YALE CLIMATE CONNECTIONS INTERVIEW
The uncanniness of
climate change
An interview with Amitav Ghosh, author of 'Gun Island.'
By Amy Brady
Friday, September 27, 2019
In 2016, Amitav Ghosh, the author of more than 10 books including The Hungry Tide, published The Great Derangement, a polemic about why contemporary literature has yet to embrace the scale of climate change. With his latest novel, Gun Island, Ghosh offers... a beautifully layered story about climate change and its thorny relationship to immigration, the legacy of colonialism, and the very nature of storytelling...
The novel stars Dinanath “Deen” Dutta, a Kolkata-born rare books dealer who lives in Brooklyn and who embarks on an adventure of a lifetime after visiting a shrine in the Sundarbans. The shrine is dedicated to the ancient Gun Merchant, who circled the globe in an attempt to escape the wrath of Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes.
Amy Brady: In The Great Derangement, your 2016 nonfiction treatise about how difficult it is for contemporary novelists to write about climate change, you describe a tornado. You’ve said that writing about this tornado in fiction has proved difficult because it’s such an improbable event. In Gun Island there’s a tornado.
Amitav Ghosh:..The weirdest thing has happened, Amy... things I’ve written about in my books have actually happened. There was another tornado like the one I describe in Gun Island in Venice quite recently. I also write in Gun Island about a massive hail storm and rare, poisonous spiders appearing in places they aren’t supposed to be. Well, a hail storm occurred in Venice just a few weeks ago. And very recently I received a message from a friend of mine who lives there – he had to take his son to the hospital for a spider bite... It’s all so uncanny.
Amy Brady: Are you a prophet?
Amitav Ghosh: [Laughs] No, we’re just living in an age where the improbable is becoming the probable.
Amy Brady: While reading Gun Island, I felt like I could experience the universe in two different ways, depending on how credulous I was willing to be... the strange “happenings” in your novel... could be explained by... global warming. But your novel also leaves open the possibility that these are manifestations of a vengeful goddess. There’s a lot of ambiguity here.
Amitav Ghosh: Yes, absolutely...What’s interesting is that giving voice to the nonhuman is something that fiction used to do... Melville’s Moby-Dick is about a whale that has agency and the power of comprehension...
Amy Brady: It’s hard to know what an animal is thinking, isn’t it?...
Amitav Ghosh: Well, you know, animal suicide is quite common.
Amy Brady: It is??
Amitav Ghosh: Oh, yes. There’s a very good book about it called Animal Madness by Laurel Braitman. It’s very well written. Many kinds of animals commit suicide: dogs, parrots, elephants.
Amy Brady: I had no idea... Thank you for introducing me to that possibility, even though it’s horribly depressing.
