Chasing the dragon

River of Smoke. By Amitav Ghosh. John Murray; 528 pages; £20. To be published in America in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $28. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THIS is the second novel in a promised trilogy by Amitav Ghosh, set in the late 1830s, the eve of the first opium war between Britain and China. The first, “Sea of Poppies”, set a year earlier, conjured up the dust-baked heat of the north Indian plains, awash with the violent red billows of Papaver somniferum, the British opium factories and the wharves of the silty Hooghly River from where the sticky, addictive stuff, packed inside clay balls the size of cannon shot—“foreign mud” in Chinese eyes—flowed to the Celestial Kingdom. “River of Smoke” takes the story, and some of the first book's characters, from Calcutta to the port-city of Canton (now called Guangzhou) on the Pearl River delta, then and now, China's emporium.

The vast book has a Dickensian sweep of characters, high- and low-life intermingling. Tying this book to the last is the Ibis, a former slave ship carrying convicts and indentured workers to Mauritius. A storm overtakes the Ibis, along with the Anahita, an opium carrier out of Bombay owned by Bahram, a Parsi merchant, and the Redruth, outfitted by a Cornish plantsman for botanical exploration. In magical ways, the storm entwines the characters' destinies.

In Canton, the inexorable drumbeat is the coming collision between China and the West when the emperor's honest new commissioner, Lin Zexu, arrives to put a stop to the quantities of ruinous opium being smuggled into the country. For “presiding over the Sodom of our age”, the Brits win the prize for high cant: “Really there was no language like English for turning lies into legalism.” But moral and immoral exist together. As Bahram told Napoleon years earlier (yes, you will have to read the book to understand the circumstances), opium was like the wind or the tides: “A man is neither good nor evil because he sails his ship upon the wind. It is his conduct towards those around him—his friends, his family, his servants—by which he must be judged.” In the end, Bahram finds himself wanting.

Mr Ghosh conjures up a thrilling sense of place. For all the evil of the trade, Canton stands at the heart of an earlier web of globalism. The lexicon of the novel—English, Hindi, Parsi, Malay, Chinese and pidgin—is a rich brew from cultures re-energised through imperialism and trade. Sometimes Mr Ghosh is too addicted to the brew: he describes the household of George Chinnery, an historical figure who became a well-known painter of Asian scenes, as “chuck-muck as any in the city, with paltans of nokar-logue doing chukkers in the hallways and syces swarming in the istabbuls”. And that is not to mention the bobachee-connah.

The era's globalism bred long-distance passions for pictures and plants. And not just money was made out of nothing in the “factories” (the warehouses and apartments) of the foreign concession, but also whole new lives. The novel's characters never come so alive as when they are amid Canton's swarms. In the current age of globalism the creeks of Canton have been filled in. The boat-people have been put up in tenements. And all sense of where you are is lost to a sea of concrete. Who would believe, asks a central character at the end, that such a place once existed?