”We go about our daily business through habit, as though we were in the grip of forces that have overwhelmed our will; we see shocking and monstrous things happening all around us and we avert our eyes; we surrender ourselves willingly to whatever it is that has us in its power.”

I had previously read Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, which led me to this book. It is not advertised as a sequel but is set in the same area of the world, the Sundarbans, and features several of the same characters, many years later. Themes include current issues such as migrations and climate change.

Narrator Dinanath "Deen" Datta, a New York-based Bengali American, is an antiquarian book dealer. He believes he is a rational person; however, he encounters what appear to be a string of mystical events and struggles to make sense of them. He travels frequently. While in the Sundarbans, he visits a shrine to the mythical snake goddess, Manasa Devi, dedicated by the titular Gun Merchant in the 17th century. The story contains encounters with many venomous creatures, such as snakes and spiders, and cataclysmic weather events, such as tornadoes, violent storms, and floods. The storyline is, intentionally, filled with coincidences.

The writing is strong, but the structure is odd. In a series of fragmented episodes, Deen travels across the world to places such as Venice, Kolkata, Los Angeles, and New York, tracing the legend of the Gun Merchant, which is reenacted in present times. The reader will need to connect the dots. I wish the migration story of displaced persons had been more fleshed out. It takes place in bits and pieces, with lots of “sound bites.” I did not enjoy it as much as The Hungry Tide, which is one of my favorite books, but I will be reading more of Ghosh’s works.
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I wanted to love this book as I did The Glass Palace. It has many good points in that it looks at the impact of global warming on two diverse countries as well as incorporating the international refugee crisis. These are big topics on their own, which had me doing further research. There is also the story line thread which has the protagonist reinterpreting the meaning of an Indian legend with the aid of an old friend. The story spans a few years and at times there is an edge of menace with the inclusion of snakes and poisonous spiders added in to the mix. At times it was a page turner but at others we were given diatribes, be it scientific, political or mythological, so there was an unevenness in the delivery.
For myself who has had limited travel experience, I found some aspects, especially the Sundarbans and Venice, beautifully described and delivered, fascinating and even the interpretation of the legend was interesting, making it very credible.
However, there are at times, too many co-incidences in the plot line, which stretched credibility. I am struggling to decide whether the writer has attempted too much. ( )

I had a love-hate relationship with this book. Too many big themes -- global migration, refugees, environmental pollution, climate change, even historical linguistics on language change -- dealt with cursorily to do any of them justice. Global migration and refugees were better developed (although still wanting) and took precedence for me; the rest was distracting. I enjoyed most of the storytelling -- the mix of folklore, religion, history, and literature that runs throughout, but some of the didactic commentary on environment and climate change and the miraculous spiritual revelation (largely Christian) of the final three pages deflated the novel's strengths. ( )

Disappointing! A sort of sequel to The Hungry Tide, but with none of the depth and beautiful writing of that book. Reads more like an allegory than a full-fledged novel, and a messy one at that, as if Ghosh whipped it out in a few hours. The characters are flat, and both the plot and the scientific underpinnings are full of inconsistencies and errors. The interweaving of contemporary characters living in the middle of climate catastrophe with Indian mythology was interesting, but in the end just seemed flat and sort of meaningless to me, unless to say that that only the gods' miracles will save us. And the non-love story was equally pointless...
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Deen Datta is a rare book dealer in New York who leads a rather uneventful life until one day he runs into a distant family member who tells him an old aunt wants to speak to him about a story she once heard on an island in the Sundarbans. This story seems to be a strange and unheard of version of a myth that is commonly known in eastern India and in Bangladesh. It deals with a rich guy who is on the run for the snake goddess, but wherever he goes, she always finds him. In this version, the rich guy is called the gun merchant.

Deen once wrote his dissertation on this myth, but isn't really interested in this new version. Still, out of politeness, and because he feels attracted to a lady who works for this old aunt, he joins an excursion to the temple in the Sundarbans that is associated with the gun merchant. That is the start of a series of adventures where Deen and 2 young guys he meets more or less retrace the route of the gun merchant as far as Venice in Italy.

On the one hand this book has some Dan Brown like qualities mixed with the supernatural atmosphere of one of Ghosh's earlier novels: the Calcutta chromosome. You could see a movie being made of it. On the other hand, the book is about the grand themes of our times: climate change and mass migration. That is a lot to bring together in one story and I fear that it was a bit too much at times.

For this reason I couldn't really go with the flow of the story. I felt that some of the characters were solely added to have a person to explain this or that about the history of Venice, or about climate change. In these parts the book became more of a pamphlet than a novel. And though I am really interested in these themes, I am not really sure if it worked as a novel.

Then again, I am a great fan of Ghosh's writing and enjoyed reading this one too. Especially as I ran into some of the characters from The Hungry Tide again. That felt like meeting old friends! ( )