The Hit List

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

Amid the industry's gloomy forecast —see Boris Kachka's state-of-publishing piece in New York magazine two weeks ago simply titled "The End"— there remain a couple of routes to surefire sales. Oprah holds the best cards, but Britain's Man Booker Prize also guarantees a significant bump, rare for literary fiction, for its nominees.

The stakes showed this year in the flap over including Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 (Grand Central, April 29) on the Booker long list. Smith's book, better researched than executed but still quick and engaging, got dinged for being a thriller, the kind of book where a steadfast investigator bucks the pressures of the system to bring down a dangerous serial killer. The problem wasn't Smith's predictability or his occasionally clunky prose, but that a specimen drawing from a pulp genre would get placed on par with the high seriousness of a Salman Rushdie volume.

Ultimately, Smith missed the short list (as did Rushdie, as did Joseph O'Neill's wonderful Netherland); instead, amid a slate of pulp-untainted nominees sits Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct. 14), a great huge historical novel that features religious mysticism, forbidden romance, a frisson of miscegenation, and pirates.

Now, Ghosh's book, with the pirates and the romance and the opium dealing,really should seem like a great companion to Child 44. Both have exotic settings, with Smith's cold Stalinist Russia eclipsed by a lush 19th-century Indian panorama in Ghosh's. Smith's policeman's pursuit looks single-minded next to Ghosh's explosion of event, with narrow rescues from suttee quickly giving way to the Dickensian bankrupting of an Indian raja whilst a French damsel disguises herself as a native to pursue true love, all set against shipboard politics and heavy swashbuckling and a bunch of other various busyness.

Despite all of this, Sea of Poppies isn't much of a thriller, or even much of an adventure — and the things that make the book worthy also make it dull. Ghosh's sailor hero Zachary Reid, octoroon from Baltimore, winds up unwittingly passing for pukka while conscientiously defending the defenseless. He's a modern post-racial paragon without a whiff of self-doubt or moral complexity. He also gets the girl in the end. The book's language weighs things down even more:Ghosh has performed an impressive feat of historical research by resurrecting gobs of Anglo-Indian slang, enshrining it in an appendix, and injecting gouts of it into his prose,but that gums up swathes of the bookwith cunchunees and cumras and ticky-taw bos. It's beautiful, overwhelming, creative linguistics; it also overburdens the adventure story and clashes with a strangely modern politics of race.

Incidentally, the flap over the seriousness of thrillers becomes even more baffling in light of A Most Wanted Man (Scribner, Oct. 7), asteady-handed miniaturist's spy novel by old master John le Carré. Le Carré, after all, followedGraham Greene in infusing pulp with careful characterization and plotting. With this latest book, he now works in a form that's been enervated by the loss of the great Cold War narrative.It stillshowcases his skills as a meticulous plotter and character-sketch artist, deploying astringent prose to mark out a moral spectrum composed ofgray shades. Like Child 44 or Poppies, this book wants to be a novel of ideas expressed through action; dry where Smith is prolix and Ghosh is lush, le Carré avoids confusing scale with significance. What le Carré does so well, in right-sizing the thriller, Hannah Tinti also accomplishes with her adventurous The Good Thief (Dial Press, Sept. 2). Like Sea of Poppies, the book delivers a steady stream of incident and complication, beginning with the adoption of amputee orphan Ren and continuing through confidence scams and grave robberies. Tinti doesn't step wrong at all in drawing Ren, or in portraying his search for his past, and she nestles him in a full cast of curious and often dubious misfits. But where Ghoshtries to recreate a full continent on a single ship through brute verbal force, Tinti takes a more modest approach; she may not dazzle like Ghosh, but she hits her marks much more convincingly and produces an endearingly old-fashioned and entirely satisfying yarn.

Of course, being American, Tinti's hopes now lie with Oprah.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)