Amitav Ghosh

I am a sucker for scenes with snakes, and it is the scene in the temple early on that pulled me into this novel. Despite that, though, this novel felt really uneven. There were some beautifully written scenes featuring strange occurrences involving the natural world during the narrator's travels to the Sundarbans, Los Angeles, and Venice, and I actually really liked how the myth slowly became entangled with the present day, but some of the themes felt very heavy-handed, almost didactic, and show more while there was a lot of explaining, the story never seemed to really gel. Mixed feelings, leaning toward positive. show less

Ghosh challenges the western reader to imagine the existence of powers well outside of the human ones, by presenting the idea that a plant can be, to put it a little ambiguously but pointedly, a contender. By that I mean potent, dangerous, insidious, irresistible, consuming, alluring, voracious . . . in its quest to prosper. He is putting forth that the poppy has evolved along with us and offers a temptation that is powerful enough to destroy mankind. I have a somewhat crackpot theory show more anyway, that many of the things happening around us from ticks to floods are Gaia's response to human interference. The poppy fits right in. Ghosh explores the history of the poppy, the drugs made from the poppy, the cultivation and distribution of the poppy . . . and the biggest temptation of all: the fabulous sums of money to be made from the poppy. He puts the OxyContin scandal into this context, horrific similarities to the behaviour of the British East India Company in the 19th century, the effect of the drug on the governance and the people of the Far East. The drug overpowers everyone, by what it offers to both the user and the provider. Ecstasy and money. Worth reading. **** show less

Lucid, scholarly prose that doesn't use a lot of jargon even on this technical topic. The thing is, though, it is not particularly a scientific book, so it doesn't really elucidate the issue of global warming so much as the issue of literature and art ignoring global warming. Still, literature and art do have their fair share of jargon, and avoiding that shows that the author recognized his need to reach a wider audience. That said, this book had some great advantages in that it managed to show more address the issue without being either Euro-centric or Ameri-centric, and was not an apologia for the total innocence of non-European countries in the production of greenhouse gases that are warming our planet. The discussion about the failure of art and literature to address this mammoth problem struck home to someone who has one foot in science and one in theatre, as I recognize and bemoan the problem he expressed so eloquently. I could add that, whenever someone does manage to get a work out there that addresses an environmental issue, the audience will tend to re-interpret it as having some message about non-environmental issues, usually immigration or social justice. The only issue I take with this book is that he does some fancy footwork to dance around the elephant in the room that screams out between the lines of his own work, that of runaway population growth. And he condemns the entirely of modernity, while taking special aim at consumerism, never recognizing that we could find way to have modern medicine and other benefits without the excess consumerism. Then, after taking aim (justifiably) at excess consumerism, he denies that individuals can make any difference by changing their buying habits. I realize that there does have to be a collective action, but he fails to recognize that it has to start somewhere, and that modeling better behavior has been shown to be effective in getting those behaviors to become the norm. Overall, a satisfying, but not totally satisfying, work. show less

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The Calcutta Chromosome is a fascinating book in which the research of Ronald Ross into malaria in 1898 turns out to have been something of a sham, in fact the outcome of manipulation by shadowy forces whose nature is only hinted at. The story is told in roughly three timelines: a near-future New York (probably roughly 2019), where an unassuming Egyptian with a friendly Siri-like AI is sucked into research on how and why a former colleague who was show more obsessed with Ross disappeared in 1995; the story from the former colleague's point of view, as he goes to Calcutta to get first-hand evidence on what Ross actually did; and the story from Ross's own point of view, which does not really explain all that much. The western versions of science and history are in conflict with Indian traditions, and subverted by the mysterious immortal character Behind It All; there is a memorable ghost train moment as well.

It's a really fun read - Murugan's obsession with Ross could have been weritten as tedious info-dumping, but Ghosh turns it into some very strong characterisation, and the other Indian characters of 1995, the poet Phulboni, the journalists Sonali and Urmila, and indeed Calcutta itself are vividly visualised. The ending is a bit of a let-down, in that the various plot strands are not really brought together and none of them is really resolved, though hints are left for the reader to draw their own conclusions. Still, I'm glad that the Clarke judges stepped outside the usual circles of genre fiction to recognise this. show less