WHILE THE CLIMATE crisis has reconfigured our relationships with each other, other creatures, and our places, fiction has not. It remains focused on the human’s internal, moral journey, as if human life is something circumscribed from the rest of creaturely life. Gun Island is a much-needed antidote to the anthropocentric ideal of the novel, one that meets the age of climate change with stories that are true to the new dimensions of relationships unfolding around us.
In his first novel since his nonfiction masterpiece The Great Derangement, in which he laid out a vision for a climate-changed literature, Ghosh illustrates the agency of nature: how in this Anthropocene age, shaped by human activity, our porous lives are intertwined with those of our nonhuman interlocutors, who become increasingly present in our lives through climate-change-driven typhoons, fires, and species migration. He tells a story of stories, not recasting the tales of modernity, but reaching back into Bengali folklore to guide us through this uncanny age. For, as one of Gun Island’s characters says, “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.”
An inescapable connection with the tale of Bonduki Sadagar, the Gun Merchant, sends the novel’s narrator, Deen, to three hot spots of climate disasters: the disappearing Sundarbans mangrove forest off the coast of India and Bangladesh, the fiery hills of Southern California, and the flooding canals of Venice, Italy. The visible effects of climate change are inescapable in all three, and yet the ability of people in each region to adapt is vastly different. While the wealthy attendees of a conference at the Getty in Los Angeles are shuffled to a high-end hotel to escape the encroaching flames of a wildfire, the Bengali refugees from the Sundarbans are trapped on an overcrowded boat off the coast of Italy, at risk of sinking with every day they are forbidden to come ashore. The real tragedy of the climate crisis may not be the physical effects, but the social and political hatred that it reveals.
Through all the human-caused pain and suffering of the Anthropocene, however, Ghosh imagines that rather than retreat into modernity and isolate from the lives of our nonhuman neighbors, we might listen to Indigenous tales from around the world, where the despotism of human life is dissolved into a divine dance with all of creation. Gun Island tells again the narrative central to so many faith traditions: It is only through the mystery of this sacred entanglement that we might be delivered into a world full of loving, flourishing relationships.
Avery Davis Lamb is an activist, ecologist, and public theologian working at the intersection of Christianity and environmental justice. He is the executive director of Creation Justice, whose mission is to educate, equip and mobilize Christians to protect, restore, and rightly share God's creation.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
