Can fiction take on climate change?

Despite the increasing acknowledgement that we are living through a man-made climate crisis, argued Amitav Ghosh in his acute and engaging work of eco-criticism The Great Derangement (2016), this has not fully registered in literature. When climate change has become a subject for novelists, it has mostly been addressed in the form of speculative fiction (Ghosh cites JG Ballard and Margaret Atwood as outriders of the burgeoning sub-genre of “cli-fi”) or high farce, as in Ian McEwan’s toothless satire Solar (2010). In what Ghosh calls the “mansion of serious fiction”—by which he means contemporary literary novels in the realist tradition—climate change barely features.

This absence is attributable, he says, to the origins of the form. The modern novel is, like climate change, a product of industrialisation. It developed in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries to satisfy a growing readership created by the increasing affordability of mass-printed books, rising literacy and the expansion of leisure time: changes that were made possible by the carbonisation of the economy and colonialism’s exploitation of global resources. These social and technological developments altered the kinds of stories that were considered worth telling. “It was in exactly the period in which human activity was changing the Earth’s atmosphere,” says Ghosh, “that the literary imagination became radically centred on the human.”

The co-dependency between climate change and modern subjectivity—united under the broad category of the anthropocene—is most visible in fiction in terms of how it accommodates chance. (Ghosh notes in passing that mathematical theories of probability were invented around the same time as the novel.) In a secular world, with the shackles of religious predestination removed, fictional characters were granted freedom of choice and, subsequently, psychological depth. Just as people began to feel they had control over their own destinies, so did literature start to dwell not on the doings of heroes or gods, but on the humdrum experiences of everyday individuals. The novelist’s job was to arrange those elements of what came to be thought of as “plot” in ways that were both believably likely and satisfyingly unpredictable.

Rethinking realism

Recently, argues Ghosh, the delicate balance between individual autonomy and plausible improbability that once allowed us to categorise a novel as “realist” (or, at least, “realistic”) has begun to fall apart. Climate change is “unthinkable” because unlikely climatic events are now part of our daily lives, despite the fact that we still seem unwilling to recognise them as such: each hurricane seems like it’s stronger than the last, every summer feels the hottest on record, “unprecedented” flooding has plenty of precedent. “It appears that we are now in an era,” says Ghosh, “that will be defined precisely by events that appear, by our current standards of normalcy, highly improbable.” The inability of the novel to confront climate change is therefore a representational as well as a moral problem: it is “as though our Earth had become a literary critic and were laughing at Flaubert.”

In his fiction, Ghosh has been thinking about these issues—the relationship between individual lives and global population change; the legacies of colonialism; the weather—for a long time. His novel The Glass Palace (2000) is partly set in the oil fields of Yenangyaung in Burma, which, during the 19th century was the centre of petroleum production in the region, predating western attempts at “modernising” (and thus appropriating) the industry.

The Hungry Tide (2004) was a study of ecological decline set in the Sundarbans, the vast, coastal “tide country” of mangrove forests and waterways in the Bay of Bengal. That novel’s central character was Piya Roy, a Bengali-American biologist who had come to the Sundarbans to research the life-cycle of the Irrawaddy dolphin, in the process coming to recognise the superiority of indigenous knowledge over modernising zeal. Her epiphany played out through Piya’s relationship with a local fisherman named Fokir who, at the climax of the novel sacrificed himself to save her during a terrible storm (Ghosh has never shied away from the grand gesture).

Ghosh has returned to the Sundarbans in Gun Island, a novel that is—in terms of plot, if not genre—a sequel to The Hungry Tide. It represents his most sustained attempt to engage with climate change in fiction, both in terms of its effects on human and animal populations and on the future of the novel. That it’s only partly successful shows just how difficult it is to think outside of the structures and habits of mind provided by stories that, as Ghosh showed so convincingly in The Great Derangement, are in large part the products of the phenomena they seek to bear witness to.

The events of Gun Island take place some years after those of The Hungry Tide. The narrator is Dinantha “Deen” Datta, a rare book dealer who grew up in Kolkata but now lives for most of the year (like Ghosh himself) in Brooklyn. He is summoned to the Sundarbans by a relative to investigate the story of Bonduki Sadager, a lost figure from Bengali folklore known as the “Gun Merchant.” The legend of the gun merchant is associated with a shrine in the Sundarbans maintained by a family of boatmen, who have passed down the legend in a poem that has never been written down and is now largely forgotten.

The set-up is knowingly that of an adventure story, and Ghosh is game enough to run with all the hoarier tropes of the genre: a bookish narrator tasked with decoding a literary riddle who is cast, against his will, in an action role. “It was simply unimaginable that I had stepped into a cobra’s lair,” Deen reflects after he has a Dan Brown-ish encounter with a snake. “Such things just don’t happen to people like myself—reclusive antiquarians who spend most of their waking hours staring at screens and old books.”

As well as encountering the wildlife, in the Sundarbans Deen meets Piya—still conducting her research—and Tipu, the son of the fisherman who saved her life, to whom she feels an ongoing obligation. The area has changed a lot in the years since Piya first visited. A new refinery upriver is spewing effluent into the rivers, storms are more frequent, and everyone now has a mobile phone. The movement of the animals has changed too, especially the dolphins, of which only a handful remain.

Tipu is worldly (having spent some time in America with Piya as a wayward teenager) and cynical about the folk knowledge of his elders. He talks like a feisty kid from a 1980s Hollywood movie, calling Deen “pops” and saying things like: “What’s the matter widdya man? You look like ya got something inside a’ya.” He can see the way life is going in the Sundarbans. “The fish catch is down,” he says as he provocatively puffs on a spliff on the way to the gun merchant’s temple, “the land’s turning salty, and you can’t go into the jungle without bribing the forest guards.” The poor dream of escape: a migratory route has opened into Europe and Tipu, a digital native, is involved in people- trafficking. His favourite part of the job is making up stories for his clients, providing them with the fictional narratives that might give them legitimate reasons to seek asylum.

After Tipu and his friend Rafi take Deen to investigate the gun merchant’s temple they both go missing and Deen, aided by an old friend named Cinta, goes looking for them. A series of unlikely encounters (the novel is full of them) leads them to Venice—another place threatened by rising sea levels—where they witness the effects of climate change-enforced migration at first hand.

A fantastical patchwork

Gun Island is constructed almost solely around far-fetched coincidences and serendipitous moments. Some of these—such as when Deen picks up his voice recorder to delete an interview, only to push the wrong button “by accident” and play it instead—are small enough to be understood as the necessary contrivances novelists must deploy to satisfy the demands of realism. Others feel more deliberately, if not provocatively, improbable. When Cinta calls him after a strange dream, when they haven’t spoken in months, Deen is “unsettled by the sheer randomness of the call,” and it’s clear we are supposed to be too. Characters are forever saying things like “we’ve never met till today but I also feel that I know you.” When Tipu predicts a mass beaching of dolphins, Deen asks Piya: “Even if it’s just a coincidence, don’t you think it’s interesting?” She does not.

The mechanics of its storytelling—involving lost notebooks, decoded symbols and hidden shrines—give Gun Island the air of a short story by Kipling, or of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels: books deeply tied to the colonial endeavour. This is surely intentional, a comment on the egocentric nature both of colonialism and of climate change (under the auspices of the anthropocene we truly think of ourselves as at the centre of our worlds), but the result is that the novel often feels like a pastiche of past forms rather than something genuinely new.

One way of making thinkable the “unthinkability” of our own annihilation is to model it on the past. During a walk through Venice, Cinta and Deen pass Santa Maria della Salute, a church built in honour of the “Madonna of Good Health” after a small area of the city was spared from the plague. “It could be said that it is a monument to a catastrophe,” says Cinta, in art history-lecturer mode, “a memorial to the terrible afflictions of the Little Ice Age,” as though to comfort us with the idea that bad times sometime make great art.

But one of Ghosh’s arguments in The Great Derangement is that climate change presents a burden to writers that other kinds of apocalypse do not. The big, important question it asks is not whether global warming should lead to a revitalisation of the novel, but whether the novel can contribute to halting it.

On the evidence of Gun Island, that seems unlikely. This is a compelling book—a sinuous and often gripping piece of storytelling, satisfyingly shaped and beautifully written—but the satisfactions it offers are familiar ones. In The Great Derangement Ghosh concluded that the anthropocene’s resistance to literary fiction will eventually create “new, hybrid forms,” and that “the act of reading itself will change.” Yet it’s striking that in addressing the greatest challenge facing humanity, Ghosh hasn’t so much invented a new kind of story as offered us a comforting patchwork of older ones. In its interest in portents, foreshadowing and strange animal behaviour, and in asking us simply to accept the existence of the improbable, Gun Island feels more like a return to previous kinds of literature—the mythic, the picaresque, the Gothic—than it does a break from them.