The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the

Unthinkable, Book review

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a new non-fiction work by

Amitav Ghosh that tries to tackle the urgent issue of climate change by commenting on our

'deranged' systems of political and socio-economic organisation.

Amitav Ghosh is a renowned Indian writer and recipient of the 54th Jnanpith prize, India's

highest literary distinction, is best recognised for his work in English fiction. He was born on

July 11, 19561. Ghosh's ambitious novels explore the essence of national and personal

identity, notably among the people of India and Southeast Asia, via intricate narrative

approaches. He was born in the city of Calcutta. His first employment was at the Indian

Express newspaper in New Delhi, where he studied in Dehradun, New Delhi, Alexandria, and

Oxford.

There are three portions to the book. The first deals with the reality of climate change and our

failure to comprehend it. The other two are about the portrayal of climate change in literature

and politics. Ghosh claims that current culture has generally failed to address climate change,

in part due to the embrace of an unified European contemporary worldview as the primary

norm of progress. Our globe, on the other hand, has been split into nation states, cities, forest

clusters, and designated protected zones. Our rivers are segmented by dams, and our cities are

split into gated neighbourhoods. In these conditions, communal thinking and shared

responsibility are difficult to come by.

If society is to change, decisions must be taken together, inside governmental structures, as

they are taken in times of war or national emergency. The book explains that because literary

imagination has been centred on the human during the period when human activity was

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amitav_Ghosh
generating climate change, modern fiction has also failed to embrace and represent themes of

climate change.  Ghosh claims that in twentieth-century writing, there has been a growing

focus on observation of ordinary details, character traits, emotional nuances. Basically, of

everyday life. The focus has been on personal experiences, on memoirs. As a result of that, in

today's literature, climate change goes unmentioned.

In his own words: “Is it possible that the arts and literature of this time will one day be

remembered not for their daring, not for their championing of freedom, but rather because of

their complicity in the Great Derangement?”

Ghosh criticises the key issue of the 'literary novel'. He talks about the eccentricities of

'individual moral adventure' and how modern fiction has over time gravitated towards

increasing materialism. Realist literary fiction always assumes the existence of a stable

natural environment and an inexhaustible supply of resources to feed the capitalist

mundanities hidden in its narratives. While it does explore the many aspects of human

experience, Ghosh claims that the modern novel ignores climate change and is

therefore partly complicit in the dissociation of the psyche from the vulnerability of

the tangible situation. It encourages ignorance by rarely allowing the climate fear to violently

intrude upon the habitual routines and ordinary problems it prefers to portray in fiction. 

The greatest takeaway is that in a dramatically altered future, when sea-level rise has

destroyed the Sundarbans and rendered cities like Mumbai, New York, and Hong Kong

unliveable, future generations will look first and foremost for traces of this world's history in

the art and literature of our time. And when they are unable to find these traces they

will conclude that this was a period when most forms of art and literature were made to

become patterns of deception that kept people from realising the harsh realities. It is quite
obvious, therefore, that this era, which prides itself on its self-awareness, will be remembered

as the period of the Great Derangement.

Citations

Wikipedia contributors. “Amitav Ghosh.” Wikipedia, 5 Dec. 2021,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amitav_Ghosh.

“The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.” Wikipedia, 9 Oct. 2021,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Derangement:_Climate_Change_and_the_Unthinka

ble.

Kumar, Meera. “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.” Gateway

House, 4 July 2017, www.gatewayhouse.in/how-did-this-come-about.

Karnad, Raghu. “Why We Do Not Hear the Waters: Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Great

Derangement.’” The Wire, 2016, thewire.in/books/why-we-do-not-hear-the-waters-

amitav-ghoshs-great-derangement.