Is there any subject that fiction cannot address? From its beginnings as a form, the novel has dealt with love and hate, war and peace, courage and cowardice, boredom and catastrophe. Yet there is far more in heaven and earth than any human can convey. In the view of the writer Amitav Ghosh, one subject especially threatens to elude fiction’s comprehension. “The climate crisis,” he writes in his book-length 2016 essay, The Great Derangement, “is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.”
Across his many novels and nonfiction books, Ghosh has been attempting to correct this shortcoming. He has become a leading theorist of the relationship between global climate change and culture, arguing that the sparsity of the former in fiction owes to a “grid of literary forms and conventions” that coalesced just as “carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth.” Contemporary writing, he believes, is not up to the challenge of depicting forces so great and impersonal that they seem to actively confound attempts at storytelling.
It makes sense that Ghosh would become a writer of ecological rupture, as he is, in a sense, the product of one. At some point in the mid-1850s, the river Padma suddenly carved a new path through the village of his ancestors in modern-day Bangladesh, flooding their homes and scattering them across the Indian subcontinent. As a result, Ghosh was born in Calcutta, India, in 1956. His family’s collective memory taught him about the destructive capriciousness of the natural world, and it made him a keen observer of human migration throughout history. It also informs his skepticism of the modern realist novel.
In much of literary fiction, characters and settings are developed slowly, through the gradual accrual of discrete moments that rarely stray from the mundane and the reasonable. Yet this supposedly “realist” form, Ghosh argues, is in fact engaged in a “concealment of the real.” For many people on Earth, life is full of abrupt and irrevocable events. Homes flood; tornadoes rip up crops; fires swallow families. To be unfamiliar with these outcomes is to be the outlier, not the norm. So why, Ghosh wonders, are such rapid turnabouts so rarely present in the genre?
Ghost-Eye, his 11th and latest novel, attempts to push back on this aversion to the improbable, and thus to the catastrophic—though it fails to effectively solve the problem. In Calcutta, readers meet Varsha, a 3-year-old girl who is the youngest child of Abhay Gupta, a businessman and heir to a family that has “risen, in one generation, from modest to quite extravagant wealth.” But in September of 1969, the toddler begins to recall another life, when she lived in an impoverished island village and ate fish. Varsha has only ever lived in a mansion and has never even visited the coast, but she insists on her recollections. This causes significant dismay among her upper-caste and strictly vegetarian Marwari Hindu family, which calls in a local doctor, and then his wife, the psychologist Shoma Bose.
Their choice is fortuitous. Though Shoma is “dogmatically materialist,” with little interest in the supernatural, she has in the past conducted research on “cases of the reincarnation type”—young children who begin to vividly recall an existence not a bit like their own. She had embarked on this research only within the past few years, after she became the Bengali-language translator for an American researcher, Cathy Booth. Shoma initially considers it “unimaginable that reincarnation could be the subject of serious scientific research,” and her husband, Monty, calls Booth “the ghost-doctor.” But Shoma is quickly convinced of its plausibility by the subjects she meets while working with Booth. This shift sets up a narrative pattern in the novel: deep skepticism followed by immediate conversion.
In its opening stretch, Ghost-Eye alternates between Shoma’s 1969 consultations with the young Varsha and the experiences of Shoma’s nephew, Dinanth Datta, called Dinu by his aunt. During “the plague year of 2020,” Dinu begins to reflect on his childhood. He had often left the modest, overcrowded home of his family to spend time with Shoma and Monty at their large Art Deco estate, called Tavoy. His intimate, sensual memories capture the cacophony of city sounds, the tumult of left-wing agitation, and the vivid darkness of Calcutta’s periodic blackouts, “the like of which,” he notes, “I have never again experienced anywhere in the world.” These recollections are fond, but tinged with the knowledge of all that would soon change; even the name of his city is no longer the same.
The novel thus proceeds in two registers, at once mysterious and elegiac. In the present, Dinu is old and lonely. He begins every day by checking the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and a running tracker of how many species went extinct during the previous day. Shoma, even older, is bed-bound with a broken hip. Dinu’s reflections are intercut with stories from their past, memories of Varsha’s therapeutic work, and stories of the migrants and post-partition refugees who lived and worked at Tavoy.
Ghost-Eye is at its best when Ghosh remains in this intimate mode, following lives that persist in the face of political and ecological disruption. Yet this is the lesser part of the novelist’s plan. During the early pandemic, Dinu begins receiving FaceTime calls from Tipu, a young gay man who is working at a nonprofit in the Sundarbans, a network of coastal mangrove islands that spread across the Ganges Delta. In the nonprofit’s archives, Tipu has found a mention of a trip that Shoma made in 1969 to the islands, and he has become convinced that this visit has some cryptic connection to a project he refuses to divulge more about.
Ghosh has written about the Sundarbans at least twice before, in 2004’s The Hungry Tide and 2019’s Gun Island; both Dinu and Tipu were introduced in the latter. Those novels involved investigations into history, and the past is clearly Ghosh’s comfort zone. Shoma’s investigation of Varsha’s reincarnation, and Dinu’s investigation of Shoma, give the first part of Ghost-Eye a satisfyingly retrospective quality. Yet Ghosh means to paint a picture not only of Dinu’s life in the 2020s, but also of the entire world, and then he aims to reach into the future. Varsha’s mysterious memories are apparently linked to a much larger set of crises, and in order to make sense of these connections, both Dinu and Ghosh will have to dispense with the material and tread into the metaphysical.
To say that Ghost-Eye is a novel of disaster would be underselling it. Storms smash into cities, disease shuts down whole societies, and millions of humans migrate across the globe. The scale of these events transcends the limits of any individual experience—making it difficult for the typical realistic novel to contain them, as Ghosh has argued.
At the same time, natural disasters, fed and intensified by man-made climate change, are entering the realm of the familiar. In the decade since Ghosh published The Great Derangement, a few novelists have attempted to make sense of these disruptions in fiction. In Jenny Offill’s Weather, climate change intrudes on its narrator’s mundane day-to-day thoughts, a nagging anxiety that never quite boils over. Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility attempts something at once more traditional and more ambitious, exploring how a young woman tries to disentangle herself from the oil industry’s poisonous tendrils. Both do a fine job of capturing how it feels to live through an age of human-engineered hazards. Yet these novels, alongside other recent works by Richard Flanagan and Alexandra Kleeman, struggle to convey what Ghosh describes in The Great Derangement as the “scalar” dimensions of the Anthropocene, an age defined by “forces of unthinkable magnitude” that both dwarf and discount any one perspective.
As it goes on, Ghost-Eye becomes a quest to recover ancient, repressed forces—the supernatural powers rejected by modernity, yet still alive in the spiritualism infusing the lives of most people on the planet. In the course of her investigation, Shoma begins to suspect that Varsha is clairvoyant. The pair’s mysterious interactions in the early chapters give way to a series of parables of doubt and belief, in which a rational character is confronted by an irrational event—and immediately convinced of its absolute truth. These conversions are not grounded in the characters that Ghosh has sketched, but rather in the plot he needs them to advance. Character gives way to contrivance, and Ghost-Eye collapses under the strain.
The trouble, once again, comes down to questions of scale. As Ghosh himself has noted, the “realistic” novel is loath to make space for unlikely events—yet his solution to this problem is at odds with his own skill set. In the end, Ghosh is a very traditional novelist, adept at sketching scenes and enlivening characters with well-placed detail. But as his novel goes on, nighttime scenes and vivid memories are replaced by exchanges of purely expository dialogue, which seeks to explain to the reader, point by point, the book’s ghostly developments. This approach substitutes information for sensation, and reduces both human and supra-human experiences to the level of data. (This reaches its absolute nadir in Tipu’s video calls, where this gay Gen Zer is reduced to prompting Dinu with humiliating lines such as “Okay, Pops, since you’re trippin’ on me, I’ll spill the tea.”)
Rather than creating “unbearably intimate connections,” as Ghosh has called them, between the individual and planetary scales of climate change, these tricks merely reveal the flimsiness of his narrative. The novel’s climax—a sequence defined by reality-shattering magical spectacle—is narrated by one character to another over FaceTime, a dreadful decision that deflates the entire story.
Perhaps it isn’t so much the realist novel that resists catastrophe, but Ghosh’s narrow conception of the form. In The Great Derangement, he slams the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, which he believes unconsciously undermined collective narration by exalting the experience of the individual. This is a bold claim to make about modernism as a whole. Among the diverse international literatures grouped together under that heading, there are dozens of writers who reinvented literature to cope with ruptures of their own. In novels such as Thousand Cranes and The Master of Go, Yasunari Kawabata wedded stream-of-consciousness to classical forms of ritual and performance, modeling rapid Japanese westernization through stories that overlay the ancient and the modern. Juan Rulfo infused his novel Pedro Páramo with half a century of political and economic violence, envisioning rural Mexico as a mythic space where past and present overlap. In his classic work The Obscene Bird of Night, the Chilean writer José Donoso created a literary mirror for a South America in crisis; his mutable story’s transformations—of subject, temporality, point of view—replicate the developments that were roiling his home country.
These writers did not merely replicate modernity; they responded to it, transforming the novel to address a world in constant and often cataclysmic flux. Artistic innovations are often driven by crises, after all, and the novel is no different. Ghosh is right to argue that naturalistic narratives are not up to the urgent task of depicting our unstable moment. But he is wrong in thinking that no recent counterexamples exist. Perhaps the problem of art in the time of climate change is not that its subjects are too immense to be grasped. We might be dealing instead with a lack of artistic imagination, an inability or an unwillingness to adapt the form of the novel to suit the subject. In this respect, Ghost-Eye is more the norm than the exception. But where Ghosh has failed, others might succeed.
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