The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh, 2019 on Amazon

This was a somewhat disappointing book. Amitay Ghosh is an Indian novelist. His contention in this nonfiction work is that novelists, more specifically writers of “serious literary fiction” (compared, say, to science fiction), are not taking on or dealing with the challenge of climate change. Why? Ghosh gives a few related reasons. They come down to the modern novel’s focus on character and its—his, hers, or theirs—interaction with the world, usually leading to some triumph of the human spirit. In other words, the humans of modern novels control (more or less and sometimes imperfectly) their destinies in spite of what the world throws at them. We moderns are (so novels would have us believe) largely responsible for the character of our lives. Climate change, Ghosh believes, has, or will, put paid to this notion (which is true), but serious novelists have not caught up. Serious novelists are still writing novels in which humans, for good or ill, are in control or end up in control.

Ghosh spends much of the book connecting the modern novel to the “industrial age,” in other words, to the world’s carbon economy. He does a good job tracing this parallel evolution, particularly as it unfolded in India, but not ignoring the rest of the world. The problem is that this connection is indirect. It is a coincidence not because the modern novel—not to mention the novelist—is independent of the carbon economy but in the sense that the carbon economy is responsible for modernity in general, and the modern novel, the “we are in control” trope, is merely one expression of modernity like everything else. 

But there is more coincidence here. There are many modern literary novels whose story occurs in the context, say, of big wars. Now, wars are caused by humans living now (or when the war happens), while climate change is the result of human activity over the past 275-plus years—and more especially the last 100 years. From a literary viewpoint, what big war has in common with climate change is that modern character-oriented stories cannot encompass the whole of it, instead focusing on the effect of the over-arching event on the smaller events of individual people’s lives. Like war events, climate events are discrete.

But there is also a difference between big war and climate change. People, governments, have control over big wars in that they can and do eventually stop them, if only for a time. No one alive today, in 2025, nor anyone who lives through the next ten generations is going to block the oncoming impact (in discrete events—more floods, droughts, heat waves, sea level rise, etc) of climate change! Indeed if we ceased human production of atmospheric carbon tomorrow, the worldwide climate—cascades like melting permafrost and enormous annual forest fires having already been triggered—would continue to grow more inimical to human life for the next thousand years (see The Uninhabitable Earth by Wallace-Wells)!

The “out of context” problematic nature of climate change (compared, say, to war) is some part of Ghosh’s point. It isn’t that the modern novelist cannot write poignant stories about people living through climate-driven excessive heat, or floods, or what-have-you. Grapes of Wrath is nothing if not that. The problem is, I think that a hypothetical climate-change-driven novelist cannot end the novel on a note implying mankind (instantiated in the novel’s characters) still has some control over his physical environment. If the novel is to be written for or about this time—the first half of the twenty-first century—the characters involved might make spiritual, moral, or intellectual progress. But against the weather, the atmosphere, and oceans, the characters must, in the end, be crushed.

What is a novelist to do? Ghosh never tells us, even tentatively. It’s the one thing I was looking for in the book. If, as I assert, modern novelists can write such novels, then why aren’t they? Ghosh’s final position on this question seems to be that they haven’t broken free of the human-ultimatly-in-control trope. Perhaps he is right about this, but surely there are some serious modern novelists who are willing to cite climate change along with human stupidity, develop sympathetic characters, and then kill everybody off. Kurt Vonnegut’s Glapagos comes to mind. 

What, as a writer, could I do? Could a modern novel encompass climate change in the abstract? What would such a novel look like? It might be more like The Odyssey than a modern novel. Characters might develop over volumes as some intrepid band navigates the globe, encountering one disastrous effect of climate change after another. In each place, some climate-related effect is responsible for the death of one or more members of the group. In the end, the last member must also die—symbolic of the inevitable future collapse of our present civilization—and not too distant a future at that. The project is too big a bite for me, but perhaps Ghosh might give it a go.