Author Amitav Ghosh, seen here, set himself the challenge of writing a beautiful story about climate change in his latest work, Gun Island.Tight, intricate plotting buoyed by loose, lyrical storytelling is at the heart of what makes an Amitav Ghosh novel so excellent. Both skills serve the author well in his latest,, for which he set himself the challenge of writing a beautiful story about humanity’s biggest problem – climate change.
Gun Island isn’t the only recent book that weaves together images of environmental destruction with ancient stories about the human relationship to nature.by Inuit musician Tanya Tagaq. Encompassing poetry, teen angst and colonial horror, it defies categorization, and that’s the point – as the unnamed heroine crisscrosses between real and imaginary worlds, she shows just how thin that barrier can be.by academic and activist Nick Estes.
That said, as climate grief and anxiety increase, the novelist has noted an emerging instinct toward ritual, community responses. Last summer, funeral ceremonies were held for disappearing glaciers in both Iceland and Switzerland. It was also the fulfillment of a vision had by Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota leader who Ghosh mentioned to me as well. Estes takes as a given the validity of Indigenous knowledge, including what he calls prophecy, not myth, or legend.