Reader’s Digest India – July 2019

120 july 2019

Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

REVIEW

A FEW YEARS

AGO, Amitav

Ghosh warned us

in The Great De-

rangement that

we were looking

away from the

abyss. Climate

change was the great

crisis of our time and

we seemed paralyzed, if

not by fear then by some

strange anomie. Even

our imaginations, he

said, were failing us,

pointing to the absence

of a literary response

to a human-wrought

catastrophe.

As if forced to write

the book he wanted to

read, Ghosh responded

to his own criticisms

with Gun Island, a novel

set in an eroding, fast-

disappearing

world. Its protag-

onist—a Bengali

rare book dealer

whose life in

Brooklyn is so

quiet that he can

be away for weeks with-

out receiving so much

as a text message—is an

unlikely adventurer.

Stepping into a plane,

he notes, “It was as if I

had entered an impreg-

nably metallic, mechan-

ical, man-made womb,

where everything served

to protect me from that

world of mud and its

slithering, creeping in-

habitants.” But it is, of

course, that world he

must confront.

As he showed in his

swashbuckling Ibis tril-

ogy, Ghosh knows how

to tell a tale. Gun Island

is another exhilarating,

surprising ride. Occa-

sionally, Ghosh displays

a heavy hand—his char-

acters as wooden and

ludicrous as those in

any airport thriller. But

he is not a writer of inte-

riors, of human depths.

He loves words while

also having a tin ear for

dialogue. However,

Ghosh evokes wonder in

the reader—for places

and stories, for the natu-

ral and supernatural.

And horror, too, at the

unfolding Anthropo-

cene, at the damage we

have done and continue

to do.

A New

Awakening

By Shougat Dasgupta

Reader’s Digest

bandeep singh/india today