Representing Environmental Disaster in the Anthropocene: Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay as an Ecodystopia

In recent years, anxiety around anthropogenic climate change and its consequences has taken centre-stage in the narratives of contemporary novels. The abundance of ecodystopian novels placed in futuristic climate-changed settings with visions of apocalypse or dystopian futures, reflect the contemporary anguish around climate crisis. It is also the case of India, where many contemporary writers have adopted the literary mode of dystopia to envision the future societies grappling with the consequences of climate change and ecological disaster. Against this backdrop, Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (2019) is an attempt in fictional form to depict the ecological concerns and environmental crisis caused by anthropogenic climate change. It captures the mind by staging an extreme climate crisis like the Arabian Sea invading the whole city of Mumbai resulting in the rise of a dystopian city settling in a gigantic drome. This article explores how Mathew’s novel depicts the dystopian imagination in the Anthropocene through the portrayal of a city after an environmental disaster. It also critically engages with the representations of non-human world’s agency and the politics of memory in a collapsed ecosystem. Moreover, this article also makes a parallel reading of dystopian themes by referring to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).