Gun Island: A Fine Magic Realism Devolving into Activism

It is also in Goodreads: Nusrat JAHAN’s review of Gun Island | Goodreads

In Gun Island, Amitabh Ghosh navigates the delicate boundaries between reality, the supernatural, and the spiritual realms through the story of Bonduki Saudagar, a merchant from the Sundarbans who flees to Venice to escape Mansa Devi, a deity demanding his unwavering devotion. The novel vividly explores humanity's interconnectedness with both the animate and inanimate worlds, illustrating how the entire Earth is intricately linked through weather patterns, ocean currents, climate change, and the migrations of animals and humans. The book held the potential to evolve into a profound poetic form of magic realism, shedding light on our lost connection with one another and the natural world—and the suffering that arises from this disconnection.

But, I was disappointed to see the activist in Ghosh overshadowing the historian and writer. His language often feels overly literal when describing events and phenomena. While this approach may resonate with some readers, it seemed to me that Ghosh was straining to advance his cause at the expense of his literary brilliance. Toward the end, the delicate balance he had maintained between the real and the transcendent broke down, plunging the narrative into a surreal world of supernatural phenomena. While this may appeal to others, I found that the novel's literary beauty was diminished, replaced by a Disney-esque spectacle.

Finally, Ghosh portrayed the entire anti-immigration movement in Europe—and, by extension, in the United States—as a deliberate effort to preserve White European hegemony, dismissing entirely the concerns of working-class individuals, whether white or of any other race. These concerns, such as fears of job loss, rising housing costs, and increasing prices for essentials, are all too evident in the anti-immigrant movements in both the U.S. and Europe.

I truly wanted to love this book, and for much of it, I did—its fine magic realism highlights the deep connection with the universe we have lost in the wake of modernization. But, in the end, Ghosh seemed to lose the historian and writer beneath the overwhelming force of his activist identity.