Oh death, where is thy bite?
Michael Hulse
THE CALCUTTA CHROMOSOME by Amitav Ghosh Picador, f15.99, pp. 308
Immortality has not figured very prominently in literature since Swift's Struldbrugs, and Amitav Ghosh's donne ought by rights, in the age of genetic engineering, to have fired a fiction of unusual trajectory. His subject is malaria, and its transmission by the anopheles mosquito. What if the principle by which the disease is imprinted on the mosquito's target could be adapted for genetic imprinting, so that an entire personality, by being imprinted upon succeeding genera- tions of host bodies, might be chromoso- matically granted immortality?
That immortality, if I understand Ghosh's bee-in-bonnet protagonist Muru- gan correctly, has been achieved by a bizarre Indian conspiracy overarching the generations, a conspiracy in which a select community of the living dead seek new host bodies as they extend their franchise. The Calcutta Chromosome is a melo- dramatic thriller set simultaneously in three periods: the 1890s, when the anopheles mosquito was identified as the carrier of malaria by Sir Ronald Ross, who received a Nobel Prize for his work in 1902; the 1990s, when Murugan pursues his pet theory concerning the truth about Ross's research; and a futuristic present in which Antar, an Egyptian computer opera- tor working for a global database in New York, tries to discover the facts of Muru- gan's disappearance in India in 1995.
Ghosh's is one of those plots in which every character, no matter how casually encountered, proves deeply implicated; in which computers decades hence are magi- cally able to reconstruct a past to which none can have had sufficient access; and in which character, depth comes a poor second to character function. It is story- board rather than novel, a yarn tailored to a Hollywood idea of narrative and shorn of the Swiftian considerations that would have given an edge to it. Grammar is the least of Ghosh's worries:
He began to bitterly regret the impulse that had caused him to leave his own microscope behind, at his family's New England home, or else it would have been all too easy to set up an improvised laboratory right where he was.
And there are other problems. Chief among them is the grating style of Mum- gan's speech. Here is his account of Ross's commitment to malaria research: He's married, he's got kids, he's about to hit his midlife crisis; he should be saving for the power lawnmower and what does he do instead? He looks in the mirror and asks himself: 'What's hot in medicine right now? What's going to bag me a Nobel?'
Forty pages of Ghosh's exposition are told by Murugan with this burger-joint facetiousness, and the infantility is so wearying that I wonder if Ghosh, for some reason best known to himself, wants us to think his hero is an idiot. Furthermore, the notion that a serious scientist might calcu- latingly cast about for a line of research that could earn a Nobel Prize is too vulgar for words, though I'm prepared to believe that such people exist; what I will not believe is that Ross can have thought in this way in 1895 (according to Murugan), a year before Alfred Nobel died and the preparatory work for the Nobel Prize was begun under the terms of his will.
Two chapters near the end of The Calcutta Chromosome unexpectedly contain the most arresting Indian ghost story I have read in many a year. Ghosh can write when he wants to, but the frustration of reading the other 270-odd pages is a high price to pay for the pleasure of that tale.
Previous page
