Amitav Ghosh: The Calcutta Chromosome
Dec. 30th, 2014 02:38 amAmitav Ghosh's novel The Calcutta Chromosome is fascinating but hard to characterise. Part science fiction, part medical thriller, part meditation on the nature of knowledge, part conspiracy theory, part post-colonial examination of the British presence in India... As I said, it's hard to characterise.
It begins with Antar, a middle-aged man living in New York, at some point in the not-too-distant future, whose job appears to consist of working with an AI named Ava in an attempt to inventory ... I'm not sure what, maybe everything. He recognises an artefact shown him by Ava as the damaged ID of a man he once worked with L. Murugan, who disappeared in Calcutta in 1995. Murugan was obsessed with the discovery of the transmission mechanism of malaria by an Englishman named Ronald Ross in 1895 - only Murugan believes that Ross' discovery was actually orchestrated by a secret society whose members embraced a kind of anti-science, and for whom Ross' work on malaria was just a sideline on the way to their real goal.
The novel moves between the three timelines - Antar's, as he recalls the strange things Murugan told him; Murugan's, as he searches for clues to the whereabouts of the secret society, and Ross's, as he conducts his research in the midst of colonial India, surrounded by servants who may or may not be part of the society Murugan will look for a century later.
What is particularly interesting about the novel is Ghosh's concept of anti-science, or comprehending without knowing, that has been adopted by his mysterious group. It seems to incorporate an intuitive analogue of the uncertainty principle - that watching changes the watched. Ghosh never fully describes it, possibly because wherever it is, it's not something that is reducible to words. What he does, is write the unravelling of the mysteries of Murugan's quest in a fashion that urges the reader to comprehend the novel in just that fashion. Ghosh rarely tells his readers anything, he merely presents a slow accretion of clues and leaves the reader to put it all together and figure out what has gone on, and why. All the answers are in the mind of the reader, not in the book.