The Sunday Times of London, 
Amitav Ghosh was a student in Delhi in 1978 when a tornado came whipping through the city. Ghosh said he ducked behind a building as the twister hit and later killed 30 people and wounded 700, many of them yards from where he was standing. For several decades, he tried and failed to use the experience in his fiction. What he had seen was too freakish to ring true.
Now, however, fast foward to 2019, and Ghosh has come around to the freakish.

There are twisters in ''Gun Island,'' his 9th novel, a mad, mystical migration saga. There are also floods, wildfires and snakes, millions of them, in the trees, on the beaches. “They’re all over my body, they’re wrapped around my hands, they’re under my feet,” cries one unfortunate victim.
What changed? Well, the climate. In his non-fiction essay book ''The Great Derangement ''( from 2016), Ghosh argued that the realist novel is too bourgeois a form to deal with climate catastrophe. In the coming years, outlandish events, such as yellow-bellied snakes tormenting Los Angeles, will seem commonplace. And yet it’s impermissible, almost embarrassing, to reproduce such occurrences in literary fiction. Here then is his attempt to find a new form for the Anthropocene era. You might call it deranged realism.
Our narrator is Dinanath Datta (“Deen”) a “rational, secular, scientifically minded” Brooklyn-based rare-book dealer, who is lonely as he approaches his sixties. On his annual trip to Calcutta, he hears an obscure Bengali myth about a Gun Merchant who was chased across the world by the snake goddess Manasa Devi.
Deen agrees to visit the goddess’s shrine in the Sundarbans, the mangrove forests between India and Bangladesh, when he finds there is “an interesting woman” connected to the area: a marine biologist named Piya (also the protagonist of Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide). Piya’s adopted son, Tipu, guides Deen across the swamps — but his day job is people-trafficking.

As Deen’s life becomes bound up with that of the Gun Merchant, he sees parallels with the climactic upheavals of the Little Ice Age of the 17th century. Meanwhile, his friend Cinta, an Italian professor, outlines the hidden history of Bengali-Venetian trade, while dispensing sibylline wisdom that unsettles Deen: “‘People think that knowing the future can help you prepare for what is to come,’ she says, ‘but often it only makes you powerless.’”

     

At times, the combination of mystical symbols and bad dialogue (“Oh hell! A king cobra’s bite can kill an elephant”) call to mind a Bengali Da Vinci Code. TheFrench cartoon character Tintin is never far away either: all those kindly professors and hair-raising encounters with wildlife. But ''Gun Island'' is a book of reckless and persuasive scope, a huge, rambunctious reckoning with our environmental declension. Ghosh draws strong parallels between human and animal displacement, as refugee boats and migrating whales meet in the ocean.
It’s hard to think of a literary novel since Graham Greene’s ''The End of the Affair'' that abounds so unashamedly in miracles. Both books challenge notions of what is plausible in realist fiction. If it is a failure, then it fails beguilingly.

Gun Island 320 pages