How do you capture the reality of climate change in a novel—not just its causes and symptoms, but the ever-changing, increasingly weird ways it manifests, within the conventional framework of a story with a beginning, middle, and end?
Answering that question, according to the writer Amitav Ghosh, is the great challenge of the literary world. “I fully believe that we need to change our fictitious practices in order to cope with the world we find ourselves in,” he said.
“Something so big and so important, there must be an infinite number of ways to just talk about it,” he said, akin to how war, slavery, colonization, famine and other crises and events have seeped into so many forms of literature.
Ghosh, 63, tries to add something to the conversation with ‘Gun Island’, his 12th book. The novel, due out Tuesday, jumps from the United States to the Sundarbans mangrove forest between India and Bangladesh, to Italy, places where rising temperatures and water levels have uprooted human and animal lives and turned political systems upside down.
It centers on Dinanth Datta, a rare bookseller also known as Deen, who reluctantly sets out on an Indiana Jones-esque journey to a temple in the Sundarbans in search of clues to an ancient Bengali legend. That visit propels him on an adventure that connects him with Bengali migrants in Libya, dolphins in the Mediterranean and venomous water snakes in California, while also touching migration, xenophobia and technology.
In his 2016 nonfiction book of essays, “The Great Derangement,” Ghosh wrote of his ancestors, “ecological refugees long before the term was invented” who lived on the banks of the Padma River in what is now Bangladesh. “One day in the mid-1850s, the great river suddenly changed course and the village drowned,” he writes. “It was this catastrophe that untied our ancestors.”
About a century later, Ghosh was born in Kolkata, a city near the Indian border with Bangladesh and serves as the starting point for Danish travel. Ghosh’s life, like Deen’s, spans countries from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to Great Britain and finally the United States, where he now lives.
While studying in New Delhi in the late 1970s, Ghosh experienced a tornado and hail storm – phenomena previously unheard of in India. He struggled to incorporate the episode into his fiction because, as he explained in “The Great Derangement,” it’s hard for a writer to use a case of “extreme improbability” without appearing contrived.
Ghosh got the idea for “Gun Island” in the early 2000s when he was researching another novel, “The Hungry Tide,” which explores the rivers of the Sundarbans, whose ecosystem supports the endangered Bengal tiger and thousands of other species. But Ghosh already saw the impact of climate change: bigger waves and worsening cyclones hampering agriculture. Over the years, that shift has directly or indirectly forced a significant portion of the Sundarban’s 4 million residents to flee to parts of India and Bangladesh.
“Gun Island” is likely to resonate in Italy, said Anna Nadotti, his friend and Italian translator of more than 30 years, as the country grapples with an influx of migrants fleeing war, persecution and climate crises. “Political, social and also culturally it is important to give people all the tools to understand what is really happening, why all these people are coming,” she said.
“Even if Amitav sometimes thinks of ‘Gun Island’, nothing is fictional,” she added, pointing to a scene from the book familiar to many Italians: a boat full of migrants, stranded at sea because he was not given permission to dock.
At one point in “Gun Island,” Deen arrives in Los Angeles for an antiquarian bookstore conference at a museum. Forest fires burn nearby. The conference will initially go ahead. But soon the bibliophiles, librarians and booksellers are told to evacuate as the wind changes direction, making the path of the fire increasingly unpredictable.
It seems to reflect when fires came dangerously close to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2017, raising concerns that they would destroy the artifacts inside. Ghosh said he wrote the scene six months earlier.
Later in the story, Deen is confronted by an erratic hailstorm and fierce “gusts of wind” in Venice. Two months ago, the real city was ravaged by hailstones and winds powerful enough to swing a cruise ship around.
That a novel seems to anticipate some of these unusual weather events is proof to Ghosh that literature should pay more attention to the environment.
© 2019 DailyExpertNews . Alisha Haridasani Gupta
