Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, “Gun Island”, takes its readers on an adventurous journey from the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans to raging wildfires in Los Angeles and to a Venice that is inexorably sinking into the sea.

Amitav is one of the most accomplished writers in either India or the US, the two countries in which he lives. In 2018, he became the first English-language writer to receive the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor. Amitav is known for novels such as Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the Ibis Trilogy, which chronicles the opium trade between India and China run by the East India Company, but also for non-fiction works such as The Great Derangement, which sets out to understand our collective failure to deal with climate change.

In Gun Island, published in 2019, Amitav uses the power of stories and legends to look at a reality where humans seem at the same time more connected and more disconnected than ever before. The book’s narrator, Deen, a Brooklyn-based antiquarian from Kolkata, becomes obsessed with untangling the mystery of an old Bengali folktale. Throughout the book, climate change provides the backdrop to a story that is full of natural disasters and human tragedies.

At times, the uncanny coincidences and freak weather events blur the boundaries between legend and reality, and the plot becomes almost unbelievable. Yet reality sometimes really is stranger than fiction, and in an interview with npr, Amitav recalls such an incidence: In 2016, working on Gun Island, he described a scene in which a wildfire was advancing toward a Los Angeles museum. About half a year later, reality outran his imagination, as the Skirball fire burned on the hill adjoining the Getty Center in December 2017.

Amitav thinks that in order to deal effectively with climate change, we have to open ourselves to ways of thinking that go beyond scientific and technological approaches:

“What interests me more and more, and I’m sure that shows in the book, is what science cannot tell us. […] The idea that nature is entirely the domain of science – I don’t really accept that. Within this world there is something in excess of what science can tell us – certainly right now, and perhaps even in the future.”

You’ll hear Amitav explain his views on the limits of science in a discussion about geoengineering. Gun Island covers an incredibly broad range of topics, and so the conversation also touches on the role of modern technology in migration, fantasy lives, our changing (perception of) reality, and social hysteria.

The interview with Amitav Ghosh was recorded in July 2019. Photo credit: Photo credit: Aradhana Seth