To create a world is a miraculous thing. Nineteenth-century Canton, the hold of an opium-running clipper, the busy life of the Whampoa River, a mountain cave on the far island of Mauritius: All these places figure in "River of Smoke" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 522 pages, $28), the second book in Amitav Ghosh's proposed trilogy.

Ghosh weaves a deeply human and richly colored fabric from the characters who came so vividly to life in his preceding book, "Sea of Poppies" (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize). The breathing solidity and emotional truth of Ghosh's phantasmagoria of characters and locales continues to amaze. Few authors since Melville and Joyce have excelled at both rambunctious, rangy linguistic play and deeply and lovingly observed human insight like this.

The trilogy will apparently culminate, finally, with the Opium Wars in China, but it doesn't reach that point in this volume. The hundred strands of plot that arose like wisps of smoke from the consuming historical forces laid out in "Sea" here acquire the solidity and salt of flesh and eccentricity. The former slave ship Ibis -- which is a real character in the book -- reaches Mauritius with its cargo of indentured Bengali laborers, and its crew of lascars and American officers. On the way, mutineers and escapees from the ship wend their way to Canton by way of Singapore. And it is in Canton, finally, that the lines of fate converge, linking Bengal's poppy farmers, the East India Company, English and Indian merchants, prison-forged friendships, rare-plant hunters, and Chinese bureaucrats and opium addicts, in a plotted denouement both intimate and historically driven.

The miracle is that the complexity is not the point -- it's incidental. The doings and desires and loves and curiosities of people are the point -- very individual people, whom Ghosh seems to know and love like old friends and relatives. Almost every one of these characters, moreover, is a mix, a blend, a traveler, an alien or a subject of transformation -- yet none of this seems unnatural or forced.

And the language! The liberating, proliferating, expressive sprays of it! Really, it has to be experienced rather than described. Perhaps only an Indian, like the Calcutta-born Ghosh, could perform this lucid magic with a dozen languages, pidgins and dialects.

I am hoping that Amitav Ghosh takes good care of himself, eats wisely, gets regular checkups. The world badly needs the third book he's writing.

Ann Klefstad is a writer and an artist in Duluth.