GUN ISLAND | Amitav Ghosh
READ AUGUST 2020
This book was read in the original LAX LAB climate fiction book club, which was active between 2020 and 2023. 🕷
GUN ISLAND |
Amitav Ghosh
2019
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“… how can any reality match the worlds that exist only in books? … novels had done for me exactly what critics had anticipated when “romances” first began to circulate widely in the eighteenth century: they had created dreams and desires that were unsettling in the exact sense that they were the instruments of my uprooting.”
— Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island, 2019
Temperatures reach a record high of 54°C in Death Valley. Wildfires rage once more in California. Four-thousand-year-old ice collapses into the Arctic Ocean – nearly half of the last fully intact ice shelf gone within a couple of days. Heavy monsoon rains lead again to devastating floods in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, impacting millions of people and putting the region on the brink of humanitarian crisis. What’s this got to do with fiction? According to author Amitav Ghosh, a great deal. In his 2016 non-fiction book The Great Derangement, Indian author Amitav Ghosh writes that climate change is a crisis of culture and a crisis of imagination. He provocatively argues that literature is failing to grapple with climate change, an omission that future generations may well find morally reprehensible.
If the realism of the climate crisis is too much for authors and readers to bear, Ghosh suggests through his novel Gun Island that mythology and the fantastical may be a viable alternative. In Gun Island we meet Deen Datta, a dealer of rare books in Brooklyn. On a visit to his hometown Kolkata, Deen becomes reacquainted with the old legend of gun merchant Bonduki Sadagar. Through Deen, we travel from Brooklyn to Kolkata to Los Angeles and Venice, meet snakes and goddesses, and are plunged into a world of mystery, adventure, and Bengali folklore.
The novel speaks to the connectedness of our world, how our relationships to space and time are intertwined with the carbon economy. Through this magical realist narrative emerges insight on the climate crisis, refugees and human migration, the forces of nature, and how old legends might help us confront and re-imagine the challenges of our present situation and precarious future.
“Only through stories can invisible or inarticulate or silent beings speak to us; it is they who allow the past to reach out to us … You mustn’t underestimate the power of stories. There is something in them that is elemental and inexplicable … It is only through stories that the universe can speak to us, and if we don’t learn to listen you may be sure that we will be punished for it.”
— Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island, 2019
About the author
Amitav Ghosh — author website
Further reading, listening, viewing
‘Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh review – climate and culture in crisis’
Alex Clark, The Guardian, 5 June 2019
'COVID collides with weather disasters to affect millions worldwide'
Thomas Frank, Scientific American, 25 September 2020
'California wildfires erupt from wine country to Los Angeles, damaging Santa Rosa and displacing thousands'
Andrew Freedman, The Washington Post, 29 September 2020
‘Death Valley just recorded the hottest temperature on Earth’
Concepción de León and John Schwartz, The New York Times, 17 August 2020
The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh
Original LAX LAB book cover illustration by Emma Arnold, 2020
