Author Amitav Ghosh's epic trilogy ends in Hong Kong

Hong Kong has inspired some fine works of literature. Representing the populist front are James Clavell's Tai-Pan, Michael Connelly's 9 Dragons, John le Carré's The Honourable Schoolboy and George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman and the Dragon. More literary contributions include Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil, Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City, Han Suyin's A Many-Splendored Thing, Liu Yichang's Intersection, Timothy Mo's The Monkey King, and Jane Gardam's Old Filth.

Few writers have united these two halves - the populist and the literary, the entertaining and the intellectual - more successfully than Amitav Ghosh in Flood of Fire. By turns exciting and insightful, vividly atmospheric and unflinching in its portrayal of realpolitik, it concludes a genuinely epic trilogy about the opium wars.

Flood of Fire culminates in the creation of Hong Kong, a place that is both real and metaphoric to Ghosh. Here it is as geographical focal point: "There was a rocky protrusion at the eastern end of the bay that would serve very well as the foundation for a jetty; the promontory had been named East Point and some of the bigger British opium-trading firms were already constructing godowns and daftars [offices in Hindi] in its vicinity."

The "Ibis Trilogy" - which began with Sea of Poppies, followed by River of Smoke - may take place in the middle of the 19th century, but like the best historical fiction it shines bright lights into the darkest corners of the present. The description of Hong Kong's restless development kickstarted by British rule could almost pass for any moment of the past 150 years: "Only after the squad had departed did the seths [merchants/bankers in Hindi] notice that Hong Kong had changed in the last couple of weeks: they saw that a wave of settlers had washed up on the island's shores; they noticed also that a cluster of buildings was already under construction at the eastern end of the bay."