Raj. Anyone with less gumption would simply drop by the wayside, like the unfortunate Captain Mee, or Behram’s illegitimate son, Freddie Lee.

The bankrupted Raja, Neel Rattan Halder, imprisoned by the British, who had also escaped from the Ibis and ended up in China, plays the part of chronicler, his brave son Raju, with the help of the bizarre Baboo Nob Kissin Panda, also enters the story.

The build up to the war is interesting, but scenes of the battles go on a bit too long and make for dull reading; still the narrative perks up when Zachary, Kesri or Neel appear. Till the end, when Hong Kong is annexed by the British, after thousands of Chinese have been slaughtered, the action never lets up. It is a fascinating glimpse or history, especially in the light of China’s current place in the world’s power hierarchy and the UK’s great decline. Worth reading all three books—the first remains the best!

Flood of Fire

By Amitav Ghosh

Publisher: Viking

Pages: 616                               

Deadline & Gathering Prey

Enjoyable Crime Capers

Lucas Davenport is Virgil Flowers’s boss. John Sandford has given both their own series of books, and the two make guest appearances in each other’s stories. That’s the reason for writing about two books by the same author, Gathering Prey starring Davenport (the latest in the Prey series) and Deadline with Flowers.

They are both crime fighters—Davenport is a family man (after philandering through many early Prey novels) of independent means, and a penchant for fashionable designer clothes; a maverick for whom him his job is a passion. Flowers is a roughneck with multiples marriages behind him and is currently in a happy relationship with a woman who has many children by different fathers. Both books are hugely entertaining, the Flowers’ one more so, because of the crackling dialogue—the exchanges between Flowers and his buddy Johnson Johnson (same first and last name) are hilarious.

 

Virgil Flowers is a tall guy with blond hair, dressed in jeans and vintage band T-shirts, with a sharp mind and a laidback air.  He is awakened at an inconvenient hour by a call from his buddy Johnson, reporting the theft of his friend’s dogs.  It is one of a series of dognappings in bucolic Trippton, which has upset the people of the town, who think of their canines as family.

When Flowers lands up to help Johnson and his friends as a favour, he hopes to get time to go fishing, but the seemingly peaceful town is seething with crime.  Without meaning to look under the rocks, Flowers finds a drug gang cooking meth in the hills, and a local journalist is found dead with bullets in his back.“You got a colorful town here,” he observes to the locals who want to form a posse and hunt down the dog snatchers (who sell their beloved pets for medical research).

In the very first chapter, the reader knows who stole the dogs; it is also revealed that the members of the local school board had the journalist killed, because he was about to reveal their financial scams. The fun is in keeping up with Flowers’s investigations and seeing how he solves all the crimes and ties up loose ends with a neat bow.

Up in the hills, Virgil befriends a street smart 12-year-old, rifle-toting kid called Muffy (he deserves a series of his own), who sees more than is good for him, and finds a feisty old lady as well as a young woman described as the “town prostitute” more than willing to give him the information he seeks. Lucas Davenport does his boss duty on the phone. The body count rises, and leads to an action-packed climax.

Deadline is the eighth book in the Virgil Flowers series, written with obvious relish and affection for the many lowlifes of small town Minnesota. John Sandford is the pseudonym of John Roswell Camp, who, as a journalist won the Pulitzer Prize 1986 for a series of stories titled Life on the Land: An American Farm Family. He is the author of 35 novels and two nonfiction books many of them bestsellers—it’s not hard to see why.

Deadline

by John Sandford

Published by Putnam

Pages: 388

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In Deadline, Virgil Flowers describes his boss, Lucas Davenport, as “not a bad guy, though a trifle intense.”

Davenport who works for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (beat that CID!) that keeps him more than busy. He loves dressing, and drives swish cars, obviously not paid for by his cop’s salary.Gathering Prey is Sandford’s 25^th Prey novel and from all accounts among the better ones.

His life is chugging along with routine crime when his adopted daughter Letty comes to him for help with two Traveler she has made friends with. Travelers are bands of people who live like gypsies, always on the move and making a little money busking, petty crime or dope-peddling.

A young woman, Skye, has called Letty in a panic to tell her about the disappearance of her boyfriend, Henry. She believes that a psycho called Pilate may have killed Henry. Pilate is a maniac who travels around with a band of ‘disciples’ who torture and kill people for fun—mostly homeless people, whose deaths nobody cares about.

Lucas and Letty launch a search for Pilate as they discover that he is a killer of the notorious Charles Manson variety.  The chase involves cops from many towns and precincts—Virgil Flowers included--as Pilate and his gang hang around Juggalo Gatherings—Juggaloes being fans of the hip hop music group Insane Clown Posse, and wear clown make-up at their music meets called Gatherings in various towns across America.

Pilate is smart, deadly and one step ahead of the cops—he kills without a qualm and hold his followers in a tight grip. It turns out that his girlfriend Kristen has more spunk than he does, but the breathless chase takes Lucas and Letty from one town to another, endangering their own lives to prevent more brutal murders.  The pre-climactic shootout is like an edge-of-the seat scene in a film, so vividly does Sandford describe the landscape and the people caught in Pilate’s web. Twenty-five books in the series and still going strong…

Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

Published by Putnam 

Pages: 416

Memory Man

Never to Forget

David Baldacci is a very prolific writer of thrillers, and his latest, Memory Man, is not just an absorbing read, it also introduces the Amos Decker series.

How is Amos Decker different from other fictional detective heroes?  He never forgets anything—which can be a blessing and a curse. Years earlier, as a young football player, he had been blindsided in his first game and got hit on the head so violently that he was declared dead. When he was revived, something had happened inside his brain that made him “an acquired savant with hyperthymesia and synesthesia abilities.”  Which in simple terms means he has total recall.

After he recovers, he goes on to become a cop, and because he has an exceptional brain, makes for a very good investigator. But we discover all this later. The book begins with Decker returning home one night, and finding his family slaughtered—his wife, little daughter and brother-in-law.

He is so devastated that he almost takes his own life, and is prevented from pulling the trigger by his police friends who arrive at the scene of the crime.  The shock unravels him—he gives up his job, loses his home and car, becomes a recluse, making a sparse living as a private eye.

As he is sliding deeper into his own hell—he cannot even forget-- two things happen; a man walks into the police station and confesses to the killing. And in the local school, a masked killer guns down several students and teachers.

The man, Sebastian Leopold, is not the killer, he has a cast iron alibi—he was in jail when Decker’s family was murdered. So why did he confess?  Then a connection is found between the two sets of killings and Decker is dragged into the investigation.

The killer leaves clues and taunting messages for Decker, expressing a strong hatred for the man. Decker is bewildered, because he does not remember ever hurting anyone so badly that they would turn around and kill innocent people as revenge.

The plot is convoluted and very unpredictable. The reader can never guess who the psycho is, even when the character makes a couple of appearances before Decker finally figures out who his enemy is; by then the body count has risen and every corpse is a message for the ex-cop. Decker also acquires a journalist sidekick called Alexandra Jamison, and an admirer in FBI Agent Bogart, who are likely to appear in future Decker novels, along with his former police partner Mary Lancaster—a fine bunch of characters.

The story may be convoluted and a bit far-fetched, but also gripping and intense. The next Amos Decker book will come out next year, and Baldacci fans must already be waiting. when a man begins with such lacerating tragedy, his life and work can only get better.

Memory Man

Written by David Baldacci

Publisher: Grand Central

Pages: 416