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A review by clarkness
Un déluge de feu by Amitav Ghosh
3.0
"You wanted me to be a man of the times, did you not? I am a man who wants more and more and more. A man who does not know the meaning of enough. Anyone who tries to thwart my desires is the enemy of my liberty and must expect to be treated as such."
Love this quote as a searing indictment of both the Opium Wars and our current times. It feels like a deeply American statement.
I really enjoyed the turn of Zachary Reid in this novel and his arc throughout the trilogy. Otherwise, I found this final chapter to be kind of a letdown. For all of the setup of the first two novels, I felt like this book failed to bring the disparate threads of the story together. So many characters had journeys that led to nowhere or petered out and disappeared into the ether. I can't tell if it was a lack of planning from the outset or whether Ghosh got lost in the details of his research and failed to let the characters dictate the outcomes of the story rather than the historical circumstances. Like others here on Goodreads, I found the battle scenes to be overwritten and underwhelming and wished that the same energy had been spent on characters I grew to love in the first part of the trilogy.
Love this quote as a searing indictment of both the Opium Wars and our current times. It feels like a deeply American statement.
I really enjoyed the turn of Zachary Reid in this novel and his arc throughout the trilogy. Otherwise, I found this final chapter to be kind of a letdown. For all of the setup of the first two novels, I felt like this book failed to bring the disparate threads of the story together. So many characters had journeys that led to nowhere or petered out and disappeared into the ether. I can't tell if it was a lack of planning from the outset or whether Ghosh got lost in the details of his research and failed to let the characters dictate the outcomes of the story rather than the historical circumstances. Like others here on Goodreads, I found the battle scenes to be overwritten and underwhelming and wished that the same energy had been spent on characters I grew to love in the first part of the trilogy.