T.H. White complained that the characters in Walter Scott’s historical novels talked ‘like imitation warming pans’: those in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, of which Flood of Fire is the final volume, talk like a whole Benares brass bazaar.
As an avid reader of both Hobson-Jobson (the dictionary of Anglo-Indian slang) and Patrick O’Brian, I thought that the trilogy, set in the First Opium War, would combine the delights of both. And so it does; but one can have too much of a good thing. The linguistic pudding is often so over-egged that it clogs the arteries of the narrative.
Ghosh’s rendition of the ‘Laskari’ of eastern sailors is superb:
That motley tongue, spoken nowhere but on the water, whose words were as varied as the port’s traffic, an anarchic medley of Portuguese calaluzes and Keral pattimars, Arab booms and Bengal paunchways, Malay proas and Tamil catarmarans, Hindusthani pulwars and English snows….
and, generally, the reader who takes a run at it will get the sense flowing beneath ‘this farrago of sound’.
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