The Glass Palace Revisited: did this book change, or did I?

THE GLASS PALACE by Amitav Ghosh      Random House      470 pages   ISBN:  0-375-50148-7

The Globe and Mail books section    January 16, 2001

Review by Margaret Gunning

      THE GLASS PALACE is a vibrant blockbuster of a novel, described by a London critic as “a Doctor Zhivago for the Far East”.  It’s historical drama on a grand scale, swift-moving yet packed with detail, as naturally cinematic (and romantic) as GONE WITH THE WIND.  But beneath this colorful exterior run deep currents of conscience, lending the novel extra dimensions.  Two lovers are the glue binding together a massive century-long sweep of story, from the British invasion of Burma (now Myanmar) in the late 1800s through the chaos of two World Wars to the age of e-mail and the Internet.

     The novel opens in 1885 with an ominous rumbling sound, “unfamiliar and unsettling, a distant booming followed by low, stuttering growls.”  Only one person in the marketplace of Mandalay knows what the sound is – an eleven-year-old Indian-born orphan boy named Rajkumar:  “ ‘English cannon,’ he said in his fluent but heavily accented Burmese.  ‘They’re shooting somewhere up the river.  Heading in this direction.’”

     As usual, the canny young survivor’s instincts are correct.  British soldiers have invaded the royal city of Mandalay, and are about to send the King and Queen into bitter exile.  Burma is rich in teak forests, and though the people are incredulous (“A war over wood?  Who’s ever heard of such a thing?”), they soon must join neighboring India in submitting to British rule.

     As King Thebaw and the haughty Queen Supayalat are forced to leave the glittering Glass Palace, looters quickly move in to scavenge what they can find.  Young Rajkumar watches in shock as the unguarded palace is stripped of its treasures:  “Armed with a rock, a girl was knocking the ornamental frets out of a crocodile-shaped zither; a man was using a meat cleaver to scrape the gilt from the neck of a saung-gak harp; and a woman was chiseling furiously at the ruby eyes of a bronze chinthe lion.”

     The irony here is that the King and Queen are respected and even beloved figures in Burma.  But Ghosh is adept at stripping the veils off human nature, to reveal the crude drive for survival that lives even in seemingly innocent hearts.

     Before the royal couple are sent away to India, Rajkumar has an extraordinary encounter with a young girl, one of Queen Supayalat’s attendants:  “She was slender and long-limbed, of a complexion that was exactly the tint of the fine thanaka powder she was wearing on her face.  She had huge dark eyes and her face was long and perfect in its symmetry.  She was by far the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld, of a loveliness beyond imagining.”  The young girl shyly tells Rajkumar her name:  “Dolly.”  It is as if the name is branded into his heart, for even after years of separation he continues to believe that this still, mysterious creature is his destiny.

     Rajkumar seems to represent the human will to survive – and even thrive – even under the most adverse conditions.  Destined for success, he goes to work for his friend and mentor Saya John in the teak industry, eventually creating a kind of empire of his own.

     Meanwhile, in Ratnagiri, India, Dolly continues to care for the daughters of the exiled royal family.  District Collector Dey , a sort of combination jailer and protector-figure, keeps close watch over the family; like so many of the oppressors in the British regime, he is Indian.  His wife Uma, restless and intelligent, strikes up a close, unlikely friendship with Dolly which neither of them realizes will last a lifetime.

     Ghosh deeply explores the complex nature of oppression as his huge story unfolds.  Of the British, one of his characters comments, “They don’t wish to be cruel; they don’t want any martyrs; all they want is that the King should be lost to memory – like an old umbrella in a dusty cupboard.”  The Collector cynically observes about Rajkumar, now a well-known figure, “Do you think this man Raha would have been able to get rich if Thebaw were still ruling?  Why, if it were not for the British, the Burmese would probably have risen up against these Indian businessmen and driven them out like sheep.”

     When Rajkumar meets Dolly again in Ratnagiri years later, she is little changed, “a prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her cage and could look for contentment within those confines.”  This odd stillness gives her a rare sort of power, as for the rest of the story she will become the eye of a hurricane of world events.  When Rajkumar and Dolly finally marry, there is a satisfying sense of resolution.  But where a lesser novel might have ended, this one is just getting started.

     There are several strands of story that radiate outwards from the golden couple.  When Uma’s husband the Collector dies, she reinvents herself dramatically as a world traveler and, later, a political radical for the cause of Indian self-rule.  Her nephew Arjun, first an eager young recruit in the British Indian army, undergoes a huge upheaval in conscience when he realizes that serving the oppressor (and thereby gaining some personal status) is morally indefensible.

     The bond between Uma and Dolly is further cemented when Uma’s niece Manju marries Neel, one of Dolly’s sons.  The other son, Dinu, falls in love with Alison, the granddaughter of Rajkumar’s old mentor Saya John.  (At the end, Ghosh takes us nicely up to the present day when Dolly’s granddaughter Jaya embarks on an internet search to find her uncle Dinu, now a very old man.)  Though all these interconnections are complex, the skeins of story never become tangled due to Ghosh’s awesome gift for storytelling, which includes an ability to cover tremendous ground without shirking on intimate details.

     This is a novel brimming over with ideas, exploring the ways we cooperate with our own oppression, the nature of exploitation, the dehumanizing effects of racism and dispossession, and the miraculous way in which a change of consciousness (as with Uma and Arjun) can eventually alter the course of history.

     Ghosh is so adept at entertaining us with his big, rip-roaring story that we barely realize we are being enlightened.  Through his characters he delivers some powerful punches, as in this exchange between Arjun and his friend during World War II: 

     “ ‘As colonial masters go the British aren’t that bad – better than most.  Certainly a lot better than the Japanese would be.’

     ‘In a way the better the master is, the worse the condition of the slave, because it makes him forget what he is.’ “

     The way Ghosh drops in jarring little references to British culture is masterful.  At one social event on a rubber plantation in Malaya, peanut crumpets are served.  Manju goes to fetch “the Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit tin in which she kept Arjun’s letters”.  And Arjun remarks to his friend (whose name has been Anglicized from Hardip), “Just look at us, Hardy – just look at us.  What are we?  We’ve learned to dance the tango and we know how to eat roast beef with a knife and fork.  The truth is that except for the color of our skin, most people in India wouldn’t even recognize us as Indians.”

     The highest calling of a writer is to serve as the conscience of humanity.  Ghosh’s writing is so saturated with conscience that it transcends all but the best historical works.  (The author lives up to his convictions.  He recently turned down a shot at the prestigious Commonwealth Literary Prize on the grounds that the very existence of a “Commonwealth” smacks of the old imperialism.)  In THE GLASS PALACE Ghosh has created a work of literature that deserves to become as permanent as all the maddening, beautiful paradoxes of human nature.

BLOGGER'S UPDATE. So did this book change, or did I? Re-reading it in 2024, it hardly seems like the same scintillating epic I rhapsodized about in this review. I wrote it for the Globe and Mail in 2001, and naturally, the passage of more than 20 years has changed my perspective on practically everything. Though I was kind of pleasantly surprised at the review itself and thought it was well-written, not to mention a fair summation of this ponderous doorstop of a book, it nevertheless just lands completely differently with me now.

I’m making my way through it as my bedtime reading,  which is in part designed to bring on a peaceful slumber. Thick books are appreciated, mostly novels and biographies. My husband jokes that I buy my books by the pound. But these days, finding anything truly well-written sends me back to the stacks and things I've read before, at least once.  The Glass Palace isn’t exactly making me sleepy, but I’m finding it much harder to get through. In fact, it's a bit of a trudge. 

For one thing, every page seems to have at least three unidentified words in foreign languages – with very little context to give the reader any idea what these words mean. This violates one of the cardinal rules of good writing: Never talk down to your readers – or right past them, for that matter! Keeping us in the dark as to what you actually mean is - what? Irresponsible? But it has the effect of watching two people talk to each other in a private code while you struggle to understand what they are saying. It's insular. And it's exclusive. It pushes us away from this richly exotic culture rather than welcoming us in. This means Ghosh just lost a major point with me. Had I compiled a glossary when I started re-reading it, the list would likely be in the hundreds by now (and I’m not even finished reading yet!).

This means that my poor cat Bentley has to listen to me fist-pound and curse and yell, "NOT ANOTHER ONE!" every couple of pages. What does the man mean, and why won't he tell us? The only reason I don't throw the book across the room is that it's just too heavy to lift.

The multitude of characters are on the whole well-drawn, but it’s hard to keep track of the players, as the book covers something like a hundred years and three generations. But the younger generation in this book just don’t come across as young. They seem like throwbacks to the 1920s or 30s in their idiom and attitudes. Are they stereotypes? Not quite, but I’m struggling to get a picture of some of them, of how they come up against each other, how they succeed and fail and grapple with each other in their march through history. (And that's another issue: every single thing these people do seems to be drenched in historical significance, which I can't get into here or I'd have to write another 1200 words.)

 I’ve noticed this “damn, the book changed” phenomenon, of course. We all do. I’ve watched movies from the 1990s that I absolutely loved, and have been borderline-appalled at the poor quality of them. My Best Friend’s Wedding fell apart completely, with its sophomoric and even puerile sexual crudeness and its utter lack of chemistry between Hugh Grant and Andie McDowall. Only the poem recited over the gay partner’s grave is any good, and it’s by W. H. Auden.

So is The Glass Palace a period piece, and if so, from what period? Hard to say. Sweeping sagas are harder to sell nowadays. All I know is that I'm glad I don’t have to go through the laborious process of reading and then reviewing it again. I only had two weeks, no matter how long the book, one week to read and one week to write, making copious notes all the while. Then I had to get it in on the dot, then wait three or four weeks for it to actually run so I’d be paid my $250.00. (Not to mention the $50.00 "kill fee", which was all I'd get if they decided not to publish it.)

 And yes, folks, as amazing and astounding as this is to most people, I DID get paid. It was, and is, work. Writers have needs, breathe, need to eat and take shelter. People were always astonished that  I would actually be PAID to trudge through a thousand-page book and earn the incredible sum of $250.00. Most of the many newspapers and magazines  I worked for all across Canada paid considerably less. But the fact this had anything at all to do with money (shouldn't I just be starving in a garret somewhere?) astounded most people.

"Do they PAY you for that?" would be the incredulous query. When I said yes, then I'd get, "How much?" If I made the mistake of telling them, there were two possible responses:

"THAT much?" (with a doubtful expression), or 

"Oh. (Long pause) Is that all?" 

The whole idea of making money for something as rarefied and esoteric as WRITING is still pretty foreign to most people. I feel liberated now in that I do not need to answer to ANYONE, I can just launch it out there whenever I feel like it, and though I’m not exactly paid for the work I do on my blog, it’s still pleasant and gratifying for me to keep working on it. In fact, if it isn't pleasant and gratifying, I won't do it. Every week, I get several comments from readers all over the world (I got one from New Zealand before breakfast!) on blog posts I wrote in 2012 or even earlier, which makes me realize my stuff is “out there” – very much out there, if I google my name and location or one of my book titles.

Well, this thing is getting almost as long as my Globe review, but at least I don’t have to go back and fine-tooth-comb it for errors and length. Nobody has to approve it. I think the upshot of it all is, I’m a lot less inclined to want to plough through a book that is basically pretty heavy going, with characters that don’t exactly jump off the page, a dated viewpoint, and dozens and dozens of unfamiliar words that are never defined.

Hell, I ain’t got time any more! I’m almost seventy, and back when I was in my youthful forties I felt I had all the time in the world. I didn’t, of course, but making my way through this museum-case of a novel is bringing it home to me that I have absolutely NO time to waste. On anything. Not even on a book as large and impressive as this one. Dr. Zhivago for the Far East it might be, but that's without Julie Christie and Omar Sharif and that magnificent musical score.

And I'm not going to be reading Zhivago any time soon. I've heard it's an awful bore.