Amitav Ghosh's latest novel Gun Island (2019) is a fictional experimentation of his concern about climate change as conveyed in his nonfiction treatise The Great Derangement (2016). The story rotates round the experiences of a Brooklyn-based Indian dealer in rare books named Dinanath (Deen). Deen loves to lead a quiet life spent indoors but his visit to his birthplace Kolkata changes his attitude to life and surroundings. He finds his life becoming entangled with an ancient legend about Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes. While visiting a temple, deep within the vast mangrove forests of Bengal, he experiences a disturbing encounter with the most feared, and revered, of Indian snakes, a king cobra. As his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he encounters. A flurry of coincidences and spooky interventions contribute to weaving of plot which shows how naturenurture can be dissolved. The narrative progresses with Deen's interactions with the supporting characters like Cinta, a brilliant Venetian historian with a reverence for the mystical aspects of life. Piya, a pretty, and eminently practical, marine biologist, a loudmouth slacker/hacker named Tipu and Rafi, a desperate migrant reveal the genuine concerns for the climate change, present and past, around the world. The proposed study, mainly based on the principles and insights of ecocriticism, a field of study of literature with the help of the concepts, ideas and insights of ecology, will look into how the novelist develops within the text an underlying discourse as well as argument for the development of the awareness about the environment against the backdrop of present great concern of the people of the world relating to global warming.
Associate Professor, Department of English, Suri Vidyasagar College, Suri, West Bengal
