She had huge dark eyes and her face was long and perfect in its symmetry. 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.īefore 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. The irony here is that the king and queen are respected and even beloved figures in Burma. 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."
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.Īs 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. British soldiers have invaded the royal city of Mandalay and are about to send the king and queen into bitter exile. The canny young survivor's instincts are correct. 'They're shooting somewhere up the river. 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 that the sound is an 11-year-old Indian-born orphan boy named Rajkumar: "'English cannon,' he said in his fluent but heavily accented Burmese. 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. But beneath this colorful exterior run deep currents of conscience, lending the novel extra dimensions. Review | The Glass Palace by Amitav GhoshĪ vibrant blockbuster of a novel, a London critic described The Glass Palace 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.
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