Are We Deranged?

In his most recent book The Great Derangement, the writer Amitav Ghosh asks the question “are we deranged?” That’s because of what he calls our “imaginative failure in the face of global warming?”

Ghosh believes that serious literary fiction is percularly resistant to the subject of climate change, and thus writers like myself who attempt to address it, are always pushed out of the mainstream and relegated to the science fiction shelf.

Interestingly Ghosh begs that the climate crisis asks writers to imagine other forms of human existence, and that’s just what I’ve done. I’ve imagined underground communities, re-engineered human beings, as well as making my characters wrestle with both personal moral reckoning and collective action.

I’m delighted to note that Ghosh finishes his book by throwing out the idea that fiction may be the best suited of all cultural forms to bring this subject home to a wide audience. He puts out a summons to “the great writers of our times”, to take climate change on as a subject of their writing.

If you haven’t read Ghosh’s books, please do. I am a great fan of The Hungry Tide. What I loved about this book was his description of the Sundarbans, tiny islands off the easternmost coast of India in the Bay of Bengal.

Tidal floods rise and storms batter the land. It is a place of vengeful beauty. In this isolated world three main characters are drawn together, and their lives are forever changed by the forces of nature; much in the same way as these same forces change the form and substance of this labyrinth of tiny islands, many of whom will most certainly disappear if global warming continues its inexorable path forward.

As Naomi Oreskes, author of The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future concludes:

“Climate change, Ghosh argues, is the result of a set of interrelated histories that promoted and sustained our collective dependence on fossil fuels, and it is a kind of derangement to say we want a different world but act in a way that ensures the continuance of the present one.”

Thanks as always for reading and please check out my site for some of the latest news on climate change