Escapism has its virtues
Gun Island turns global crises into engaging fiction
Gun Island
Amitav Ghosh
Farrar Straus Giroux
Indian writer Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island, his ninth novel, deals with two of the biggest issues of the moment: climate change and human migration. The confidence with which he shapes a good, old-fashioned diversion around these particular poles is instructive. Escapism has its virtues, but a book unafraid of ideas can be bracing.
The novel’s narrator is Deen, a 50-something rare-book dealer. He lives in Brooklyn, but we meet him in Kolkata, and eventually follow him to Venice. In India, a relative tells Deen the folk tale of Bonduki Sadagar, or the Gun Merchant.
The Gun Merchant is said to have run afoul of Manasa Devi, a goddess who rules over snakes and poisonous creatures, and his trials are recorded on the walls of a small shrine on an island in the Sundarbans. This mangrove forest is where India and Bangladesh meet, and the story, appropriately, braids together Hindu and Muslim cosmology.
The Sundarbans are now one of the world’s vanishing regions but have always been difficult terrain. The 1970 Bhola Cyclone killed half a million people there. But the story Deen hears is that a small pocket of survivors rode out the storm inside the aforementioned shrine, protected by Manasa Devi.
Deen is respectful but skeptical. “The story’s appeal is, I suppose, not unlike that of the Odyssey, with a resourceful human protagonist being pitted against vastly more powerful forces, earthly and divine.”
Ghosh is not subtle about stating his intention, but sometimes a little clarity is nice.
Early in the book, Deen is guided to the elusive island, not yet swallowed by a rising sea, by a native of the region named Tipu. The rest of the novel is a quest: Deen’s search for the meaning in the myth, and Tipu’s search for safe passage into the West. Deen is a proxy for the reader.
“I am sorry if this does not conform to stereotypes of Indians — but I am not religious and don’t believe in the supernatural,” Deen tells Cinta, an Italian friend (alas, the least convincing player in the book, almost! everything! she! says! accentuated! with! an! exclamation! mark! because Italians equal passion!). He doesn’t truly believe in a divine being who can corral snakes and spiders to do her bidding. Nevertheless, there are moments this goddess seems to be his adversary.
Ghosh is a practised and capable writer; by the seventh page, we’re deep into Bengali folklore, and willing to accept this as a novelistic subject. That Ghosh is able to sustain the book’s momentum when its primary inquiry is so cerebral is no mean feat.
The novel made me think of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, or Tom Stoppard’s best plays, texts that treat academic pursuit as something thrilling.