Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh
Published 2015 · 617 pages · 190,000 words · about 14 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, War Fiction
How hard is Flood of Fire to read?
Flood of Fire scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 74 out of 100
- Sepoy drill commands, Laskari sailing terms, Hindustani, and Canton pidgin run untranslated throughout.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Cleaner and faster than River of Smoke, though Zachary's and Shireen's sections keep Ghosh's long subordinated periods.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Ideas about race, credit, and imperial justification are argued through characters rather than stated.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Bengal Native Infantry organisation, the mechanics of steam warships, and the first Opium War's campaign order are all rendered in detail.
- Narrative indirection: 56 out of 100
- Four separate viewpoints—a sepoy havildar, a Parsi widow, an American sailor, a British officer's world—never share what they know.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The steamship Nemesis, iron-hulled and unstoppable up the Pearl River, carries the book's whole argument about technology and conquest.
- Ironic distance: 64 out of 100
- Zachary Reid's rise from ship's carpenter to opium trader is written as a success story, which is the joke.
- Resolution withholding: 54 out of 100
- The trilogy closes with Hong Kong founded and most of the Ibis passengers still scattered, several fates left open.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Four parallel strands across two oceans, closing a trilogy without gathering its cast into one room.
How Flood of Fire is regarded
Flood of Fire holds a literary regard score of 65 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.