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A review by bunnie225
The Calcutta Chromosome : A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery by Amitav Ghosh
3.0
I could say I've finished this novel but the fact is, I've hardly understood it, and the sad part is I don't think multiple reads of this will make it any clearer.
This is my third Amitav Ghosh novel. The other two were Shadowlines and In An Antique Land. While Shadowlines bugged me with its back-and-forth narrative, hopping through various periods on the timeline and from various caharcters' perspectives, it was blessed by the virtue of brilliant characterisation. In An Antique Land, to me, was pure joy to read. Historical fiction is always fun, and the more accurate that history is, the more one can appreciate the author/compiler, and the lack of strong characterisation may be sacrificed for the sake of fact in fiction. But though The Calcutta Chromosome incorporates the above qualities, it fails to deliver either strong characters or a plausible storyline.
There is a reason I took 4 days to read this relatively small and easy-to-skim book. I zoomed through the first 200 pages in almost a day and then stopped merely 20 pages before the end and tossed it aside. It was out of duty rather than curiosity that I finally got through the last couple of chapters. The reasons are not hard to find: the ending was in sight but the story kept getting more convoluted and fantastical, and with the addition of so many new characters, it started looking like one of those badly made Hindi serials and just exasperated me. I think it was JK Rowling that once said something like, "Readers like to be surprised, not conned." This book unfortunately does not give the reader a chance to understand what is happening, and more than lack of a believable or apparently traceable thread, I believe it all boils down to terrible characterisation.
First you have this guy Antar, from Egypt, whose complete social life seems to consist of interactions with his robot-like device, Ava. She can sense his moods, respond appropriately, and seems fond of talking in languages he does not know and projecting lifesize holograms into his room that scare the crap out of him. He is quiet, relatively modest, and does not seem thrilled at the prospect of meeting up with anyone human (his neighbour Tara, for instance, an impending meeting that was dwelt upon for the first fifty pages at least.) When he does come across Murugan's record, he seems to have no recollection of who this guy is, despite the fact that his file is fat with information that he has input himself regarding this man.
Then there is Murugan himself. He is described by the author as loud, unpleasant, etc. but the reader is not given a chance to see those qualities for him/herself. All the reader comes to know through the portrayal of this man is that he is self-centered and annoyingly condescending to everyone regarding what he is studying and what he knows about Ronald Ross. Towards the end of the novel he is shown to have a mutual attraction to the mousey Urmila, although she has her own deal altogether and is somewhat in love with the equally self-absorbed Sonali 'di'. When the reader is introduced to Sonali, she is going to attend a talk by a famous man, Phulboni, with whom there is no discernible connection. But at the end of the book the reader learns that this man is Sonali's father! See what I mean when I say 'conned'?
Of course then there are all the characters that switch places (or chromosomes or whatever) because they are all mired in this intricate malaria-cure conspiracy - Phulboni, Romen, Laakhan etc..
Murugan, from the way he talks, sounds as if he has great derision for Ronald Ross in spite of the fact that he spent his whole adult life studying him and tracing the line of his thought. The premise of this science fiction is that Ronald Ross did not know as much about malaria and mosquitoes as other scientists who were working on it long before he thought of it. He has an assistant called Lutchman (Laakhan) who is sort of like a spy, or hired by, the 'other' camp to give him the evidence he requires in blood samples that will lead him onto the next discovery (or off the track? I really couldn't figure out from just one reading). The 'other' camp is not a scientist of established repute or anything, it's a black magic woman who beheads pigeons in her attempt to breed a strain of malaria (that she has found out is a cure for syphilis) into them. While they allow poor 'Ronnie' to imagine he has understood the life cycle of the mosquito and has unearthed the secrets of malaria, this woman and her cronies are merrily transferring bits of their personality into other people, thus ensuring that a part of themselves lives on (or something). I should not even attempt to explain this plot, in fact, as it was totally lost on me.
Suffice it to say that I thought this book, though an exciting and fast read, was a complete failure when it comes to resolutions and conclusions. It is one thing to leave questions unanswered, but to expect the reader to infer these answers without sufficient evidence is too much to ask. Conclusion: I liked it but only because it was Ghosh. This is still sloppy story-telling at best.
This is my third Amitav Ghosh novel. The other two were Shadowlines and In An Antique Land. While Shadowlines bugged me with its back-and-forth narrative, hopping through various periods on the timeline and from various caharcters' perspectives, it was blessed by the virtue of brilliant characterisation. In An Antique Land, to me, was pure joy to read. Historical fiction is always fun, and the more accurate that history is, the more one can appreciate the author/compiler, and the lack of strong characterisation may be sacrificed for the sake of fact in fiction. But though The Calcutta Chromosome incorporates the above qualities, it fails to deliver either strong characters or a plausible storyline.
There is a reason I took 4 days to read this relatively small and easy-to-skim book. I zoomed through the first 200 pages in almost a day and then stopped merely 20 pages before the end and tossed it aside. It was out of duty rather than curiosity that I finally got through the last couple of chapters. The reasons are not hard to find: the ending was in sight but the story kept getting more convoluted and fantastical, and with the addition of so many new characters, it started looking like one of those badly made Hindi serials and just exasperated me. I think it was JK Rowling that once said something like, "Readers like to be surprised, not conned." This book unfortunately does not give the reader a chance to understand what is happening, and more than lack of a believable or apparently traceable thread, I believe it all boils down to terrible characterisation.
First you have this guy Antar, from Egypt, whose complete social life seems to consist of interactions with his robot-like device, Ava. She can sense his moods, respond appropriately, and seems fond of talking in languages he does not know and projecting lifesize holograms into his room that scare the crap out of him. He is quiet, relatively modest, and does not seem thrilled at the prospect of meeting up with anyone human (his neighbour Tara, for instance, an impending meeting that was dwelt upon for the first fifty pages at least.) When he does come across Murugan's record, he seems to have no recollection of who this guy is, despite the fact that his file is fat with information that he has input himself regarding this man.
Then there is Murugan himself. He is described by the author as loud, unpleasant, etc. but the reader is not given a chance to see those qualities for him/herself. All the reader comes to know through the portrayal of this man is that he is self-centered and annoyingly condescending to everyone regarding what he is studying and what he knows about Ronald Ross. Towards the end of the novel he is shown to have a mutual attraction to the mousey Urmila, although she has her own deal altogether and is somewhat in love with the equally self-absorbed Sonali 'di'. When the reader is introduced to Sonali, she is going to attend a talk by a famous man, Phulboni, with whom there is no discernible connection. But at the end of the book the reader learns that this man is Sonali's father! See what I mean when I say 'conned'?
Of course then there are all the characters that switch places (or chromosomes or whatever) because they are all mired in this intricate malaria-cure conspiracy - Phulboni, Romen, Laakhan etc..
Murugan, from the way he talks, sounds as if he has great derision for Ronald Ross in spite of the fact that he spent his whole adult life studying him and tracing the line of his thought. The premise of this science fiction is that Ronald Ross did not know as much about malaria and mosquitoes as other scientists who were working on it long before he thought of it. He has an assistant called Lutchman (Laakhan) who is sort of like a spy, or hired by, the 'other' camp to give him the evidence he requires in blood samples that will lead him onto the next discovery (or off the track? I really couldn't figure out from just one reading). The 'other' camp is not a scientist of established repute or anything, it's a black magic woman who beheads pigeons in her attempt to breed a strain of malaria (that she has found out is a cure for syphilis) into them. While they allow poor 'Ronnie' to imagine he has understood the life cycle of the mosquito and has unearthed the secrets of malaria, this woman and her cronies are merrily transferring bits of their personality into other people, thus ensuring that a part of themselves lives on (or something). I should not even attempt to explain this plot, in fact, as it was totally lost on me.
Suffice it to say that I thought this book, though an exciting and fast read, was a complete failure when it comes to resolutions and conclusions. It is one thing to leave questions unanswered, but to expect the reader to infer these answers without sufficient evidence is too much to ask. Conclusion: I liked it but only because it was Ghosh. This is still sloppy story-telling at best.