The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 4 October 2021
by Amitav Ghosh
The pressures of climate change upon human habitation around the world are already becoming perfectly evident. They say that no one extreme event can be tied definitively to climate change, but that's a smoke screen for people inclined to deny its severity. At some point, it has to become mere common sense that the vast number of extreme events we're experiencing globally are cumulative proof that climate change is not only here, but more severe and fast moving than we ever really expected, or hoped. As sea levels change and ocean-spawned storms grow more severe, people living near coasts, the majority of humanity, face pressures to adapt or move. More and more are moving and it is predicted that a quarter of a billion people may have to flee their coastal dwellings. Where will they go? Have savvy real estate investors already bought up all the land that will soon become beach-front property? Many, having their livelihood taken away by climate catastrophe, also, will emigrate, becoming part of what may become the greatest human migration in world history. Meanwhile, right-wing forces in many countries stand ready to oppose migration, to fight for what they consider their entitlement, the privilege bestowed upon them by the accidents of fate that allow them to stand safe and affluent in the face of a global transformation. These forces demonize immigrants, portraying them as an existential threat to their traditions. Fear drives anger, and anger drives further human suffering. All of this also becomes apparent in this striking novel.
Deen, our protagonist, is a Bengali Indian from Calcutta. After a tragedy, he himself emigrates to the United States, where he has the resources to pursue his education and ultimately his career. He lives in Brooklyn and earns a living as a dealer in rare books and cultural artefacts. On one of his regular journeys home to Kolkata, he is offered the chance to explore a temple lost in the mangrove swamps and islands, the Sundarbans, in the vast delta that borders India and Banlgadesh. What ensues is a modern oydssey, through those very swamps, the borderlands culture of human trafficking, the modern culture of displaced peoples following their dreams on cell phones, into the historic oral literature of colonial India, then back across the globe to a Los Angeles beset by wildfires and a Venice that adapts to sea level rise. What is exposed is the vast underculture of human migration. He finds in Venice a Bengali diaspora, and engages in a sea-going adventure to intercept a dilapidated vessel full of migrants who have set off across the Mediterranean from the Sinai. Nature sypathizes, as Kurt Vonnegut once said, and migrants of animals, snakes, spiders and aquatic mammals, too, join the forced displacements of climate catastrophe.
Ghosh's tale is remarkable for the cross-planet journey taken by Deen. (One might take issue with how much flying around people in this book do, given the dramatic estimates of the carbon footprint of air travel.) Ghosh is very much a story-teller, relating long digressions of backstory for many of his characters, tales that ultimately weave together a fabric of emotional interconnections with the greater epic that is the state of the world as he sees it. The state of the world can be easily seen as deeply grim. It isn't easy to be hopeful. Ghosh seems to be seeking a balance between acceptance of the world as we find it, and a cautious optimism that both nature and humanity may find a new equilibrium, some quiet hope for the future of this planet. The only other option is despair, and what good is that? It has been said that we're experiencing a whole new genre of literature around climate change, political collapse, and growing chaos. Rather, this is really just storytelling about the world around us, and that is, once again, as old as the hills. Recommended.
(This reveiw refers to the audio book version of this novel.)