Bahram's story in River of Smoke doesn't have the same dynamism, although some strands of plot left over from the first book are picked up. In Sea of Poppies, the density of the novel's past-world was counterpointed by several strong and converging storylines: a young Hindu widow escaping from being incinerated with her husband's body, a black American sailor passing as white, a Raja degraded as a common prisoner, and so on.

The thread of the story can get lost amid the overwhelming interest of its context. The sheer accumulation of material ought to burst the seams of fictional form – and on occasion in River of Smoke, it does. Every element, no matter how small, in the novel's world opens up to reveal the further worlds stacked up behind it. and were spoken of familiarly by their Hindusthani name – samosa'. Bahram, the Parsi opium trader from Bombay, whose story is the primary focus of the novel, likes to eat 'a Xinjiang specialty called a samsa…': 'these were small triangles of pastry, stuffed usually with minced meat: baked in portable Uighur tandoors they were sold hot in the Maidan. We get a moment's glimpse in River of Smoke, for example, inside a ship's cabin – and Ghosh can't resist explaining how a copper tub is 'attached ingeniously to the ceiling, with removable trivets'. Both novels are cabinets of curiosities, crowded with items that hold a story of their own. His grasp of the detail of the period is exhaustive – he is so thoroughly submerged in it – that readers can't possibly remember all the things he shows them, or hold on to all the life-stories of all the characters he introduces. But Ghosh's novels somehow succeed in taking us back inside the chaos of when 'then' was 'now'. 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.

Sea of poppies book review