Gun Island 

by Amitav Ghosh

In this richly imagined, beautifully written novel, Ghosh uses storytelling, at times magic realism, to show individuals contending with strange and improbable happenings related to climate change. The narrator is Deen Ghatta, an Indian scholar and rare-book dealer who, like Ghosh, divides his time between India and Brooklyn. Deen is visiting Kolkata when a relative tells him of a Bengali legend about Bonduki Sadagar, a gun merchant who has insulted Manasa Devi, a goddess who rules over snakes, scorpions, and poisonous creatures. She persecutes him in his voyages the world over until he builds a shrine to her in the mangroves of an island in the Sundarbans, in the Bay of Bengal. 

Deen’s own harrowing experiences begin when he visits this shrine in the midst of a storm and is threatened by a giant king cobra. Tipu, a media-savvy teenager who has come with him attempts to rescue him but is bitten by the cobra, then is saved by another boy, Rafi, who sucks out the cobra’s venom. The two boys become fast friends and undertake desperate attempts to migrate to Europe. Deen comes to know beautiful marine biologist Piya, who has supported Tipu and his mother ever since his father perished while on one of Piya’s research expeditions in the Sundarbans. And when he meets up again with Cinta, a brilliant Venetian historian, she challenges his rationalist dismissals of questions about whether today’s storms, fires, epidemics, civil wars, and evils of human trafficking and enslavement somehow occur naturally or are inflicted by powerful forces much as were the travails that beset the gun merchant. 

Published in 2019 just months before we all learned about the scope of the present pandemic, Gun Island casts our experiences in a historical and globe-spanning perspective all its own. Already in his 2016 book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Ghosh pointed to the extent to which human activities in the carbon ecosystem were contributing to desertification, fires, cyclones, inundations, and pandemics. How can it be, he asked, that today’s fiction does so little to convey what climate change actually portends for the future of the earth? By contrast, as a review in the Washington Post put it, Gun Island “turns global crises into engaging fiction.”

— Sissela Bok