Of Snakes, Storms and Stateless Souls

In a literary era crowded with climate fiction, Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Gun Island’ stands apart not for its science, but for its faith in myth, in migration and in the enduring power of the tale itself.

In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh performs a literary sleight of hand that merges the mythic and the modern, the ecological and the existential into an ambrosial cocktail of narrative craft. First published in 2019, the novel is at once a fable and a forecast, a story that straddles continents and consciousness. It stakes fair claim to being Ghosh’s most urgent novel and perhaps his most restless, for it refuses to stay within the neat boundaries of genre or geography.

The book begins with Dinanath Datta (known simply as Deen), a dealer in rare books and Asian antiquities, whose tranquil Brooklyn existence is upended by a request from his elderly aunt. She persuades him to travel to the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, spread across Bengal and Bangladesh to investigate the legend of a sixteenth-century gun merchant, BondukiSadagar, who built a shrine to the snake goddess Manasa Devi on what locals call “Gun Island.” The merchant, lore says, sought to flee the goddess’s wrath; Ghosh, however, turns this myth into an allegory for humanity’s flight from nature itself.

From this premise, Ghosh constructs a web that spans oceans. In Kolkata, Deen encounters Piya, a marine biologist and a recurring figure from The Hungry Tide, whose scientific rationalism contrasts sharply with Deen’s bookish scepticism. Together with Moyna, a nurse, and her rebellious son Tipu, they navigate the treacherous waters of the Sundarbans, where myth and mangrove intertwine. Tipu, guilt-shadowed and restless, soon reveals his complicity in a migrant-smuggling network in Bangladesh.

The story’s geographic drift, from the tidal creeks of Bengal to the labyrinthine canals of Venice, echoes the journeys of Ghosh’s own characters across his earlier works, from The Glass Palace to Sea of Poppies. Yet Gun Island feels more contemporary, even prophetic. Its concerns are not imperial nostalgia or colonial commerce, but displacement, climate migration, and the uncanny persistence of myth in the modern world.

In Venice, the novel’s second act, Deen reunites with Rafi, a temple boy turned construction worker, whose story mirrors the real-world refugee crisis that Ghosh weaves into his narrative. Rafi’s struggle to bring Tipu to Italy through illegal migrant routes becomes a haunting reflection of a planet on the move. The lagoon city, with its sinking foundations, becomes both stage and symbol: a European Sundarbans, fragile before the rising tide.

Ghosh has long wrestled with how literature can address the climate crisis. In his nonfiction work The Great Derangement, he argued that modern fiction, with its bourgeois focus on individual destiny, has failed to capture the scale of planetary catastrophe. Gun Island reads as his answer to that lament. Where earlier writers such as Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake) and Richard Powers (The Overstory) used dystopia and the arboreal to dramatize ecological collapse, Ghosh returns to the oldest of narrative devices: myth.

The snake goddess Manasa, who slithers through the story’s metaphors, stands as an emblem of ecological retribution and divine indifference. The gun merchant’s flight across centuries becomes humanity’s collective denial—our refusal to reckon with the deities we have angered: the seas, the soil, the air. Ghosh’s blend of magic realism and ethnography recalls Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, yet his idiom remains distinctively Indian, rooted in the brackish delta where superstition and survival share space.

Deen’s evolution from sceptic to believer, from detached scholar to participant—forms the novel’s emotional spine. His friendship with Cinta, an elderly Venetian historian who deciphers the ancient inscriptions in the shrine, introduces an intellectual tenderness that softens the novel’s apocalyptic undertone.

At times, the plot teeters on excess as coincidences abound, and the magical elements verge on didactic. Yet this, too, seems deliberate. Ghosh is less interested in realism than in resonance. His musical prose evokes a sense of inevitability, as if myth itself were dictating the plot. He is writing not merely a novel, but a lamentation for a world in retreat.

By its end, Gun Island offers not despair but a sliver of grace. In its final moments, as the characters glimpse the possibility of redemption amidst ruin, the novel reminds readers that migration - of people, of species, of stories - is both consequence and continuity.

(The writer is a Mumbai based educator. Views personal.)