Sea of Poppies is a magnificently sprawling book — the first in a trilogy, in fact — set in a magnificently sprawling place and time: India in the 1830s, at the height of British colonialism. The cast of characters is large, but you get to know each one very well as the novel switches from one point of view to another. While the story starts with all the characters dispersed, they are gradually brought together by the intertwined strands of fate that direct their lives. And each character has a secret to hide; each one is in some way living as someone they are not. So the themes of deception and difference are established. By the cliffhanger ending, all of the characters are onboard a former slave ship heading across the “Black Water” to Mauritius — literally heading out into the unknown.

What I loved most about this novel is the use of language. The characters speak a wide variety of languages — Hindi, Bengali, French, English, shipboard pidgin, to name a few — and the text is liberally sprinkled with foreign words and phrases. (The careful reader will notice that quotation marks are omitted whenever the characters speak a language other than English, a distinction that is important for the plot.) This may be off-putting at first, but the trick is to relax and let meaning flow from context, rather than trying to understand each word. Gradually, the rhythm of the writing will overcome and enchant you.

Ghosh particularly delights in playing with puns and misunderstandings of spoken language in a way that reminds me of Shakespeare. Some of the funniest scenes in the book occur when the misunderstandings lead characters into suggestive dialogues filled with double entendres. Yes, Sea of Poppies is often funny, but it is also suspenseful, epic and evocative of a time and place that may have never actually existed as depicted here but is nonetheless wonderfully realized.

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