In the summer of 2016, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh published The Great Derangement, a book-length essay on climate change. The title was an indictment of his vocation. Ghosh argued that there were no “serious” fictions on climate change because the modern novel had historically found its audience after the Industrial Revolution. Novels abolished the power that unpredictable events had held in epics, fables, and other, older forms of storytelling. Unpredictable events are fewer and farther between in novels, and invariably foreshadowed by an artful arrangement of details. Most contemporary novels, according to Ghosh, privilege the individual over society in a manner that is essentially conservative. The bleakest of stories still partake in the optimism that life will go on in spite of everything. At its simplest, the inevitability of climate change is a threat to this fragile faith in life. And to the extent that there will be future generations, Ghosh felt they would have good reason to think that “ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight.”

GUN ISLAND by Amitav Ghosh Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp., $27.00

Ghosh’s provocation was surprising, once you got past the obvious irony. This wasn’t just another novelist (Knausgaard, Cusk, Sheila Heti) disenchanted with the novel for being “fake.” Ghosh wanted novelists to be, in a sense, more ruthless: to imagine more disasters and calamities. In his own fiction, Ghosh has never shied away from this: His 2004 novel, The Hungry Tide, was set in the dwindling Sundarbans delta of Bangladesh and eastern India; his Ibis trilogy explored the severe ways in which the 19th-century opium wars had shaped the histories of China and the Indian subcontinent. But The Great Derangement hinted at something less subtle. Faced with the impact of global warming and rising sea levels, the novelist would have to rethink what realism would encompass. Would he even have any use for realism? What would a novel that discarded all “modes of concealment” look like?

Gun Island is that novel. The narrator is a Brooklyn-based “antiquarian book dealer”, Deen, or Dinanath Datta. On a trip back home to Calcutta, Deen is persuaded to visit a shrine associated with a local legend in the nearby Sundarbans. The legend is of a vengeful goddess of snakes, feared by both Hindus and Muslims in the area, shadowing a medieval figure called The Gun Merchant. This merchant was indiscriminately punished by the goddess for refusing to believe in her powers. His boats were ruined in a storm at sea; his family was pursued by snakes and famines. He was forced to escape alone overseas and seek shelter in a mythical “Gun Island”—“an island within an island”—a place reputed to have no serpents. But the goddess still found a way to catch up. Later, the merchant promised to return home and build a shrine to the goddess in the Sundarbans. Only then did his luck start to change.

Ghosh wanted novelists to be, in a sense, more ruthless: to imagine more disasters and calamities.

In a literal reprise of the merchant’s story, Deen finds himself pursued by snakes all over the world. During his visit to the shrine, he is nearly bitten by a king cobra. In a plane from New York to Los Angeles, he is detained by a security agent for screaming “Snake!” on board. In the Cannaregio district of Venice—another “island within an island”—he is swarmed by slithering shipworms that are apparently chipping away at all the woodwork in the city. He witnesses a friend’s dog being bitten by a snake. Catastrophes punctuate the narrative at every crossing. During an expedition in the Sundarbans, Deen sees river dolphins washing up dead on the shore. In Los Angeles, a conference has to be moved to a different venue because of wildfires. The canals of Venice regularly spill over into its streets: The city is sinking inch by inch. Bad dreams, divinations, accidents, shamans, angels and ghosts—Ghosh is willing to pursue all means to make his quarrel with realism explicit. At one point, Deen is reflecting on his incredible encounter with Rafi, a boy he had first met near the shrine at Sundarbans, now an undocumented worker in Venice:

…all of this was pure coincidence, of course it was. To lose sight of that was to risk becoming untethered from reality … There was absolutely no reason to imagine, as I had done, that such an encounter, in such a place, was outside the range of the probable. Because no such thing existed; nothing was outside the range of the probable.

This might as well have been a passage in The Great Derangement.