The Story Bug
[In the following review, Chew offers a positive assessment of The Calcutta Chromosome.]
With its dazzling and haunting mix of science fiction, the history of malaria research, thriller, ghost story and postcolonial allegory, Amitav Ghosh's new novel is—like his previous work—wonderfully clever as well as a good read. Set in the not-too-distant future but covering in its sweep the 1880s and 1890s (crucial years in the medical history of malaria), The Calcutta Chromosome finds its driving force in the idea of research. Specialised knowledge carries the narrative, and is fired by the character's obsessive energies into mesmerising talk. This has all the excitement and frustrations of the chase, with the tangled operations of accident and design, the ground-breaking discoveries as well as the near-misses.
Antar is a bored computer clerk employed by the International Water Council in New York. In the course of identifying an item from one of the endless inventories that AVA (the computer) is programmed to file, he is stirred to curiosity by the familiar image of a metal chain and its scrap of ID card. A closer check points to the owner as Murugan, a colleague reported missing in Calcutta since August 1995. Murugan was an eccentric who held himself to be the “greatest living expert” on the Nobel-winning bacteriologist, Sir Ronald Ross.
Ross's fame rests upon his work on malaria and its transmission by the anopheles mosquito. According to Murugan, however, this “discovery” had been anticipated by local knowledge. Far from being a lone genius, Ross had been steered towards the right conclusions by covert assistants under the direction of Mangala, the mysterious sweeper-woman at the PG Hospital in Calcutta.
As Antar recalls, such ironic twists marked the rest of Murugan's idiosyncratic account of malaria research. He claimed that, about the time that artificially induced malaria became accepted as a cure for syphilis in Europe, a form of the treatment was being meted out by Mangala to syphilitics in the grounds of PG Hospital. The treatment probably led Mangala to observe the malaria's parasite's ability to carry personality traits from malaria donor to recipient—a process of transmission that points to reincarnation. All guesswork on his part, as Murugan was prepared to acknowledge. Nevertheless, 100 years after Ross had “bagged a Nobel,” Murugan is searching the streets of Calcuttaa for ongoing traces of Mangala's malaria cult and for the secret of a chromosome outside “the standard Mendelian pantheon.”
Beyond Murugan's obsessions, a sharp sense of the interactivity between science and counter-science emerges from his hypnotic volubility and punchy assertions. If fame was the spur behind the English scientist's endeavours, the sweeper-woman's interest in malaria was also prompted by a desire for immortality of a kind. If Ross was little more than a tool of forces he failed to recognise, then it is still the case that Mangala needed him to take the existing knowledge of malaria forward.
Stranger than all else in Ghosh's novel, perhaps, is the malaria parasite itself. Its paradoxical nature (at once disease and cure) and remarkable talent for self-renewal makes it an apt figure for the mysterious process of story-telling itself. Like parasites, the tales Murugan hears take possession of him, are repeated and transform themselves in retelling.
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