History and romance in Burma

Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, lengthy as it is, could easily have been three or four novels its size.

By DAVID WALTON

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 25, 2001

As Amitav Ghosh's sweeping and epochal novel The Glass Palace opens, the year is 1885, and at the food stall in the marketplace in Mandalay only one person recognizes the booming sound rolling in against the western wall of Burma's capital: "His name was Rajkumar and he was an Indian, a boy of eleven -- not an authority to be relied upon."

But Rajkumar recognizes the booming immediately as English cannon heading in their direction.

Ghosh, born in Calcutta of Burmese parents and now living and teaching in New York, offers one of the most dramatic openings in recent fiction. The British have utilized a trade dispute over timber as an excuse to invade and occupy Burma's capital, completing the southern Asian line of domination that now stretches from India across Malaya and marks the farthest expanse of Britain's colonial empire.

This transfer of power is seen through the eyes of 11-year-old Rajkumar, who follows the proprietor of the food stall and a crowd of looters into Mandalay's great hti, the fabled nine-roofed golden spire of Burma's kings and into its immense mirrored-ceiling and crystal-walled hall called the Glass Palace. There he catches sight of Dolly, then only 10, the youngest of Queen Supayalat's ladies in waiting, whom he falls in love with on sight -- and for a lifetime.

This wonderfully romantic, Kiplingesque opening, wonderfully reinvented from the Burmese point of view, captures the imagination immediately. And Ghosh's tale of the marketplace boy who grows up to command Burma's teak trade and the faithful lady-in-waiting who accompanies Burma's royal family into exile in India is a story easily worth this book's hundreds of pages.

Gatsby-like, Rajkumar will build his fortune in order to claim Dolly. Theirs is the compelling, all-motivating romance of popular historical fiction. But Rajkumar and Dolly, over the many years that separate them, also link the separate histories of Burma, the wealthiest land in Southeast Asia and Burma's King Thebaw in exile in the sleepy Indian coastal town of Ratnagiri, 120 miles south of Bombay.

The story of Thebaw, Burma's last king, his ruthless and implacable queen and their three daughters is a subject for a great fabulist like Joseph Conrad or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is a filmmaker's tale, rich in visual drama: the haughty queen, pregnant with her third child, angrily confronting looters in her palace; the food stall proprietor trying to clasp her hands over her head in a reverential "shiko" while tugging with the queen for a precious candle stand.

And later in India, the melancholy king is at his high window overlooking the harbor, watching the town's fishing boats sail out in the morning, the first to know if one is missing when they return at evening.

Ghosh might have made a great novel out of this material -- one that critics might, admittedly, have called a great novel of the 19th century. But any reader would gladly give Rajkumar and Dolly's courtship and King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat and their daughters all this book's 474 pages.

But Ghosh has a larger, broader story to tell -- the story of British domination over Burma, Malaya and India and the struggle for independence through prosperity, war and invasion, a story covering several generations that only begins with Rajkumar and Dolly.

History paces quickly by in this book, while a reader might like to linger and dwell and get better acquainted with Ghosh's marvelous and absorbing characters. Ghosh is never a dull novelist, but The Glass Palace, lengthy as it is, could easily have been three or four novels its size. As it is, even the Burma March seems to stride by in double-time.

With so much geography, so many characters and events to cover, one's attention inevitably flags. But its first 100 pages, re-creating the sad, comical history of Burma's last king, are worth the whole book alone.

-- David Walton is a writer who lives in Pittsburgh.

The Glass Palace

By Amitav Ghosh

Random House, $25.95

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