Product Description

Kunal Basu's panoramic first novel follows the vagaries of Hiran's life, and the flow of the opium trade, from Calcutta to Canton. Disguised as a missionary, he survives cholera, piracy and war in China, arriving back in India to find his homeland on the verge of another rebellion. And he finds himself suddenly father to a half-caste son, the child abandoned by the Englishman and his wife when they fled back in disgrace to Britain. As Hiran dedicates himself to the education of his new son, the cycle of regeneration continues. Douglas, now an adult, neither black nor white, flees India himself for the Orient, again carried along on the flood of opium, this time to Borneo, to Sarawak: the land of the White Rajahs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #507987 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Kunal Basu is 42. He was born in Calcutta but has spent much of his adult life in Canada where he teaches at McGill university. For the last year he has lived and worked in Oxford although he travels regularly to Canada, China and India in the course of his work. He has previously published short stories in the London Magazine and other publications.

Customer Reviews

images, hallucinations and history
The Opium Clerk is a book of dreamlike images and nightmarish events, without explanations. Hiran, the opium clerk, tries to decipher life by studying the lines on his palms, but he (and the reader) are as puzzled at the end as at the beginning. The line is there but, without the intrusion of any all-knowing narrator to guide us, it seems to have no coherence, no meaning. We share Hiran's bewilderment as circumstances force him to leave the shelter of his Brahmin caste and adapt to his career at the Auction House under British rule, and his terror when sent from Calcutta to Canton he finds he has become an unwitting pawn in their struggle with the Chinese for control of the opium trade. His duty obliges him to commit the "sin of passage", and his distaste for the unclean food he is served in the rebel hideout is as upsetting to him as the mass executions he witnesses. We get no objective view of Hiran but we like and trust him because his many friends do. He is discrete. We follow his footsteps through the Auction House, to the house of his English boss, into the room of the addict wife. We never know if his fascination with her is as healer prescribing his homeopathic cures for her many ailments or if the sexual implication of his drawing of her is part of the cure or his own wishful imagination. We follow his steps through the Jaanbazaar without getting more than a passing mention, glimpse of the women he visits there on his way home to his despairing mother who is watching and waiting on the roof of the decaying family mansion... This is a book that rewards close reading, but offers no neat conclusion, no answers beyond what readers can make of it for themselves.

A haunting, poetic and realistic book
This is a book that absorbs the reader into an intense and wierdly soft-focused world. We never seem quite to get inside the main character, Hiran; nor do we come to feel much sympathy for him. And yet his situation, his vision, his famly and surroundings seem to be ours. It as if we are part of the opium haze that haunts this Calcutta and this Canton, and it becomes unthinkable to shake it off. I don't believe I have ever read a book that at once denies me the simple pleasure of sympathy with the characters and yet seduces me so completely into its world. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in writing, in the relationship between Britain, India and the Opium trade, or in the underlying anxieties about identity and origins that are, I suspect, the source of the creative power of the book. And I very much look forward to Kunal Basu's next book!