The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh - a great start to a year of books

2015 BOOK NUMBER 1

One of my husband’s friends gave her this book as a present, but only after he had finished reading it, and given one of my definitions of a good book is that once you pick it up, that’s it, you’re hooked, I decided to add it to my reading list.  The good news is that I’m with Wayde, (the husband)  this one, I loved it and became bad tempered when the needs of daily life interrupted my pursuit of the pages.

‘The Glass Palace’ is set in Burma, India and Malaysia.  It opens with the overthrow of the Burmese monarchy by the British in 1885 and follows the fortunes of Rajkumar, an Indian boy living on his wits and street smarts, who witnesses the downfall of King Thebaw and the looting of the Glass Palace from which the novel takes its name.  The Glass Palace is the story of Rajkumar and his family dynasty that spreads across South East Asia over the following years.

There are so many interweaving themes it is hard to isolate any one; romance, drama, family saga, a story of the power and might of colonialism and the downfall of that concept told from the perspective of those whose countries were seized and annexed.   Patriotism and loyalty and the notion of country and nationality are explored, although Amitav Ghosh doesn’t try to provide glib answers, his characters wrestle their way through life and moral dilemmas.

My mother was a child of the British Empire, born in Colombo, and then evacuated with her mother to South Africa as a toddler, with her younger brother being christened as a week old baby on the quayside before they left, and I found the parts of the book that dealt with Malaysia and the rubber plantations during the 1930s and 1940s particularly intriguing, as it carried echos for me of my grandmother’s stories of life in Ceylon pre and post World War II.  In many ways that was what I found the charm of The Glass Palace, it was like listening to your grandmother’s stories, filled with drama and excitement, with information and anecdote scattered through a narrative populated by a cast of inter-related characters so that like all good family dramatic recounts, you find yourself saying “Hang on, didn’t he marry her sister?”

‘The Glass Palace’ was definitely a good start to the year of books – and one that gave me a different perspective on colonisation and the British Empire.