Booker club: The Sea of Poppies

The egregious chairman of this year's judges, Michael Portillo, has said that every book on the Booker shortlist is "intensely readable" and has described them all as "exciting page-turners". These bold claims will no doubt have set plenty of Booker-cynics laughing into their sleeves, and advocates of the old-fashioned novel of ideas gnashing their teeth. Amitav Ghosh's The Sea Of Poppies has many fine qualities, but will in all probability only confirm the prejudices of both parties.

Beginning in 1838, among the poppy fields of India during the build up to the first opium war, this is a historical novel of the old school. There are pirates, exotic landscapes, palaces, prisons, swash and buckle galore, while reams of information about nineteenth-century conditions give a patina of authenticity to an otherwise enjoyably unlikely narrative.

In a suspiciously film-like manner, the story cuts between a number of characters who make their way onto the Ibis, a ship bound for Mauritius with a hold filled with emigrants, prisoners and coolie labourers instead of its more usual cargo of opium (since the lucrative trade with China is temporarily blocked). Among the various clichés are spank-happy English sailors and capitalists (who get their kicks from whipping "natives" or allowing their own bottoms to be subject to "chastisement"), deposed Indian nobles, noble Indian peasants, exotic Chinamen, even more exotic religious mystics (one labouring under the extraordinary name of Baboo Nob Kissin), attractive French women and – essentially for such a Hollywood-hungry opus – a hero from America.

This latter is the moral, intelligent, death-defying, romantic and very attractive Zachary Reid, the second mate of the Ibis, and first friend of all the friendless. He's annoying and his character is paper-thin, but Ghosh throws him into enough predicaments to ensure that there isn't much time to muse on his deficiencies. He fearlessly braves rising waters on leaky boats; on-board riots; starchy English dinner parties; sadistic first mates… There's plenty of a drama when he isn't on the scene too: a dramatic rescue from the ancient rite of Suttee; a no holds barred description of the incontinence resulting from opium withdrawal; wrestling bouts; a court case…

Even so, it's stretching things to describe The Sea Of Poppies as a genuine page-turner. Much of it, unfortunately, is dull. Ghosh's insistence on making the most of his considerable researches can occasionally be a virtue – a room-by-room description of an opium factory that is an undoubted tour-de-force – but more often it's a drag. The worst offence in this regard is an insistence on using dialogue culled from Hobson-Jobson. No doubt the vocabulary is authentic, but many passages such as the following smell too much of the lamp, and are baffling:

"Now there was another chuckmuck sight for you! Rows of cursies for the sahibs and mems to sit on. Sittringies and tuckiers for the natives… Cunchunees whirling and ticky-taw bos besting their tobblers. Oh old loocher knew hot to really put on a nuach all right!"

Did people really talk like that? Even if they did, Ghosh doesn't convince me that this is real dialogue. No Anthony Burgess, he. Things get even worse when the French girl, Paulette, is on the scene. We can tell she's French because she says her words in a funny order and is constantly subject to malapropism. A habit that Ghosh insists on turning into a (bad) joke just about every time she speaks and causes him to slip into some alarming constructions when the mystic Baboo is on the scene: "Come, Baboo Nob Kissin… I will walk you to the boathouse. Come to there one goes."

So much for readability. In terms of ideas, Ghosh does have a few pertinent points to make about the evils of colonialism and modern capitalism. It's hard to avoid the parallels between all that nineteenth-century rhetoric about free trade as justification for bloodshed and war and modern US politics. Hard especially since Ghosh labours the point so heavily. Even clumsier are the distinctly modern racial politics. One character must overcome his caste snobbery, Paulette has a 'native' stepbrother, Zachary is half caste… Which would be all well and good if they weren't so prone to speechifying about their various issues: "Are not all experiences defective in the end? Whatever there is within us – whether good, or bad, or neither – its existence will continue uninterrupted, will it not, no matter what the drape of our clothes, or the colour of our skin?"

Well yes. Few would disagree that it's better that people be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin, but by thus putting these clichéd modern words into the mouth of his nineteenth-century character, Ghosh manages to sound both at once hackneyed and anachronistic. The net result is that the book feels like as much like lecture as an adventure – but one that has little that is new to tell anyone.