SOURCE: “Oh Death, Where Is Thy Bite?,” in Spectator, Vol. 277, No. 8771, August 24, 1996, pp. 25–26.

In the following review, Hulse offers a negative assessment of The Calcutta Chromosome, criticizing the characters' grating slang dialogue and the improbability of the plot.

Immortality has not figured very prominently in literature since Swift's Struldbrugs, and Amitav Ghosh's donné ought by rights, in the age of genetic engineering, to have fired a fiction of unusual trajectory. His subject is malaria, and its transmission by the anopheles mosquito. What if the principle by which the disease is imprinted on the mosquito's target could be adapted for genetic imprinting, so that an entire personality, by being imprinted upon succeeding generations of host bodies, might be chromosomatically granted immortality?

That immortality, if I understand Ghosh's bee-in-bonnet protagonist Murugan correctly, has been achieved by a bizarre Indian conspiracy overarching the generations, a conspiracy in which a select community...