GUN ISLAND:A REVIEW

 

Amitav Ghosh was born in Kolkata and grew up in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. He is the most acclaimed writer of all time. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. He is the author of a multitude of books starting from the Ibis trilogy-‘Sea of Smoke’ River of Poppies and ‘Flood of Fire. Apart from this, he is also the author of the Circle of Reason and Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land & Dancing in Cambodia. One of his book on climate change  The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable a work of nonfiction appeared in the year 2006. Some of his other books are The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide. They are considered to be literary masterpieces and gems of Indian English literature. In the year 2007, this prolific writer was awarded Padma  Shri by the Government Of India. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. Taking note of his literary achievements he was awarded the  Jnannpith award in the year 2018. He is the first English writer to be conferred with this award. The  Jnanpith reaffirms his status as one of the leading storytellers and his linguistic mastery and intellectual depth. The author mentions that he draws from Bengal in most of his works. He has earlier won the Sahitya Academy award for some of his works on different topics.  His most recent novel Gun Island was published in the year 2019.

   ‘With sweeping exuberant style and extraordinary linguistic facility Ghosh  takes us into a world where desperate refugees  trickle through borders like water  from melting ice, but where massing animals find no escapes. This important novel is an account of our current world, the one few writers have had the courage to face’

                                                          Annie Proulx

                        Author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain

       The Gun Island has a characteristic flamboyance  which arches from the past to the present through its numerous instances. It brings to the readers an already known fact that it is human actions which is the root cause of all evils and perils on the surface of the earth. It reiterates the truth that the world as we know today is in the grip of unprecedented change and it is in our willful ignoring as humans where lies our vicious end. It is centered around a Brooklyn based  rare books dealer trying to decipher  an ancient legend of the goddess of snakes Manasa Devi .The narrator on a visit to his birth place Kolkata finds himself entangled  unexpectedly  with an ancient legend set around in the deep forest of the Sunderbans the largest mangroves in the world. A visit to a dhaam in the mangrove forest brings to him an encounter with the King Cobra and then urfurling of some strange events spanning in the pages of the book. The book is divided into two parts-part 1 deals with the gun merchant his encounter with Manasa  Devi and her wrath and bring to the readers the tales of characters like Nilima, Kanai, the narrator Deen, and many others. Part 2 deals with the incidents of Venice. It is the meeting of two worlds and the recounting of tales common to mankind. It is the blending of Bengali legend with contemporary adventure in finding out new ways to write about pertinent issues like migration and climate change. It is a story about a world where humans and creatures of every kind are forced to bear the brunt of climate change, torn loose from their accustomed homes by the process of displacement at an ever increasing pace. Gun Island is the meeting blended with ancient myth and folklore, tales of heroism, and the supernatural set in a contemporary world disrupted by the challenges of constant migration. There are characters from different parts of the world like a glamorous Italian, a pair of young Bengali men who submit to dalals (traffickers), a marine biologist who is involved in tracking the disturbing rise in stranded whales and dolphins, the result of which she believes is due to the spread of oceanic and riverine dead zones. The novel unfurls in a twist and turns where the readers get to experience the reference to Manasa Devi in the forest of Sunderbans and the people bearing the brunt of Cyclone Bhola in 1971,the partition of 1947 and its impact upon the people. Somewhere in the pages one gets a King Cobra the most venomous of India snakes with its fang stretched to throw its poison and at others a block of masonry to fall from a building. The book is irresistible for the author's incredible way of writing. The novel unravels the tales of escapology, of deprivation and persecution, the yearnings to be the inhabitant of a new world which brings us to the terrified refugees on the Mediterranean.

It is a story which the narrator has lived with as a child yet its retelling sparked on a journey for Deen rekindling his unrest quest to explore more about it. The book has in it everything a book reader can ask for-the magic of words interwoven with the sweetness of Bangla , English and some other language at times. It brings to the readers the mettle of the author as a linguist. It has magic which unfurls along with history and science. It is about human trafficking one of the most pertinent topic. Today we are confronted with events like tsunamis, beached whales, melting ice and dying birds. The book is relevant for every set of reader and thus crosses ages and boundaries and is a gem unlike any other book of one of the most prolific writer. It is a call to the nations to get together and join hands to save Mother Nature.

                                                                            Image source:Google