Amitav Ghosh: The Hungry Tide

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON for canvas

Amitav Ghosh is not — yet — widely known here, although his previous novels, including The Glass Palace, have won many awards overseas. But with this new novel (his fifth) and a visit here next month, there's a chance for New Zealanders to catch up with the work of this most seductive and polished of the Indians writing in English.

The Hungry Tide is set in a landscape that seems made for fiction: the vast archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, the Sundarbans, where the tides reach more than 100 miles inland. "Midwived by the moon", as Ghosh puts it, every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear under water and re-emerge hours later. Dangerous beasts predominate: tigers and crocodiles, snakes and sharks.

Set on the fictional island of Lusibari, the story stretches back to events several years earlier: a mysterious package reveals truth about a failed local uprising.

Just arrived in the district is marine scientist Piyali Roy, Indian-born but American-on-the-inside, on the track of rare river dolphins. After a near-drowning, she's rescued by a boatman, illiterate Fokir, and taken to Lusibari. From there, Piyali enlists his help in her search for the dolphins, and they set off on an odyssey down the river, into the heart of darkness.

Menace darkens the pages, heightened by an early tiger attack, by the relentless tide, and also the metaphysical power of myth, and the journey into the jungle is very much a journey of the human spirit.

Ghosh writes with great vividness and particularity of the tide country and the lives of the people who live there. There is a formality and precision in his language that creates a slow pace, but the result stabs with its truthfulness.

* Penguin $27