Ashley's Reviews > Sea of Poppies

I almost considered not reviewing this, but I’d made a resolution to myself that I would post about every book I read for the sake of crystallising what I took away from it. To put this book in perspective: I’ve started reading with post-it flags to mark passages I love or things that I want to come back to when I write about it later. I didn’t mark a single passage in Sea of Poppies. Not one post-it flag. The only thing I considered marking was a passage that was hilariously difficult to follow.

I’m not saying it was terrible, but my overriding impression of it revolved around the use of outdated language. I assume what happened was that Ghosh spent months researching the precise way that certain classes of people would have spoken at the time of the book’s continuity. But rather than enhancing the realism of the book, it (a) feels like Ghosh got too bogged down in the details of language instead of making the character bounce off the page; and (b) completely blocks your ability to understand what’s happening in parts. E.g:

There was green turtle soup, served artfully in the animals’ shells, a Bobotie pie, a dumbpoke of muttongosht, a tureen of Burdwaun stew, concocted from boiled hens and pickled oysters, a foogath of venison, a dish of pomfrets, soused in vinegar and sprinkled with petersilly, a Vinthaleaux of beef, with all the accompaniments, and platters of tiny roasted ortolans and pigeons, with the birds set out in the arrowhead shapes of flocks in flight. The table’s centrepiece was a favourite of the Bethel bobachee-connah.

That’s just one example, and the first one that I came across while flicking through the book. I don’t see what the point is of a list like that is, other than setting a scene. And if the words themselves don’t correspond to an image (e.g. if you have no idea what the words mean), then it fails in that job. And to be honest, it takes quite a bit of digging to discover what these words mean (“dumbpoke” apparently correlates to “dum pukht”, or “slow cook”. “Petersilly” might be “petersillie”, which is German for parsley - when these are English people living in India, the reasons for their using German words for spices is beyond me. And I still have no translation for “bobachee-connah” -I assume it means something like ‘master of the house’, but any googling leads me to quotes from the book itself). And in some cases, they’re entirely useless (in this passage, “muttongosht” is used when “mutton” could suffice).

We’re talking here about a 470 page book that’s written in this manner. It’s frustrating. I was always told that the more invisible the writing style, the better. If writing sutures you into the milieu of the book and allows you to forget that you’re even reading altogether, then that’s ideal. Sometimes I’m okay with a noticeable writing style if it’s clever (e.g. Special Topics in Calamity Physics), but if I notice it and I dislike it, I suddenly find it difficult to lose myself in, or even enjoy the book. Unfortunately, that was the case here.