Day 218: Sea of Poppies

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Cover for Sea of PoppiesSea of Poppies is an absolutely enthralling historical novel, the first of a trilogy. Set in India in the 1830’s, it is centered around the opium trade, which the British East India Company forced upon both India and China. The novel is an ensemble piece, following the fates of several characters who all find themselves by the end of the book on the Ibis, an old slave ship bound for Mauritius.

The novel begins with Deeti. Like the other Indian farmers in her area of eastern India north of Calcutta, she has been forced to replace her food crops with poppies, destined for the Ghazipur Opium Factory. Now she can barely grow enough to feed her family, while the price for poppies sinks. As a girl, she was tricked by her husband’s family into marrying a hopeless opium addict. Soon fate will cause her to leave her home and flee down the Ganges.

Zachary Reid is a mulatto sailor who ships out from Baltimore on the Ibis as an ordinary seaman. A series of misfortunes onboard leave him without officers to sail the ship to Calcutta from Africa with only the help of Serang Ali and his fellow lascars. Once in Calcutta, his employer Benjamin Burnham hires him to help refit the ship and take the third mate position for the voyage to Mauritius.

Raja Neel Rattan Halder, the zemindar of Rashkali, is deeply in debt because of poorly timed investments in the opium trade. Although Neel is careful of the welfare of his hundreds of dependents, he is careless of business and expects to go on in his pleasure-loving ways. But the self-righteous Burnham wants the Raja’s estates for himself.

Paulette Lambert, the daughter of an eccentric French naturalist, has been left destitute by his death. Burnham has taken her into his family out of charity, but she is having a hard time adapting to his household. She is expected to behave like a proper young English lady, but she was primarily raised by an Indian woman, treats her son Jodu like a brother, and prefers to dress in a sari. Jodu has recently returned to Calcutta after his mother’s death and wants to be taken on as a hand on a sailing ship.

The fates of all these characters, and others, converge aboard the Ibis, which is scheduled to journey across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius with a load of indentured workers and then to sail to China to participate in the impending Opium Wars.

The novel is filled with entertaining characters and the colors, smells, and languages of India. It is beautifully written and crammed full of unusual words–Bengali words, sailor and lascar jargon, ornate oriental English, and various patois. The book has a glossary, but it is ironically intended. Comic, cruel, vivid, and deeply engrossing, the novel is rich and teeming with life. Amitav Ghosh’s novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is wonderful.

Day 217: In the Time of the Butterflies

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Cover for In the Time of the ButterfliesIn the last days of the Trujillo dictatorship of the Dominican Republic in the 1960’s, a jeep containing the bodies of three sisters known as “las mariposas,” or “the butterflies,” was found at the bottom of a steep cliff. The three sisters were revolutionaries who were committed to the overthrow of Trujillo, and they were murdered by the regime. In the Time of the Butterflies tells the story of the lives of the three sisters, and their surviving sister Dede.

The novel begins with the young girlhood of Patria, Minerva, Maria Terese (Mate), and Dede Mirabal, narrated by each girl in turn. As life under the regime becomes more difficult and the sisters grow older, one by one they become radicalized until they and their husbands are actively taking part in an underground movement working toward a revolution. The novel depicts their lives in prison and the final days when their husbands are moved to a new prison precisely so the sisters will be forced to drive up that fateful road to visit them.

The novel certainly is interesting and kept my attention, but it was vague in a way that is difficult to describe. I think it assumes a larger knowledge than I have of the state of affairs in the Dominican Republic at that time. Ironically, I also feel as if it downplays the acts of the regime. In my investigations after reading the novel, I learned that the Trujillo regime was responsible for the murders of many people, but the book was not effective in conveying that or the other atrocities committed by the government. Reviews of the book remark that it captures the terror of the time under the regime, but that is exactly what I feel is lacking.

Day 216: Bangkok 8

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Cover for Bangkok 8Previously, I gave a bemused review to Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett. I wish I had started the series with Bangkok 8, the book I am reviewing today, because it provides a lot of context. In this book, we are introduced to Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a half-caste Bangkok cop. He and his partner Pichai are lifelong friends and arhat, devout Buddhists and uncorrupted police officers in a city where corruption is rife.

Sonchai and Pichai have been ordered to follow William Bradley, a retired marine. He picks up a beautiful woman before they lose him in traffic. Later, they find him in his car, where the doors have been jammed shut and a python is attempting to eat his head. After they open the door, they discover too late that his car has been filled with cobras. Pichai is bitten in the eye and dies. Sonchai then vows to find and kill the person responsible.

He is soon requested to meet with the FBI, who are investigating a powerful American associate of Bradley’s–a jeweler named Sylvester Warren who supplies magnificent gems and artifacts to the wealthy of the world. The FBI agents believe that Warren hired Bradley to import jade and commission replicas of ancient sculptures so that Warren can sell them as authentic. However, Warren’s connections make him too powerful to touch either in the US or in Thailand.

The woman who was on the motorcycle proves difficult to locate or identify, even though she is strikingly tall and has unusual multi-colored hair. As Sonchai investigates further, he finds a tangle of secrets and dark deeds.

This novel provides a lot of background about Sonchai and is full of rich descriptions of the city and its occupants. It is also darkly funny. Burdett does an excellent job of conveying the flavor of the city. The mystery is dark and complex, involving the sex industry, drug smuggling, and connections to the Russian mafia and Cambodian thugs, but it is also entertaining. Sonchai’s insights into, for example, the other characters’ past lives, lend additional spice to the mix. This series is not a traditional one but offers something fresh.

Day 215: The Wandering Fire

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Cover for The Wandering FireLike the middle book of many trilogies, The Wandering Fire has so much going on in it that it is hard to describe. It of course is meant to continue the plot of The Summer Tree, the first book of Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry, and leave us with a cliffhanger before the final book.

In the first book, a mage brought five university students to Fionavar, where they were separated to fulfill their various roles. The five friends returned to their own world at the end of the book to rescue Jennifer from the hands of the Unraveller. The fact that they could have done this any time after she was kidnapped, fairly early in the previous book, and saved her from being raped and tortured seems to have escaped everyone.

Most of them return to Fionavar when Jennifer is near term with a child who will be half man, half god. Kim stays behind to wake up Arthur Pendragon and bring him along. Of course, Jennifer turns out to be an incarnation of Guinivere.

I think the Arthur and Guinivere subplot was where the book pretty much lost me. I know this novel  is a mishmash of just about every Celtic myth, but King Arthur? Really? Could we not get more original than this? I think this plot is where the novel really shows its roots in the early 1980’s. It also seems to have been written by a very young man, although Kay was in his early 30’s when it was published. Again, as I mentioned in my previous review, the characters are not well developed, and the men particularly seem immature.

Day 214: The Sense of an Ending

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Cover for The Sense of an EndingBest Book of the Week!

The Sense of an Ending is a quiet novel that made me stop and consider. It is a meditation on memory–how we reinterpret past events. It is also about the lost opportunities of life.

Tony Webster begins the novel by considering his past, particularly his relationships with his pals from school. He and two other close friends chose to enlarge their circle to include a new boy, Adrian Finn, who was extremely intelligent and analytical. Adrian’s indifference to seeming cool made him very cool indeed. The four friends remained close throughout college and for awhile after, until Adrian committed suicide.

Tony also remembers his first serious relationship, with Veronica Ford, particularly an unpleasant weekend he spent with Veronica’s family. After they broke up, Adrian went on to date Veronica. He wrote Tony a letter apprising him of this as if he were asking permission to date her, and Tony’s recollection is that he ironically assented.

Tony has lead a comfortable life avoiding too much effort in his relationships. He sees himself as a “peaceable man.” He believes he understands the events from the past until he receives a legacy from Sarah Ford, Veronica’s mother–the only member of her family who seemed sympathetic during that long-ago visit. In addition to a small bequest, she has left him Adrian’s diary. This legacy confuses him. Why would a person he only met once leave him anything, and why would she possess Adrian’s diary? When Tony asks for it, he finds that Veronica has taken it.

In Tony’s attempts to gain the diary and his subsequent inquiries, he learns things that force him to re-examine and reinterpret his memories of long ago events and to reconsider the consequences of his own actions. He ends up also contemplating where his own life has gone and how he has evolved into this “peaceable man” from a boy full of curiosity and promise.

This very short novel is crammed with thoughtful observations, often wittily and wryly expressed. I found myself turning back to re-read and reconsider certain passages, which is something I seldom do. Sparely and beautifully written, the novel is an excellent illustration of the use of an unreliable narrator.

Day 213: The Monk

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I don’t usually have problems with the language of the classics or with appreciating a book that is long out of its time, but I had one with The Monk. Although it is considered a classic gothic novel, published in the height of their popularity in 1796, I found it boring. I imagine that for its day it was very shocking.

Ambrosio is a monk at a Capuchin monastery in Madrid. Although he is considered to be almost a saint, he is full of vanity and lust. He becomes sexually obsessed with a woman who is disguised as a boy in the monastery, and succumbs to temptation. Then his eye lights on a pious virgin. Gradually, he becomes more and more debauched until he is completely given up to depravity.

What irritates me is the narrative, which is repeatedly interrupted by long and boring digressions, apparently to further the gothic flavor. An example is the story of the brave Lorenzo, who battles with bandits in the forests of Germany. The novel is also rabidly anti-Catholic, as almost all the representatives of the church are scheming, power-seeking, or just plain evil. Although the general over-the-top quality of the novel should have appealed to me, I found myself just not interested enough to finish it.

Day 212: Roseanna

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Cover for RoseannaApparently Roseanna is a classic of Swedish crime fiction. Written in 1965 by the team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, it is a compelling police procedural that has sent me to the book stores looking for more.

Lake Vattern is being dredged on a July afternoon when up comes the naked body of a young woman. Autopsy results find she has been violently sexually assaulted and strangled. Detective Inspector Martin Beck and his colleagues Ahlberg, Kollberg, and Melander at first have difficulty even identifying the body.

After months of inquiries, they learn she is a librarian from Nebraska named Roseanna McGraw.  Once they know that, it takes awhile longer to deduce that she must have been killed on a canal boat named the Diana, during a trip when engine trouble delayed her passage through the lake until midnight.

As with other Scandinavian mysteries I have read, the pace is slower and probably more realistic than American procedurals until the police finally identify a suspect. Then, in that time when forensic evidence is so much more limited than at present, they find no evidence linking him to the murder except some hazy snapshots of the two together on the boat. Martin and his team must find some other way to prove he is the murderer.

It’s hard to define why I found this novel so much more enjoyable than some of the more recent Swedish mysteries. It is written in a spare, tight prose. The solution is plausible instead of too convoluted. The characters seem fully defined. The book drew me in, and I was not disappointed.

Day 211: Affinity

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Cover for AffinitySarah Waters is great at constructing compelling plots and characters who fascinate even if you dislike them. In Affinity, Margaret Prior begins visiting the woman’s ward of Millbank Prison as a volunteer in an effort to become more active after a year of depression. As with many Victorian charities, the point of this volunteer work is to set the inmates the example of a proper upper-class woman and to make sure they have religious training. Margaret is despondent because her father treated her like an equal and employed her as his assistant, but with her father’s death, she is left with a mother who apparently despises her and with no work or purpose.

Margaret becomes fascinated with a prisoner named Selina Dawes, a spiritualist found guilty of complicity in her sponsor’s death as well as fraud and assault. Although initially skeptical of Selina’s abilities, Margaret begins to experience strange, unexplainable events. Not only does she become convinced of Selina’s powers, but she believes she is innocent.

As Margaret’s obsession grows, she devises a daring escape plan for Selina.

Waters’ depiction of London in Victorian times is convincing, and the atmosphere of the novel is grim and foreboding. Although I was not at all sympathetic to Margaret, I was engrossed by the story and particularly interested in the explanation, if there was any, for the apparently psychic phenomena in the novel.