Wonderful but hard to digest, scientifically. Review on Calcutta Chromosome, The - Amitav Ghosh

I like to think of this book more as a literary masterpiece rather than a science fiction book. Ghosh, with amazing lucidity creates true to life pictures of New York and British India.

The sequence of the ghost train is superb. It is some time since I read the book but I still can remember things from this book as pictures.

Ghosh has this amazing ability to paint pictures for you with words. In some parts he creates such dark atmosphere that it is almost palpable. The story revolves around the discovery of Malaria parasite is Calcutta by Ronald Ross and a fictional cult which genetically exploits the parasite. One amazing fact is that indeed Ronald Ross had something to do with a guy named Lutchman (lakshman? Laxman?) who is a character in the novel and part of the mysterious cult. I followed a link from the nobel laureates site ( http://www.nobel.se) to info about ross and indeed there is the mention of Lutchman!

But otherwise some of the theories put forward in the book are sort of undigestible for the scientifically literate. Still this is fiction and counting other pluses of this book I give it four stars!!