Book review: In Amitav Ghosh's ‘Ghost-Eye’, the climate crisis meets the supernatural

Amitav Ghosh’s new novel, Ghost-Eye, takes ahead the story he had started telling in The Hungry Tide (2004), set in the Sundarbans, in West Bengal’s Gangetic delta region, threatened by climatic upheavals. He returned to it, along with some of the original cast of characters, more recently in Gun Island (2019), where he expanded the narrative to grapple with environmental catastrophes unfolding in the US and Italy. Between the last novel and this one, he published a translation of the folklore of Bonbibi Johuranama, also indigenous to the Sundarbans, deftly rendering it into a meter that mimicked the original dwipodi poyar, or the two-footed line. Along the way, Ghosh has also written non-fiction on related crises in books like The Great Derangement (2016), The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) and Wild Fictions (2025).

All these works, written over two decades of research and travel, are connected by the theme of climate change, caused as much by avaricious capitalists as by general apathy. Intrusions by miners and real-estate mafia are upsetting the fragile ecosystem and rich biodiversity of ancient regions, spawning global calamities in the form of rising sea levels, wildfires, earthquakes and pandemics. Ghosh has not only demonstrated his knowledge of scientific literature and local legends while telling these stories, but also faithfully reported on the harsh realities that make life precarious in these vulnerable parts.

Apart from the propulsive force of his storytelling, it is Ghosh’s keen observational skill that has painted an authentic portrait of suffering wrought by the ongoing climate crisis on people living on the margins. And it is this strain of authenticity that has made all his books, haunted by supernatural forces, attractive and thought-provoking to readers.

In Ghost-Eye, Ghosh takes a somewhat different perspective, deciding to look at the Sundarbans from afar, though once again through the eyes of Dinanath Dutta, or Dinu, a seller of rare books who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and has acted as a sutradhar (narrator) through The Hungry Tide and Gun Island. In the new novel, Dinu gets to occupy the centre stage, as his childhood years in 1960s Calcutta (now Kolkata), growing up under the care of his progressive aunt Shoma and uncle Monty, both doctors by profession, play a major role in the outcome of the narrative.

Set in the years of the covid-19 pandemic, Ghost-Eye explores the Sundarbans mostly remotely, via Dinu’s remembrances, Shoma’s documentation, sporadic video calls made by Tipu, who fled the archipelago in Gun Island and ended up as a climate refugee in Italy along with his lover, Rafi, and furtive references to the legend of Manasa Devi, the goddess of serpents. However, as with many of Ghosh’s novels, the past is more proximal than the present. Secrets believed to have been buried in the detritus of time rear their heads to disrupt the order of things.

The novel begins with three-year-old Varsha Gupta, a scion of an orthodox Marwari family living in Kolkata, suddenly demanding to eat fish and rice one day in 1969. Brought up as a strict vegetarian, with no meat ever having crossed the threshold of her home, the little girl creates havoc all around. Already, the family’s mercantile interests are in a precarious state due to a series of hartals, or strikes, called by workers in their factories. Further, an outbreak of communal riots that year in Ahmedabad has caused more anxiety to Varsha’s mother, whose parents live in the city. With the Naxal movement gathering steam in West Bengal, bourgeoisie families like the Guptas are also becoming prime targets for the rebels.

During this time of mayhem, in the year when the first man stepped on the moon, as Ghosh reminds us, Varsha not only throws a tantrum but also begins to vividly recollect memories and sensations from what seems to have been her past life. Shoma, a clinical psychologist, declares Varsha to be “a case of reincarnation type,” reminding the reader of Mukul, the four-year-old boy in Satyajit Ray’s novel Sonar Kella (1971), which was made into a movie by Ray in 1974.

Yet, even as Ghosh lavishes attention on theories of parapsychology (and later on metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls across species), he keeps veering into a realm of mystical and magical occurrences, replete with odd coincidences that at times stretches the patience of the most invested reader. Premonitions and spectral appearances recur as often as in a Dan Brown potboiler, as do deus ex machina-like interventions, which in classical Greek tragedies functioned as devices to resolve otherwise irresolvable plot points.

The title of the novel itself is loaded with otherworldly connotations. Tipu, who suffers from heterochromia, a medical condition that leads to his eyes having different colours, is one of the “ghost-eyes,” blessed with uncanny abilities of precognition. “They say ghost-eyes can see two worlds,” as he tells Dinu. “One of them is the ordinary one that everyone can see. But the other one—that’s just for us ghost-eyes.”

Several others in the novel have this gift of foresight to a lesser or greater degree as though a crack has opened in the world they live in, bringing them intimations from the past and future. By drawing on the supernatural, science and faith, Ghosh gestures towards the idea of metaverses, without pushing the story into the sci-fi domain.

Indeed, the strongest suit as well as pitfall of Ghost-Eye is Ghosh’s daring imagination, his decision to boldly venture into a terrain that few would dare to tread. The premise of novels like Gun Island and Ghost-Eye would be squarely dismissed by rationalists conditioned by Enlightenment notions of empiricism. In fact, Ghosh had anticipated such a challenge in Jungle Nama. “In the Before Times, stories like this one would have been considered child-like, and thus fare for children,” he wrote. “But today, it is increasingly clear that such stories are founded on a better understanding of the human predicament than many narratives that are considered serious and adult.”

Ghost-Eye takes this idea as its lynchpin, provoking the reader to suspend their disbelief and surrender themselves to myths and old wives’ tales of yore. From such an act of submission, the novel seems to say, comes not only a much-needed chastisement for all the destruction that humans have wrought on the world in the name of progress, but also a renewal of faith in forces that are beyond the laws of science and modernity.

Even for those who are willing to participate in this project, there come points when the author’s need to tie up loose ends by introducing coincidences (a word Dinu would hate) begins to stretch thin the fabric of their material reality. It isn’t a bad idea to break the fetters of limiting beliefs if the sole purpose behind such an act is to become absorbed in a work of fiction. But Ghosh seems to imbue such calls to action with a moral imperative, which doesn’t always land with the reader.

Despite its tendency to err on the side of incredulity, Ghost-Eye remains a page turner that the reader will want to stay with. Whether it lives up to the reputation of a writer who has given the world profound novels like The Shadow Lines or the Ibis Trilogy is another matter.