Yes, you’re right. But the whole world is made up of semantics and yours are those of the seventeenth century. Even though you think you are so modern.
We’re in a new world now. No one knows where they belong any more, neither humans nor animals.
The narrator of Gun Island, Dr. Dinanath — Dinu, Deen — Datta, is an archetypically-unlikely protagonist for world-spanning adventure. He a rare-book seller nearing retirement in Brooklyn who holds a PhD in Bengali folklore from an American university. And yet, a visit to Kolkata, the city of his birth, unlocks exactly such a story.
Gun Island opens with Deen in Kolkata on an annual winter trip home to escape the cold isolation in Brooklyn. While there, a member of his extended family quizzes him on the obscure figure from Begali folklore Bonduki Sadagar who, he claims, is tied to a shrine in the Sundarbans, the mangrove forest spanning the border between India and Bengal. The conversation concludes with Deen instructed to reach out to Piya Roy, a Bengali professor marine biology working in Oregon whose work puts her in India.
Deen is in no rush to actually go to the Sundarbans, even after Piya offers, but with a little push from his friend, the world-famous Italian professor, Giancinta Schiavon, he agrees to a visit.
This trip proves fateful. Deen hitches a ride to the isolated shrine with Tipu, the son of a woman who works for his aunt Nilima, where they run into a young fisherman, Rafi. The shrine proves real, but so too do other aspects of the Bonduki Sadagar lore. In the story that Deen knew, the Bonduki Sadagar, the gun merchant, angered Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes whose giant cobra guards the shrine. That cobra bites one of the intruders.
From there, Deen begins to see the tendrils of the Bonduki Sadagar story everywhere and Gun Island becomes a shaggy dog story that spans from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to Venice.
The unifying theme is a world on fire, sometimes literally. As an educated person, Deen was of course aware of climate change, but he confronts the polyvalent nature of the crisis as he becomes enmeshed by this lore. Dolphins beaching themselves in the Sundabarans, wildfires in California, Venice sinking, and waves of refugees simply trying to survive.
Gun Island is a book with lots of room for criticism. For instance, it is a book light on plot, with the characters coming into contact with one another seemingly by serendipity. And each time Deen meets a new person or runs into one of these acquaintances they invariably fill him in on what he missed. In another book I would have been frustrated by these digressions, but in Gun Island they transfer the weight of the story from plot to the currents of climate emergency woven into the magical realism. Deen is the vehicle for understanding the crisis, but it is brought to the fore through the multifaceted problem converging on his person from several vectors at once.
Speaking as a historian, I was also less taken by how Ghosh has Deen uncover a deep historicity to this piece of obscure folklore as though he was a post-colonial Robert Langdon. There is nothing inherently wrong with the premise and a sixteenth-century Bengali certainly could have found himself in India: my problem was that this element simultaneously served as the primary thing driving the plot of Gun Island and was largely irrelevant to the pressing points being made. In other words, I thought any ideas that Ghosh wanted to introduce by weaving history and folklore into this story got lost.
Despite this weak plot, Ghosh uses the shaggy nature of the novel to build a series of partial, believable, and incomplete relationships from the ragged cast just trying to make their way through this devastated world.
You ask any Italian and they will tell you that they have a fantasy, maybe they want to go to South America and see the Andes, or maybe they want to go to India and see the palaces and jungles. And if you’re white, it’s easy: you can go wherever you want and do anything you want—but we can’t. When I look back now and ask myself why I was so determined to go to Finland: I wanted to go there because they world told me I couldn’t; because it was denied to me.
The irony of writing about Gun Island is that it does not stand up to close scrutiny. While I was reading the novel it wove a spell that allowed me to simply get lost, but when I started to pull at the threads the effect started to unravel. Nevertheless, Ghosh fills the pages with a desperate determination against the most pressing concerns of our time in a way that I found compelling.
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I am planning a write-up of Tana French’s The Secret Place, and recently finished Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness. I am now reading Ayse Kulin’s Last Train to Istanbul.
Noodlings 