Amitav Ghosh concludes his Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke) with Flood of Fire, a panoramic fictional re-creation of the lead-up to the Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842. This richly populated novel teems with characters on both sides of conflicts large and small; like the preceding novels, it's another mesmerizing story that captures rippling costs of human greed and ambition that alter lives and countries in profound and permanent ways.
Zachary Reid, the wide-eyed young American son of a slave, who passes as white and lived through the voyage of the Ibis in Sea of Poppies, reappears here as a central character. He is now in Calcutta employed as a "mystery," a repairman on a riverboat owned by the wealthy Burnhams. Mrs. Burnham soon coaches him in the fine points of giving and taking sexual pleasure, within the social confines of a rigid colonial society and a very illicit affair, even while he is schooled as an opium trader by Mr. Burnham.
Flood of Fire is vintage Ghosh. He mixes war drama with domestic comedy, playful glee with skewering critiques. He does not shy away from the human tragedies that serve to count the costs of geopolitical and colonial ambitions. Ghosh's skill at balancing the high and low is especially effective in the passages dealing with Zachary and Mrs. Burnham, where class, gender and race collide.
Sharp, epic, teeming with characters and activity, Flood of Fire is bravura story telling. It is world history writ large through the minutiae of social interactions by a master of the craft of fiction. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer