Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
Read for: Orbis Terrarum Challenge – India
This book has been on my TBR list for a long time and I happened to see it on the shelf at the library so I decided to pick it up. I’ve read mixed reviews so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Now that I’ve read it, I’m still not sure how I feel about it and I don’t even know how to summarize it!
Ghosh begins by slowing introducing you to his cast of characters (and it is quite a cast of characters). And I say slowly because he doesn’t try and include all the characters right from the beginning, which I appreciated because there were so many. I have to be honest, even toward the end of the book I was still having trouble keeping everybody straight. Each of these people is destined to become a passenger on the Ibis, a former slave trading vessel, en route to Mauritius from Calcutta, India.
Ghosh takes two-thirds of this first book in a trilogy to get all of his characters onto the ship and the voyage to begin. I’m still not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, it seems like a lot of extra leading up to the main event of the book, but on the other hand, it really gives the reader the opportunity to really get to know and understand each of the characters and their motivations.
The book ends basically at the climax. There is a huge build-up to this final event, but then the novel just ends. It’s kind of like the season finale of your favourite TV show. I was just as disappointed as when I read the first book of The Lord of the Rings for the first time. I think I’ll most likely read the rest of the trilogy when they are available because I really do want to know what happens next.
Besides the confusion of the multiple characters, there are several languages used in the book without translations provided. The crew on the ship speak a couple of strange dialects that I could just not follow. In the back of the book there was a glossary, but it seemed to be kind of sporadic in the definitions it contained and I gave up on that early in the book. I could quite often figure out the basics of the meaning, but it was just extremely distracting and tedious to try to pick out some meaning from these conversations.
I’m still on the fence about this book. I felt like it took a really long time to get interesting and start making sense because there were so many characters that came from so many different places and backgrounds and I couldn’t see how they were ever going to all come together. (It actually was quite surprising in some cases, how they came to be aboard the Ibis in the end.) I would have given up on this book altogether around the 250 page mark if I hadn’t already invested so much time in it! Overall, I think I’m going to give it a 6.5/10, but after reading the rest of the trilogy, I may feel differently about this one.
Tags: Amitav Ghosh, India
August 16th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
I’ve wanted to read this book after seeing it on several best of 2008 lists, but after reading this I’m not so sure if I want to read it anymore. This seems to be something that some south asian authors have in common – lots of characters, lots of time spent introducing them, and taking a very long time to get into the actual story. I’m not a big fan of that.
August 16th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
In this case, I wouldn’t take my word for it. There are a lot of good reviews out there too. I usually try to link to as many other reviews as I can find, but it seems I was a little too lazy this time!