Review of Ghost-Eye by Amitav Ghosh – A novel about the climate crisis let down by its prose | imaginary

WWhat happens when a novelist cares more about his plot or message than his prose? Plot and message have a lot in common: they travel more smoothly on corny lubricant. Thus you may find yourself enjoying, at the level of story or argument, a novel that ranges through groups of novels such as the following: “Manicured Gardens,” “The Apple of Their Father’s Eye,” “The Reverend Patriarch,” “Little did I know then,” “Watching the weather,” “Money was tight,” “Hardly words came out of her mouth,” “Drenched in civil war,” “I was surprised,” “A hole.” “A scream”, “A deafening cacophony”, “A lick of paint”, “She was a marvel to behold”, “It was as if she were a woman possessed”, “The celebrations went off without a hitch”, “She and I were the opposites”…

This is, for the most part, the experience of reading Amitav Ghosh’s 11th novel, Eye of the Ghost. The plot has been set up very intricately. It piques the reader’s curiosity, especially in the first half, with all kinds of interesting mysteries. The subject matter – the various collisions between the global and the local in the post-World War II era – is important. But much of the prose was dead on arrival. I say this with regret. Like many readers, I think of Ghosh with gratitude: not only for the narrative riches of the Ibis Trilogy (Sea of ​​Poppy, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire), but also for the intellectual framing work he did in his polemical 2016 book The Great Confusion: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Ghosh is at least partly responsible for the arrival of the climate emergency as a pressing topic in literary fiction over the past decade. We have been awakened from our slumber.

Ghost-Eye is itself a novel about the climate crisis. The narrator is Dino, described by a friend as “a semi-retired, middle-aged wealthy man living in Brooklyn.” Dino tells his story in “Plague Year 2020.” He writes to analyze his complicated past: he grew up in Calcutta in the 1960s and 1970s, and wants to memorialize his aunt, Shoma, who worked as a therapist, often with troubled children. One of these children is the focus of the book. Shoma has an interest in what she calls “reincarnation-type cases”—that is, children who appear precisely to remember past lives. She was invited by the wealthy Gupta family. Their three-year-old daughter, Varsha, has been demanding to eat fish, even though the family is vegetarian according to ancestral Jain customs. Shoma, through therapeutic detective work that is not entirely kosher, establishes a credible case for Varsha’s past life as a young fisherman and talented cook in the Sundarbans. The narrative moves between the past and the future, and around the world, as different quests – the search for Varsha’s past life; Dino’s quest to know about his past; and a secret plan by Dino activist Tipu Jinnah to harness the power of spiritually gifted people known as “Ghost Eyes,” in order to combat the predation of polluting corporations—together.

Reincarnation here is Ghosh’s metaphor for our interconnectedness in a globalized world. It posits a shared spirituality between humans, animals and plants, and a timeless and compassionate ecological mind. It’s a provocative idea. It is smothered in a blanket of cliché. “I see dead people,” Varsha says, like the kid in “The Sixth Sense.” Is the reference intentional? That doesn’t seem to be the case. But that’s the least of it. Tebow’s supposed to be in Dino’s Gen Z suite, but this is how he talks: “Okay, Pops, since you’re tripping me over, I’ll spill the tea. Look, you know, Ravi and I have all been in the activist life for a few years.” At times, he sounds less like a cod amplifier and more like 1960s Bob Dylan: “But here’s the deal Pops: Who do they think’s gonna do it?”

The dialogue spoken by the baby boomer characters could hardly be more convincing. “Oh my God,” says Shoma’s husband, Monty. “You’re not going to spew all that Jungian stuff at me again, are you? It’s all just unproven speculation.” Shoma herself speaks as if she’s making some useful pitch for a Victorian theater audience: “But with everything going on in their lives, it will probably be a while before I hear from the Guptas again.”

The young activist character with whom Dino had a “wild youthful romance” is “controversial” and has a “magnetic personality”. After Dino learned to cook his childhood meals as an adult, he watched YouTube videos of Bengali cooking “with great interest.” Thibault “was soon digging in, heartily devouring the noodles.” “He was mobilized.” “Zero in.” “An instant connection has been created”…

In the process of constant erosion, all these accumulated clichés undermine the credibility of the plot and the urgency of the argument. The late reveal of Dino’s identity, which should arrive with satisfying force, feels instead silly. The novel’s case against polluting corporations fades into an offstage supernatural confrontation. This is a great shame. The good parts of the novel – the energy with which it evokes Shoma’s precise intelligence; Ghosh’s rich interest in food as a metaphor and as a sign of globalization is very well done. And the rest – well, maybe it’s appropriate to end with a cliche: Your mileage may vary.