Tore through this new novel this past weekend, at least until the end, when I was wearied by the tightening macrame of plot twists. A novel in term-time? I assure you: it was research! The novelist Amitav Ghosh is of course the author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017) which, among other things, argues that the world-making of literary novels makes them somehow structurally incapable of taking the Anthropocence seriously. (I avail myself of his arguments in my forthcoming piece on philosophy of religion in the Anthropocene, wondering if modern religion has the same blinders.) So how does he do as novelist?If you've read his 1995 Calcutta Chromosome you're familiar with the structure and rhythm, a hapless narrator who finds himself drawn into a vortex of mysteries, a past and a present which seem to echo each other, and uncanny coincidences so plentiful they can't be coincidences - or can they? (Of 2004 The Hungry Tide, which I also loved when I read it a decade ago, I had to report "if Ghosh's writing has a vice it is this hypersignification, which can make things seem contrived.") In the Calcutta Chromosome, you're supposed to notice the flamboyant plot-fixing: the feverish storytelling may be a symptom of malaria (which may also be a goddess). This time the gleeful coincidence-contriving dares us to consider that what we're encountering is not so much a novelist in overdrive as one who lets his work be a revelation of a world gone off its rails.
It struck me that the Venice I had encountered today ... was closer in spirit to the city that the Gun Merchant would have seen in the seventeenth century, another era when unaccustomed forces were churning the earth. Except that now it was unimaginably more so; it was as if the very rotation of the planet had accelerated, moving all living things at unstoppable velocities, so that the outward appearance of a place might stay the same while its core was whisked away to some other time and location. (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 181)
The 17th century, Ghosh has told us through a reported academic talk, was the time of the "Little Ice Age," which led to weather extremes and political instability across the planet. And it may also have been the beginning of the turn to fossil fuels which has led to the current debacle...
'all around the earth, ordinary people appear to have sensed the stirring of something momentous ... what they didn't allow for was that the story might take a few hundred years to play out.' (137)
The story doesn't just give multiple servings of extreme weather, though wild weather is the norm (there's even an evacuation of the Getty Museum because of a brush fire, just as the talk on the Little Ice Age ends - a little unnerving at the moment I'm writing). Gun Island takes place in a world where things are moving in untoward ways, with animals from Irrawaddy dolphins to California sea snakes to Italian spiders displaced from their habitats by global heating. These new flows include people, climate refugees fleeing drought- and typhoon-ravaged lands for Europe, and the novel ends in a Bugsby Berkeley water ballet of migrating animals intervening to save an Egyptian ship of rifugiati off Sicily, perhaps with the assistance of the serpent-mediating goddess Manasa Devi and La Madonna de La Salute. (You'll have to read the book for yourself to see how a story that begins in the Sundarbans ends here.)
It's a happy ending, imagine, complete even with reunited lovers! Is Gun Island, then, a fantasy of reenchanting a ravaged world? It dares us to believe otherwise. When the narrator describes his cognitive distress and paralyzing confusion at the cavalcade of improbable things that have been happening, a wise historian friend tells him that in the loss of "will" and "freedom" - volontà e libertà '- he has the symptoms the Inquisition associated with demonic possession! But the possession isn't something he's just now entering.
'You and I don't live in a world where it is possible to be possessed in the old sense. These things happened to our ancestors because their will, and their sense of their presence in the world, were essential to their very survival. To get by, they had to depend on the soil, the weather, animals, neighbours, family and so on, none of which would yield what they needed just for the asking, in the manner of, say, a cash machine, or a ticket agent at the stazione. Everything they depended on for their livelihood could fight back and resist, no matter whether it was a spouse or a horse, let alone the wind and the weather. Merely to survive they needed to assert their presence or they would have been overwhelmed, they would have become shadows of themselves. ... You and I face no such threat. We live in a world of impersonal systems; ... no one needs to assert their presence in order to get by from day to day. And since it is not needed, that sense of presence slowly fades, or is lost and forgotten - it's easier to let the systems take over.'
It took me a couple of minutes to work out the implications of what she was saying. 'But if that's true, Cinta,'I said, 'then what you're implying is that people today - people like us - are already possessed?'
She smiled in her enigmatic way. ... 'the world of today presents all the symptoms of demonic possession.'
I gasped. 'What? You can't be serious, Cinta! In what sense does it present the symptoms of demonic possession?'
'Just look around you, caro. ... Everyone knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a livable place ... and yet we are powerless, even the most powerful among us. We go about our daily business through habit, as though we were in the grip of forces that gave overwhelmed our will; ...'
She smiled and reached out to pat my hand. 'That is why whatever is happening to you is not "possession." Rather I would say that it is a risveglio, a kind of awakening. It may be dangerous, of course, but that is because you are waking up to things that you had never imagined or sensed before. You are lucky, Dino - some unknown force has given you a great gift.' (235-37)
We don't ever quite find out who the unknown force is - the mythical "Gun Merchant," Manasa Devi? It's Ghosh himself, of course! But he wants to share billing with the role of stories in human life, especially supernatural ones. Is the Anthropocene a result of our presuming to live without the guidance of legends?
In the end, Gun Island is a work of optimism. Not just in the potential for stories to help us learn anew to live in a world which demands our presence, resisting us but also potentially working with us. The novel suggests that the Anthropocene is not so qualitatively different that we are without resources, without hope. A 17th century story (which isn't just a "story") foretells - maybe even facilitates - an apparently miraculous contemporary rescue. In the church of la Salute in Venice, the wise Cinta tells our fumbling narrator:
'Remember these words, caro, think of them whenever you despair of the future: Unde origo inde salus - "From the origin salvation comes".' (244)
I understood what she had been trying to tell me that day: that the possibility of our deliverance lies not in the future but in the past, in a mystery beyond memory." (312)
Let's hope that's true.