It is almost exactly a year since I began this bookstagram account and the very first book I reviewed was Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. It only feels fitting that I return to the series that started it all for me (in more ways that one). River of Smoke is the second book of the Ibis trilogy. It starts off where Sea of Poppies concluded, with a few characters less, and follows the stories of some of the remaining main characters from the first book, as they make their way off the Ibis to Mauritius, Canton and Hong Kong. It was interesting to see the development of the characters whose journeys continued in this book as well as the new ones who were introduced. Paulette Lambert, the runaway daughter of a French botanist, was a character who already stood out, and her onward journey alongside her European compatriots in search of the Golden Camellia places her character arc in the crossroads of European scientific exploration and imperial expansion in the nineteenth century. Bahram Mody, a Parsi merchant and his illegitimate son and former pirate Ah Fatt proved the most complexly and intriguingly written in the current instalment. The characters' biographical details mesh with the social and historical realities of the setting of the novel to present a picture of the commercial and political intrigues of the South China Sea a year before the Opium Wars would begin. With Ghosh, I often find characters playing second fiddle to plot and setting, and this is especially true of his historical novels, perhaps because of the constraints of the genre. While Sea of Poppies veered away from this tendency, which I had found immensely enjoyable, River of Smoke seems to go back to his usual modus operandi. The difficult middle novel of a trilogy notwithstanding, Ghosh convincingly maintained a level of excitement and tension as the course of his story moves towards the first signs of trouble in Hong Kong which would lead to the Opium Wars. #bookstagram #oneyearanniversary #bookreview #riverofsmoke #seaofpoppies #ibistrilogy #amitavghosh #indianenglish #indianliterature #indiannovels #bookstagramindia #bookstagrammer #historicalfiction #opiumwar #britishcolonial #history https://www.instagram.com/p/CetK7b1L3A1/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
