The River Of Smoke: A review

Amitav Ghosh has a style of mingling history with fiction that results in literature which is just beautiful. The second book in the Ibis trilogy, The River Of Smoke, forces home the above point.
In your interest, I will not include the story turns, however titillating they are.
The first book, The Sea of Poppies, had laid down the base story for this one. If you want to fully appreciate The River Of Smoke, I suggest reading the first one.
The story begins in the typical Ghosh style setting in a far off land with due respect given to a nearby waterbody. The story's chunk takes place in Canton, China. As with the first book, opium wars are at the core of the story. With silken prose, Ghosh takes the reader from Mauritius to Canton, building up the momentum. The beauty and detail with which the ships are described makes one long to see them in real, but make do with imagination for now.
Once the subjects reach Canton, they begin with their lives. Seth Bahram Modi, is an opium trader from India, who has amassed his wealth from sheer shrewdness and acumen. The state he is described in, the stakes of his Canton visit, make the reader feel pity for him. But is it right to feel pity for a drug dealer? Let your conscience answer it and reach your own conclusions. The state of affairs at Canton are described by Robin in his letters to Paulette which will develops this character so well. It is like an insight into the human psyche that results from a tough childhood. Kudos, to the writer.
The high profile meetings of the trader chambers highlight the hypocrisy that the Britishers of those times showed. In the name of free trade and ending despotism, they justify the opium trade. You feel so and start questioning their motives. However wrong they are, isnt it that the Chinese could have controlled themselves? We abstain from cigarettes, alcohol etc, couldn't they? These whirling questions keep the story alive. The mosaic of characters fallen kings, Napolean Bonaparte, righteous men, money minded men, ships, flower-boats etc add pace to it.
The beauty that lies underneath is the way, Ghosh makes the reader think with the subject's mind. When he describes persons like Neel, Bahram, King etc the reader cant stop predicting the story with 'their' psyche.
The final part is at a shrieking crescendo.
This is one of those books which you will surely want to read again.