Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

The rambling start to what is threatened to be a trilogy, Sea of Poppies is the colourful saga of the crew, passengers and prisoners aboard an old slaving ship, the Ibis, as it journeys from India to the Seychelles.

Beginning in British India at the start of the Opium Wars, the cast of Ghosh’s wide and diverse novel include Zachary Reid, the ship’s American second mate, a ruined raja, a cross-dressing secretary and the widow of an opium worker. I felt, however, that his minor characters were much more fun, especially that of the Doughty, the pilot sent to navigate the Hooghly as the Ibis sails up to Calcutta from the Bay of Bengal.

Doughty certainly makes an impression on his arrival onboard, a stout, irate Englishman pounding the deck with a Malacca cane:

He waved airily at the lascar who was standing behind the wheel. “That’s my sea-cunny over there; knows exactly what to do – could take you up the Burrempooter with his eyes closed. What’d you say we leave the steering to that badmash and find ourselves a drop of loll-shrub?” “Loll-shrub?” Zachary scratched his chin. “I’m sorry, Mr Doughty, but I don’t know what that is.” “Claret, my boy,” the pilot said airily, “Wouldn’t happen to have a drop on board, would you? If not, a brandy-pawnee will do just as well.”

It soon transpires that Doughty likes a drink. An invitation to dine on the barge of doomed raja Neel Rattan Halder starts off well enough with a bottle of fizz, although Neel notes that it’s only the sauce that makes these interactions bearable:

Back in the sheeshmahal, a bottle of champagne was waiting in a balty of muddy river water. Mr Doughty fell upon the wine with an expression of delight. “Simkin! Shahbash – just the thing.” Pouring himself a glass, he gave Neel a broad wink. “My father used to say, ‘Hold a bottle by the neck and a woman by the waist. Never the other way around.’ I’lll wager that would have rung a gunta or two with your own father, eh, Roger Nil-Rotten – now he was quite the rascal , wasn’t he, your father?” Neel gave a chilly smile: repelled as he was by the pilot’s manner, he couldn’t help reflecting on what a mercy it was that his ancestors had excluded wine and liquor from the list of things that could not be shared with unclean foreigners – it would be all but impossible, surely, to deal with them, if not for their drink?

Unfortunately, Doughty, well in his cups, overhears something said by Neel’s mistress halfway through the dinner and gets in a terrible rage. Zachary and his employer shovel him off Neel’s barge and into the capable hands of their lascars:

“Catchi too muchi shamshoo,” said Serang Ali matter-of-factly, as he took hold of the pilot’s ankles. “More better go sleep chop-chop.”

After a long period spent in Calcutta while the characters assemble for the voyage, Doughty is given little to do, although he’s brought in to write the register of indentured labourers as they pass through the company’s holding camp on their way to the ship. Sadly his clerical skills are a little compromised:

Mr Doughty had just half an hour before left the table of a district magistrate, where he had been served a heavy lunch, copiously lubricated with many brimming beakers of porter and ale. Now, between the heat and the beer, his eyes were gummed together with sleep, so that a good few minutes followed between the opening of his right eye and then the left.

In a nod to future books, the names of two of the protagonists are written down incorrectly, the blame given to the faulty hearing of an English pilot who was more than half-seas over:

Zachary later says goodbye to the man in this walk-on-part with much greater regret than he anticipated, and I have to say that I did too...

A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle

I was first introduced to Doyle’s work on stage, in Dublin with my father back in 1994 when we saw his fantastic play Brown Bread. A Star Called Henry similarly uses comedy to take on big themes, and there’s little bigger than the birth of his country and the Easter Rising which forms the main part of the first half of the novel.


Henry is a fourteen year old youth, six foot two, handy with his fists, and already a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army. His father was a doorman at a brothel, a one legged bruiser who would swing his wooden prosthetic with skull-cracking dexterity, the bane of rozzers and drunken punters.

Henry Senior’s first meeting with Henry’s mother is hardly auspicous. Twenty two, one legged and dead drunk, he stumbles straight in front of the lovely Melody Nash as she walks back from early mass on Sunday:

She walked right into my father. Melody Nash met Henry Smart. She walked right into him, and he fell. She was half his weight, half his height, six years younger but he fell straight over like a cut tree. Love at first sight? Felled by her beauty? No. He was maggoty drunk and missing his leg.

At first, she not unreasonably concludes that he’s dead. She checks for life and gets little more than monosyllables:

The man groaned again. He drew his arms in and braced himself. Then he crawled one kneed off the road, over the gutter. Melody picked up the shovel. He groaned again and vomited. A day and half’s drinking poured out of him like black pump water.

And yet Henry Senior is also an absolute charmer and whisks young Melody off her feet. Soon enough they’re getting hitched, and the wedding is in full swing. Melody is getting ‘the talk’ about babies from all the older women in the room. Fortunately, there’s a distraction and she can escape:

She was saved by the fight that broke out when a couple of moochers that nobody knew were caught helping themselves to the bottles of stout. – Yer dirty lousers! Granny Nash jumped onto one of them and bit him on the cheek... The man was trying to save his face but his arms were stiffened by all the bottles and sandwiches stuffed up his sleeves.

For some reason, Melody thinks that this is unsuitable conduct for her wedding:

Melody had had enough. – You’re ruining my day! she screamed. Granda Nash dropped the leg. – Sure Jaysis, love, he said. –The day would’ve been ruined altogether if they’d got away with the rest of the bottles.

And so on to Henry Junior, who abandoned to the streets at the age of nine, finds himself manning the barricades at the GPO in Easter 1916...

The Reason Why by Cecil Woodham-Smith

One of the most popular histories of the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade, Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why focuses on two the main protagonists in the debacle; George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan and James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan.

Woodham-Smith describes how the ‘purchase system’ allowed both of these stubborn and inexperienced aristocrats to rise to positions of command by buying their way through the ranks. Pushed out of one regiment for his bullying and autocratic behaviour, Cardigan was put in charge of the 11th Hussars where he used his own money to turn the regiment into a stylish and flamboyant outfit. He achieved some degree of success in this, despite dissent from some of his officers, a situation that led to the ‘black bottle’ affair.

Cardigan’s main beef was with the ‘Indian’ officers, men who had gained proper military experience while the regiment had been stationed in India. They resented his pushiness and his use of the 11th to show off to London society. He thought their conduct unbecoming. Nothing they did was right, not even what they drank in the mess:

In India it had been the custom for officers to drink porter – it was healthier and cheaper. To this the lieutenant-colonel furiously objected. Porter was the drink of factory hands and labourers, and he wished to make the 11th famous for its splendid hospitality, for he loved the pomp and ceremony of ‘great’ dinners. He forbade bottled porter to appear on the mess table.

General Sleigh is invited to dine with Cardigan’s regiment and he entertains him extravagantly with a formal do in the mess. All is going swimmingly until one of the guests asks for an alternative to champagne. An ‘Indian’ officer called over for a waiter:

General Sleigh’s aide asked if he might have Moselle instead of champagne, and John Reynolds gave the order to a mess waiter, who, anxious to supply the wine at once, did not stop to decant it, but placed it on the table in its bottle. At this moment Lord Cardigan looked down the table, and there, among the silver, the glass, the piles of hot-house fruit, he saw a black bottle – it must be porter!

Cardigan was transported with rage. This upstart officer, an ‘Indian’ to boot:

...was drinking porter under his very nose, desecrating the splendour of his dinner table. When it was explained that the black bottle contained Moselle, he refuse to be appeased; gentlemen, he said, decanted their wine.

One of the lieutenant-colonel’s muckers is sent around the next day to remonstrate:

“The colonel had desired me to tell you,” said Captain Jones, “That you were wrong in having a black bottle placed on the table at a great dinner like last night. The mess should be conducted like a gentleman’s table and not like a pot-house.”

Well, standards have to be maintained...