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4 hours ago
5
What happens when a novelist cares more about their plot, or their message, than their prose? Plot and message have this much in common: they travel smoothest on the lubricating oil of cliche. Thus you might find yourself enjoying, at the level of story or argument, a novel that trundles along via lumps of workhorse novelese like the following: “manicured gardens”, “apple of their father’s eye”, “venerable patriarch”, “Little did I know then”, “keeping a weather eye”, “money was tight”, “Barely had the words left her mouth”, “engulfed by civil strife”, “I was taken aback”, “a piercing cry”, “an ear-splitting cacophony”, “a lick of paint”, “It was a marvel to behold”, “It was as though she were a woman possessed”, “The ceremonies went off without a hitch”, “She and I were polar opposites” …
This is, for much of its length, the experience of reading Amitav Ghosh’s 11th novel, Ghost-Eye. The plot has been quite intricately worked out. It seeds the reader’s curiosity, especially in the first half, with all sorts of intriguing mysteries. The subject – the various collisions of global and local in the post-second world war age – is important. But much of the prose is dead on arrival. I say this with regret. Like many readers, I think of Ghosh with gratitude: not just for the narrative riches of his Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire), but for the work of intellectual framing he performed in his 2016 polemic The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Ghosh is at least partly responsible for the arrival of the climate emergency as an urgent subject in literary fiction over the last decade. He woke us from our slumbers.
Ghost-Eye is itself a climate crisis novel. The narrator is Dinu, described by a friend as “a semi-retired, middle-aged antiquarian living in Brooklyn”. Dinu tells his story in “the plague year of 2020”. He writes to unpick a complex past: he grew up in Calcutta in the 1960s and 70s, and wishes to memorialise his aunt, Shoma, who worked as a therapist, often with troubled children. One such child is the book’s pivot. Shoma has an interest in what she calls “cases of the reincarnation type” – children, that is, who appear accurately to remember past lives. She is called in by a wealthy family, the Guptas. Their three-year-old daughter Varsha has been demanding to eat fish, though the household is, per inherited Jain custom, vegetarian. Shoma, through not-quite-kosher therapeutic detective work, establishes a credible case for Varsha’s past life as a young fisher and gifted cook in the Sundarbans. The narrative moves between past and future, and across the world, as various quests – the hunt for Varsha’s past life; Dinu’s quest for knowledge about his own past; and a secret plan by Dinu’s activist ward Tipu to harness the power of spiritually gifted people known as “ghost-eyes”, in order to combat the predations of corporate polluters – pleat together.
Reincarnation, here, is Ghosh’s metaphor for our interconnectedness in a globalised world. He posits a spirituality shared among human beings, animals and plants, an eternal ecological hive mind, timeless and compassionate. It’s a provocative idea. It is smothered by a blanket of cliche. “I see dead people,” Varsha says, like the kid in The Sixth Sense. Is the reference intentional? It doesn’t seem to be. But that’s the least of it. Dinu’s ward Tipu is supposed to be gen Z, but this is how he speaks: “OK, Pops, since you’re trippin’ on me, I’ll spill the tea. Look, like you know, Rafi and I were all up in the activist life for a couple of years.” At points he sounds less like a cod-zoomer and more like 1960s Bob Dylan: “But here’s the deal Pops: who do they think will be doin’ the dyin’?”
Dialogue spoken by the boomer characters is hardly more persuasive. “Oh for God’s sake,” says Shoma’s husband, Monty. “You’re not going to spout all that Jungian stuff at me again, are you? It’s all just unproven speculation.” Shoma herself talks as if she’s dropping in bits of helpful exposition for a Victorian theatre audience: “But with everything that’s going on in their lives it’ll probably be a while before I hear from the Guptas again.”
A minor activist character with whom Dinu had “a wild, youthful romance” is “a firebrand” with “a magnetic personality”. Learning to cook his childhood meals as an adult, Dinu watches YouTube videos of Bengali cooking “with rapt attention”. Tipu “was soon digging in, heartily slurping up noodles”. “Passed muster.” “Zeroed in.” “Formed an instant attachment” …
By a process of steady erosion, all of these accumulating cliches undermine the credibility of the plot and the urgency of the argument. A late revelation about Dinu’s identity, which should land with satisfying force, instead feels, well, daft. The novel’s case against corporate polluters fizzles out in an offstage supernatural showdown. This is a great shame. The novel’s good bits – the energy with which it evokes Shoma’s meticulous intelligence; Ghosh’s rich attentiveness to food as metaphor and as marker of globalisation – are very good. The rest is – well, perhaps it’s appropriate to end with a cliche: your mileage may vary.
