Review of ‘Ghost-Eye’: Amitav Ghosh’s new novel
Mohan Gulrajani
‘Ghost-Eye’: Amitav Ghosh’s new novel of the ‘environmental uncanny’ seeks to reinvent the form
‘Ghost-Eye’ shares themes, characters and locations with Ghosh’s earlier novels ‘The Hungry Tide’ and ‘Gun Island’.
Author
Amitav GhoshIn his new novel, Ghost-Eye, Amitav Ghosh once again puts into practice a literary theory he has been developing for over a decade. In a 2008 essay, he pointed out that in a time of climate change, if there is such a thing as an environmental unconscious in literature, “it would consist in an overlapping of the pragmatic and the poetic”. This would involve, he wrote, “a broad acknowledgement of mutual dependence” that merged rights, obligations, and a sense of wonder.
With his 2016 polemic, The Great Derangement, he went further by charging the traditional realist novel with a failure of imagination. Its very techniques, he argued, “are actually a concealment of the real,” blinding us to the “uncanny and improbable events” of ecological disruption beating at our doors.
Environmental uncanny
The solution he proposed was to evoke an “environmental uncanny”, not simply through spirits and other eerie devices, but by authentically integrating “non-human forces and beings” into the heart of the story. With Ghost-Eye, Ghosh continues this project, which he began with The Hungry Tide and developed further with Gun Island.
The three novels share more than just the “environmental uncanny”. They also have themes, characters and even locations in common. Like many of Ghosh’s works, Ghost-Eye is structured around different time periods, with the linkages between the narratives becoming evident as the novel develops.
In the earlier timeline, set in 1969 Kolkata, the young daughter of the scion of an industrial empire suddenly declares in a loud, clear voice in Hindi, “I want rice and fish. Give me some fish.” A moment later, she repeats in Bengali: “Ami machh-bhat khabo. Machh dao.” This causes consternation in the vegetarian Marwari household, especially when the precocious child looks at her mother and says, “That is not my mother. My real mother…doesn’t live here. Our home is beside a river.”
A therapist is summoned, and her sessions with the child convince her that this is one of those “cases of the reincarnation type” that she has earlier studied. She probes deeper, hoping to discover more evidence as well as details of the past life. However, this is no Madhumati-like tale; as Ghost-Eye unfolds, the aspect of rebirth reveals itself as merely one facet of a broader, more unsettling otherworldliness.
The second narrative, set in a time after the recent pandemic, is recounted by Dinu, a semi-retired, middle-aged antiquarian living in Brooklyn. The therapist we earlier encountered is his mashima, his mother’s younger sister. In the midst of organising care for his now elderly and ailing aunt in Kolkata, Dinu receives a call from Tipu, the migrant he had earlier met in Gun Island, who is currently managing an NGO in the Sundarbans.
The “ghost eye” of the title refers to a condition that Tipu suffers from, that of heterochromia, or having eyes of different colours. Folklore has it that this gives a person the ability to see into both the spiritual and physical realms simultaneously. In Tipu’s words: “There are folks who think they’re very special; that they can show you stuff others can’t see.” It’s a quality that the novel itself seems eager to echo.
Tipu is keen to find out about a mysterious trip that Dinu’s aunt once made to the same mangrove forests he now lives in and stresses the vital importance of the information. At first, Dinu is puzzled: “I don’t understand what my eighty-five-year-old aunt in Calcutta, who has trouble breathing without a machine and can hardly get out of bed, has to do with wildfires and droughts and neo-fascists.”
However, he agrees to investigate, and his discoveries pull the strands together: a family mystery, events that defy simple explanation, and an environmental battle against plans to erect a noxious coal-fired power plant in the ecologically fragile Sundarbans by “an immensely powerful crony capitalist who had ensured the media’s silence”.
All-seeing, all-encompassing
Along the way, Ghosh takes several detours: notably, into the selection and preparation of fish in Bengal, rendered with the relish of a Proustian narrator rediscovering the taste of a madeleine. In passing, he also conjures up the social and political climate of Sixties Kolkata as well as post-pandemic Brooklyn.
These divagations, while adding colour and verisimilitude, can sometimes seem like the novel is still clinging to the scaffolding of the realist tradition it seeks to transcend. The plot, meanwhile, creaks under the weight of contrivance, relying on coincidences and implausibility that strain the novel's architecture (even though at least one character is keen to refer to them as Jungian synchronicities instead).
Ghost-Eye makes a valiant attempt to live up to Ghosh’s credo of reaching for a storytelling mode capacious enough to hold spirits, mangroves, local legends, and the rumblings of a destabilised planet. Yet the blunt instruments of the realist novel as we know it – narrative convenience, a flat, declarative style – prove stubbornly persistent. The ambition is to reinvent the form; the execution too often settles for its familiar comforts.
Wittgenstein famously proclaimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ghost-Eye’s struggle, and perhaps its lesson, is that the language of the everyday, an apt tool for most novelists, may be unequal to the task of capturing the universal environmental consciousness that Ghosh strives for.
Ghost-Eye, Amitav Ghosh, Harper
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
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