This insight – which has galvanised the field of environmental history since the 1970s – has also challenged novelists and poets to find new forms of storytelling. In the early 1980s, Les Murray celebrated Eric Rolls’s ecological history A Million Wild Acres (1981) for its ‘golden disobedience’, its freedom to sidestep received literary sensibilities and to transcend the conventional boundaries between humanity and nature. That disobedience, declared Murray, ‘seems at the moment to be available to non-fiction writers in greater measure than to other writers of literary texts’. ‘It is even possible,’ he continued, ‘that the novel, a form we have adopted from elsewhere, may not be the best or only form which extended prose fiction here requires.’ Murray was describing an Australian style of nature writing in which animals and plants have equal status with humans in the making of history.

Ghosh ponders why humans forgot, in their derangement, that their own lives are bound up with those of other creatures and with the health of the planet itself. For most of history, he suggests, humans have intuited the precariousness of their existence and the dangerous power of nature. How did we lose our sense of vulnerability? How could a nuclear power plant be built at Fukushima where stone tablets from the Middle Ages warn of recurrent tsunamis? Following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Ghosh visited the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to write about the impact of the catastrophe. He found that the indigenous inhabitants of the Nicobars lived mainly in the interior and were largely unaffected by the tsunami, but that newer arrivals from the mainland – many of whom were educated and middle class – had settled on the seashore with devastating consequences. Australians might similarly ponder our modern inhabitation of firestorm forests. What is it about our view of the world – and our literary imagination – that pushes the forces of nature into the background?

Aerial view of the rift in the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica on 10 November 2016. (photograph by NASA/John Sonntag via Wikimedia Commons)

Ghosh argues that the social realist novel, with its expectation of a moderate and ordered nature as the backdrop to a bourgeois world, is a product of the Anthropocene, the proposed new epoch of earth history that recognises humans as a geophysical force comparable to glaciation, volcanism, or an asteroid strike. As the industrial revolution took off and ‘the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth’, the dominant literary paradigm became radically centred on the human. Even though Ghosh’s own life has been shaped by the sudden interventions of nature (as he explains in the book), he struggles to integrate such startling events into his novels. He believes the genre excludes deep storytelling about the climate crisis, and that the longue durée required for planetary-scale tales is not the territory of the novelist. Nor is it easy to evoke in a novel ‘the urgent proximity of non-human presences’ that he feels are part of the uncanny experience of living in the Anthropocene. These arguments are made powerfully through the author’s deep scholarly reading and also through vivid examples from his own writing life.

Ghosh admits he is painting with a very broad brush and that the form of the novel has changed over the two centuries since its birth. Novelist Delia Falconer, in her recent inaugural Eleanor Dark Lecture, counters that ‘literature, both fiction and nonfiction, is practically turning itself inside out trying to grapple with these questions’, and James Bradley, in a stimulating essay entitled ‘Writing on the Precipice’, argued that Ghosh’s definition of ‘serious fiction’ was too narrow and overlooks science fiction and other literatures of the fantastic (Bradley’s own novel Clade [2015] projects episodically into the future). But Ghosh has also perceived a truth: that to describe the real violence of nature is to violate the conventions of the novel, and that the realist novel is thus complicit in our derangement – and is emblematic of our complacency.

It is unsurprising that an Indian writer should so clearly see that climate change is not just an environmental issue but also one of equity and justice. The Australian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, also Bengali-born and whose work enriches this book, has been on a parallel path, investigating how the climate crisis challenges the conventions of history. Professional history – like the novel, born in the nineteenth century – was founded on a separation of nature and humanity that can no longer be sustained. Chakrabarty and Ghosh also both analyse the relations of climate and capital, nature and justice, and planetary history and global history – categories now in creative friction but which they believe we cannot collapse into one another. Ghosh has a fascinating section on the genealogy of the carbon economy where he argues that the poor nations of the world are poor because imperial powers forcefully prevented them from developing their own fossil-fuel economies. So it is incontestable that the fruits of the carbon economy have not been shared, yet to share them as justice demands is ‘to turn but toward our self-annihilation’. ‘This,’ concludes Ghosh, ‘is indeed the essence of humanity’s present derangement.’

Amitav Ghosh (photograph by Gage Skidmore, Flickr)

The author identifies another paradox: that the very moment, in the 1980s, when it became clear that global warming was a collective predicament of humanity, we turned away politically from the idea of the collective, with dire consequences. In the thirty years since humans first understood the urgency of the climate crisis, total historical carbon emissions from the energy sector have doubled. This is the derangement that Amitav Ghosh investigates, and he does so brilliantly, with eloquence and compassion.