[In the following review of Feeding the Ghosts, Tandon praises D'Aguiar's evocative description and plotting, but concludes that the work lacks an underlying element of coherence.]

Sea-water and wood, with their capacities simultaneously to preserve and obscure, figure strongly in Fred D'Aguiar's long historical novella. While the suggestive conjunction of natural materials in sea-stories is hardly innovative (Moby-Dick, for one, makes much of the Pequod's cannibalized shipwork), here it allows the author a base for what turns out to be an extended meditation—often harrowing, sometimes a little self-regarding—on the persistence, necessity and attendant costs of remembering. After all, one reason why ghosts are such fertile subjects for novelists is that they share with novels a particular way of combining different temporal dimensions; and Feeding the Ghosts, as its title suggests, punctuates its main narrative with flashbacks, not only as stylistic effects but as central motifs.

Taking his cue from Derek Walcott's “The Sea is History”—adapted here into “The sea is slavery”—D'Aguiar tells of a disease-ridden slave-ship returning from its dirty work in Africa. Captain Cunningham, his own motives all too manifest, strong-arms his crew into summarily dumping all the sick slaves overboard:

“We have surrendered seven good men to these waters and lost thirty-six of our holdings. I do not intend to bury another. One-twelfth of our holdings lost? With each loss our commission dwindles. These three months of hard work, sacrifice and suffering will come to nothing. We must act decisively or return to our families and friend and investors empty-handed. Which is it to be, gentlemen?”

Of 132 slaves thrown overboard, one miraculously survives: Mintah, an English-speaker, punished not for sickness but for insubordination toward Kelsal, the first mate, whom she disturbs to an extent initially unexplained. Climbing back up the side of the ship, she takes refuge with the cook's assistant, and begins to “haunt” below decks, becoming a talisman of strength for those left alive, as one who has come back from the dead (“the men touched her for some of her magic to rub off on them and to check that she wasn't an apparition”). But after an abortive rebellion leads to her recapture, a long, hallucinatory reverie uncovers her past, and specifically how she once nursed Kelsal back to health in Africa—indeed, it was she who reminded him of his name, which is all the more ironic given that it is Kelsal who is engaged in obliterating the identity of the slaves, their lives reduced to ink:

Both slaves were presented to the captain, who opened a ledger which he shielded against the light rain that had just begun and made two strokes in it.

Nor is this Mintah's last action from the past. Back in England, Cunningham's insurance claim on the slaves appears to be going smoothly until Simon, the cook's assistant, produces Mintah's written testimony in a book: a direct opposite to Cunningham's ledger in which lives are lost. The Dickensian vigour of this episode is one of the highlights of the novel, as D'Aguiar intertwines the rhetoric of litigation with more selfish concerns:

An unexceptional crowd for what should be a conventional hearing: a party of avaricious investors pitted against a parsimonious insurer. Lord Mansfield was sure he'd be out of court in time to dine at The King's Head, a cured pheasant, his favourite.

But Mintah's ghostly intercession is not enough, and she is last seen as an old freed slave in Jamaica, working in wood, having taken it on herself to become a collective memory for the dead slaves (“There are 131 of them. A veritable army”).

This is clearly a poet's novella, less interested in the sheer number of incidents than in the weight they carry; consequently, the most satisfying aspects of the story are D'Aguiar's precise observations of the resonances of language, and its capacity to transform what it describes—most chilling is the contrast between the unceremonious dumping of the nameless slaves and the burial of a member of the crew: “The plank holding the carapaced body was angled out over the side and tilted and William Pelling slid off it and the sea swallowed.” Nevertheless, there is something that doesn't quite cohere in D'Aguiar's rich prose (Lord Mansfield, with his “pleasant pheasant”, isn't the only devotee of internal rhyme in this novel). Perhaps it is to do with the novel's status as an historical reconstruction, in that it shares with other forms of restaging a way of being meticulous and disturbing, but finally lacking a degree of interiority.