In historical novels the past can sometimes feel tamed hindsight, hovering just off the page, tells us that we know what it all added up to and what came of it (the First Opium War, during which British gunboats enforced a treaty opening Chinese ports to international trade, comes shortly after the ending of this novel). The Chinese authorities are trying to prevent illegal imports of the drug, which has inflicted a plague of addiction on the Chinese population while making empire-sized fortunes for the irrepressibly shameless traders, mostly British. River of Smoke follows the story through to Canton in China, where the opium is sold. The first, Sea of Poppies, published in 2008, took us along the Ganges and to Calcutta, where the poppies are grown and the opium processed. River of Smoke is the second volume of a proposed trilogy. A mitav Ghosh's two latest novels carry us deep inside the opium trade in the 1830s.
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