The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

I give The Glass Palace a mixed review. On the one hand it has got heaps of stuff to love. It is full of history and groovy cultural information about Burma, India and Malaysia in the first half of the last century. The surreal bit about early petroleum collection is just one example of the type of anecdote that peppers Ghosh's story: Imagine a sandy no-man's land with oil seeping up in puddles. Then imagine families mining their staked puddle until it becomes a crumbly-edged well. Now imagine people being lowered into the well, using their family members, possesions and maybe a mule as ballast; all slowly walking to the edge of the well, and waiting for the signal to walk away again, pulling the collector and his spoils back up to ground level. Imagine a life where children and the careless regularly slip and drown in these first oil wells. For this type of stuff alone, I recommend this book.

Amitav Ghosh takes us from the fall of Burma's last King to practically present-day dictatorship, with house-arrested Aung San Suu Kyi making a cameo apperance toward the end. Ghosh depicts the intermingling generations of two families. One family is headed by Rajkumar, an orphaned Indian boy stranded in Mandalay. He attends a looting session of the royal palace and falls in love with Dolly, a burmese handmaiden to the Queen's youngest daughter. The second family is headed by Uma, the wife of the Collector, the civil servant in charge of the keeping of the Royal family's exile in India. Uma survives her husband to become an important figure in India's quest for independence from British rule.

These are great characters, Only I wish they had been painted with a less sweeping brush. They lack a depth, or psychology... something that could get you truly engrossed, rather than feeling like you were watching a sensational and slightly trashy straight-to-video movie. The book's most compelling character is that of Arjun, Uma's handsome nephew. I thought Ghosh brought him to life: his frailties, his inconsistencies and his troubled awakening to his role as an Indian officer fighting in the British-Indian Army.

"On one occasion a friend of Uma's, an eminent Congressman, arrived dressed in the manner of Jawaharlal Nehru, in a khaki cap and a long black sherwani, with a rose in his buttonhole. The elegant politician found himself standing next to a friend of Arjun's, a lieutenant dressed in the uniform of the 14th Punjab Regiment. 'And how does it feel,' the politician said, turning to the soldier with a sneer, 'for an Indian to be wearing that uniform?'

'If you must know, sir,' Arjun's friend snapped back, matching sneer for sneer, 'this uniform feels rather warm - but I imagine the same could be said of yours?'"

As I was reading Arjun's story, I wished Ghosh had made it the novel's focus, bringing in other stuff as flashbacks and flash forwards, interspersed throughout. Then one could more easily accept the sense of distance from the earlier generations, as if we are seeing them only through family stories. Of course it's easy to harp and kvetch after someone else has done all the hard work. But I did notice later, what the author mentions in his notes:

"In the end my greatest debt is to my father, Lieutenant-Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh. He fought in the Second World War as an officer of the 12th Frontier Force Regment, a unit of the British-Indian Army. He was in General Slim's Fourteenth Army during the Burma campaign of 1945 and was twice mentioned in dispatches: he was thus among those 'loyal' Indians who found themselves across the lines from the 'traitors' of the Indian National Army. He died in 1998 and never saw any part of my manuscript. Only in his absence did I come to understand how deeply my book was rooted in his experience, his reflections on the war and his self-questioning..."

Ah-ha, oh-ho, there you go. As a final comment, let me also say that I LOVE the last few pages where Ghosh does a sudden and drastic switch of narrators - unusual and effective, almost like the author's giving a good-bye bear-hug to his manuscript.

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