Book review: Amitav Ghosh's ‘Wild Fictions’ is a chaotic collection of writing

In the opening essay of Wild Fictions, which looks at migration through an altogether original prism, Amitav Ghosh observes that illegal immigration is often not by the destitute, but usually by people who have the means to pay for airfares and agents. Indeed many readers might struggle to pinpoint any sort of theme—or much that illuminates—in Ghosh’s latest collection of writing, correspondence and musings from the last couple of decades. In his novel Sea of Poppies, he tells us in an essay for an anthology published by Vogue India in 2017, a character posits a new economic law concerning the baniyan : “He argues that the status of this garment has risen and fallen with the fortunes of the subcontinent…the implications of this, of course, is that as India’s economy grows, the fortunes of the banyan will rise again, perhaps to a point where it will become, once more, a finely crafted document." Fans of Ghosh’s deft comic touch In an Antique Land and superbly observed non-fiction in his elegant collection published two decades ago, Dancing in Cambodia, will likely be baffled and disappointed. The more than occasionally self-indulgent prose and chaotic digressions that characterise Wild Fictions sadly undermine Ghosh’s legacy as a writer of non-fiction.