We see this not just in his principal characters Dolly and Rajkumar but in some of the smaller players, I loved the image of the exiled King Thebaw who with no kingdom to rule, resorts to supervising the movement of boats across the bay below his deteriorating palace in Ratnagiri.

(source: )įor me the earliest part of the novel was the most interesting, largely because of the strength of Amitav Ghosh’s characterisation. I read hundreds of books, memoirs, travelogues, gazetteers, articles and notebooks, published and unpublished I travelled thousands of miles, visiting and re-visiting, so far as possible, all the settings and locations that figure in this novel I sought out scores of people in India, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand. Little wonder that Ghosh took five years to research and write The Glass Palace. In case readers needed reminding that the fight for liberty and freedom is still an issue today as it was in the nineteenth century, the novel ends with the figure of Aung San Suu Kyi on the lawn of her home where she was under house arrest. One of the themes Amitav Ghosh weaves into the novel is the way indigenous populations fight against oppression from an alien nation. But it’s also a history of a tumultuous period in history in south east Asia, covering the rise and fall of the British Empire in the region, the second world war and India’s struggle for independence. Its settings range from the rubber plantations of Malaysia, to the Burmese teak forests and the bustling cityscape of Rangoon and Singapore. In the remainder of the book Amitav Ghosh traces their life together in Burma, India and Malaysia, their ambitions and disappointments and the fluctuating fortunes of their children and grand-children.Ĭlearly this is a family saga on a grand scale. When his position is secure as the head of teak trading empire, he goes in search of her in her new home with the exiled royals in India. She stays in his mind and his heart throughout the following years as he slowly builds a business in wood logging. He befriends Dolly, one of the young women in the queen’s entourage and guides her to safety. Rajkumar, a poor orphaned Burmese boy, finds himself in the royal palace on the day in 1885 when British soldiers storm the gates and forcibly evict the royal household. It’s the human dimension that grabs our attention as the book opens. In The Glass Palace Amitav Ghosh takes us on a journey across cultures and generations, navigating some significant milestones in history but never losing sight of the people who loved, laughed and cried through political upheaval, invasion and war.

The glass palace