Legal Research

Sea of Poppies

By Jen

Despite iOverlord’s protestations that there would be more library content on this blog, this is instead another foray into the seemingly endless task of blogging the Booker nominees.  Sea of Poppies as it happens, and not my favourite read…

Interminable, unbearable, trying far too hard and not succeeding - all completely reasonable and pertinent descriptors of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.

I finished this book months ago now, but haven’t been able to work up the energy to write a review. Truly, spending any more of my time on such a deeply irritating book was a deeply depressing concept. Sure there were some parts of the book that were alright - the descriptions of various elements of the Indian countryside were lyrical and lovely, and there was a certain fascination in getting to read about a culture and period that I know very little about. But that doesn’t make up for the deep irritation I felt towards most of this book. The gratingly horrid use of language, with most of the native Indian characters speaking in a tedious dialect made comprehension of many sections nigh on impossible. As the Guardian review rightly pointed out,  many readers will have trouble understanding sentences like:”Jodu had been set to . . . stowing pipas of drinking water, tirkaoing hamars, hauling zanjirs through the hansil-holes.” Far too much of the book is written in slang, and differing slang at that, for not all the characters share the same language. This kind of a conceit can be lift a book when used sparingly, but weighs Poppies down horribly.

And then, when you can manage to extract some meaning out of the convoluted and obscured text, you have to deal with the characters. I’ve never met a cast of characters that I disliked so profoundly. Barely a redeeming feature amongst the lot of them. Deeti, whose desire to escape from her opium-addict husband is laudable, but her methods (and choice of companion) preposterous. Zachary, the beyond-irritating young sailor who gets himself into increasingly ludicrous situations. Baboo Nob Kissim (yes, really), the religiously obsessed accountant who believes that he’s inhabited by the spirit of his mother (yes, really). That the pompous and then disgraced Raja, Neel, became my favourite (and most plausible) character by the end of the book is testament to quite how ridiculous the characterisation was.

I’m not going to run through the plot - that’s what Wikipedia is for after all. And there are any number of far kinder reviews around on the web. I don’t know how this made the Booker list, and I’m just desperately glad that it didn’t win, and that I never have to read it again.

Full post as published by Information Overload on January 09, 2009 (boomark / email).