Learning to be vulnerable

Early in Amitav Ghosh’s new novel Gun Island, the first-person narrator Dinanath Datta, a Brooklyn-based dealer in rare books, suffers a disappointment in love and is advised by his therapist to not be vulnerable. “Don’t set yourself up to fail, yet again,” he is told. A strange turn of events, however, sets him on an extraordinary journey during which he is compelled to be vulnerable again — and he rediscovers love. This process, in a way, is also a critique of western concepts of rationality and realistic narrative that Mr Ghosh seems to eschew in this book, discovering a new idiom that allows for new possibilities.

 
Readers of Mr Ghosh’s novels will find many of the themes that have preoccupied him in his four-decade-long career, such as history and anthropology, the Sundarbans and the Gangetic dolphins, voyages and myths, climate change and the conflict between nature and men driven by profit. A few characters from his earlier novel, The Hungry Tide, reappear in this one: Kanai, Neelima, Piya. One narrative strain of Gun Island is woven around Manasa Devi, the Hindu goddess of snakes and the subject of medieval Bengali poems, Manasa Mangal. The cult of the goddess seems, at least to me, to hark even further back in Mr Ghosh’s oeuvre in The Calcutta Chromosome. But, though the themes may be familiar, they are given a fresh life in the book under review.

 
Another theme that reappears is climate change, which Mr Ghosh had written about in his previous non-fiction book, The Great Derangement, where he had claimed that this undeniable fact of our times, an existential threat was hardly ever written about in literary fiction. It was usually the subject of genre fiction. In Gun Island, climate change plays a significant part in the lives of all the characters, providing them with motivation for many of their actions.  A quick scroll through Mr Ghosh’s timeline on Twitter will reveal how closely he follows global developments about climate action, such as protests in London earlier this year by Extinction Rebellion.

 

Related to the theme of climate change is that of global migration, which Mr Ghosh has written about in his celebrated Ibis trilogy and returns to in this book, albeit in a more contemporary context. The arrival of armies of immigrants in Europe has led to cataclysmic changes in the political geography, leading to the rebirth of right-wing politics and nationalism, and even Brexit. While the focus in the mainstream media as well as in cinema and art has been on African and West Asian migrants in Europe, Mr Ghosh’s novel deals with South Asians, especially Bengalis, who are one of the largest groups of political, social and climate refugees. As in almost all his novels, Mr Ghosh opens up new areas of discussion and debate by focussing on this aspect.

 
Some of the incidents in the novel are as coincidental as freak weather. For instance, a call from an Italian mentor makes Datta embark on a journey; someone gets bitten by a snake causing him to hallucinate; there spiders jumping out and trying to communicate something, or not; a block of concrete falling off a building leading to a fortuitous meeting. Some of these coincidences are necessary for every narrative, but Gun Island seems to have too many of them. One would not have minded a plot where coincidence was not the primary mover. The envelope is, in fact, pushed so far that a climactic crisis is averted by a “miracle”. To be fair, it is not a miracle such as in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951); Mr Ghosh provides scientific reasons for everything that occurs, but one is still left feeling that maybe something more conventional would have been just as satisfactory.

 
But perhaps this is essential to challenge the rigid framework of the Western realist novel. Life is often governed not by reason but by the lack of it, and significant events in our personal or global histories can often be a result of happy or unhappy coincidences. To take full advantage of possibilities created by these coincidences, one must learn to be vulnerable — like Datta, the protagonist of Gun Island. In doing so, one can often find new idiom for the novel, as Mr Ghosh does. His readers, like me, will remain curious about other experiments in his future work.

 
Gun Island 
Amitav Ghosh
Penguin
Pages: 289
Price: Rs 699