What Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace lacks in emotional intensity, it makes up for in breadth, covering the story of three generations of families in Burma, Malaya and India, and the historical forces that shaped the colonial era.

By Karen Connelly

The Glass Palace (Penguin Books, 2000), by Amitav Ghosh, is the epic story of three generations of Indo-Burmese and Malaysian families, beginning with the fall of Mandalay to the British and ending with a powerful but rather simplistic image of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as a symbol of hope for future Burma. Ghosh’s evocation of King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat’s exile in India and his rendering of intimate relationships among lovers, husbands and wives, and families definitely pulls the old heart-strings, but lacks complexity. The book was compelling, however, as it filled many gaps in my knowledge of Indo-Burmese history.

The novel begins its monumental sweep across time and countries with an orphaned young Indian boy, Rajkumar, who is stranded in Mandalay after thea sampan he’s working on breaks down. He begins doing odd jobs for an Indo-Burmese noodle shop owner; his stay in Mandalay coincides with the speedy, unexpected British takeover of the city. As the predominantly Indian sepoy forces march in, Rajkumar rushes off with the rest of the populace and begins looting the famous palace. Among the gem-studded treasures, the halls of glass and mirrors, the beautiful woods, Rajkumar’s principal prize is a brief, intense and beautifully imagined meeting with a young Burmese ethnic girl, Dolly, one of the queen’s maid servants. Though Rajkumar is only eleven, Dolly makes a powerful impression on him.

The first third of the book is superb in its description of Rajkumar and Dolly’s two very different, very separate lives. An orphan of uncertain origin—probably Karen—Dolly enters into exile with the King and Queen and their princess daughters in the seaside town of Ratnagiri, an isolated port over a hundred miles south of Bombay cleverly chosen by the British to keep the King and Queen from causing a stir in Britain’s newest, richest colony. Rajkumar becomes a willing tool of that colonization, working for a Malaysian businessman who ferries supplies and provisions to the working elephant camps deep in Burma’s teak forests.

Ghosh’s research must have been epic, and most of his knowledge is seamlessly woven into his narrative. Accompanied by the botanical relatives of teak (mint and verbena, we are amazed to learn), the work habits of elephants, and the horrible ravages of anthrax, we enter the world of colonial Burma with her rich mix of ethnicities and slow-growing tensions. It is wonderful to watch how Rajkumar—now a rich businessman himself—travels to India and finds his beloved, the beautiful, controlled Dolly. But when it comes to love relationships, the novel is shamelessly romantic; even the most misty-eyed reader will get tired of too many "she was the-most-beautiful/attractive/breathtaking woman he had ever seen" lines.

Unfortunately, Ghosh never fully answers the question of what to do with characters once they fall in love, get married, and start living together. Each time, as the conquest is made of various ravishing, often intelligent, and interesting women, the couple then becomes a simple unit. We never really know how any of their relationships work, or, if problems are cited, how those problems play out in day to day life. The character of Dolly’s good friend Uma, the wonderful Indian woman who dedicates her life to the fight for an independent India, is never fully realized. Her speedy conversion from working at a fairly high and visible level in the Indian Independence League to a follower of Mahatma Ghandi is difficult to believe.

Her nephew Arjun undergoes a similar, unlikely transformation, starting out as an colonial Indian soldier then becoming a very dedicated officer in the British Indian Army, but ending as a deeply traumatized revolutionary fighting for the "other" side—India’s own side—as an officer in the Indian National Army. Of course, the history of modern India is in part the story of that wrenching transformation from subjugation to liberation. Though he did not quite pull it off within the particularities of Arjan’s character, Ghosh does a brilliant job of painting the broader strokes of that history and how it grew up in India, Burma, Malaysia, even among revolutionary young Indian exiles living in New York. The novel becomes an education in that time and focuses most sharply on the tragic reality of the British Indian Army soldiers who fought bravely for England in so many different countries, only to realize that their elite and loyal fighting force was a tool being used against all Britain’s colonized people, including themselves.

As the novel crosses more territory, stretches across yet another decade, it grows thin, until the seams are as visible as the author’s hand, moving his people about like chess pieces. Sometimes we can believe these manipulations; other times we cannot. For example, Dolly would surely have let Rajkumar know when she found their disappeared second son back in Burma, still alive. But the last part of the book is built on the precarious platform of his continued absence, and his niece’s inspired search for him, in her own journey to Burma and an entirely different kind of glass palace. There are other similar narrative problems that weaken the novel. A few details in modern Burma are sketchy—the address of Daw Suu Kyi’s University Avenue residence is listed as 38 instead of 54.

Even as I write about the novel’s weaknesses, I feel compelled to repeat how much I liked the book. For example, the last scene of the novel is a monument to that strange human complexity that was missing in so many other places. I would wish Amitav Ghosh to return to his big, brave, passionate book. I would wish him to sit in the heart of the manuscript for two or three more years, rewriting, reliving, fermenting in his own characters’ lives, perfecting the details in this work of broad and ambitious movement. Then he would have his own glass palace, an utterly brilliant work of literature.

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Karen Connelly is a Canadian essayist, novelist and poet. Her last book is The Border Surrounds Us.

This book review originally appeared on Irrawaddy.org and is republished with permission from Ms. Connelly.

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