GRAPE VINE
THE GLASS PALACE
Source : Hugo Barnacle,The Sunday Times(U.K)
THE GLASS PALACE
by Amitav Ghosh
HarperCollins £16.99
Amitav Ghosh is probably best known for The Calcutta Chromosome, his strange and brilliant metaphysical thriller, so the tagline on the cover of his hefty new offering comes as rather a surprise. It says: "The magnificent, poignant, fascinating novel of three generations that starts in Mandalay . . . " Which clearly indicates that the publishers think this is a middlebrow family saga.
They're right. The Glass Palace is just that. It is commercial rather than literary fiction, a marked comedown for a writer of Ghosh's proven talent. And we all know that "magnificent, poignant, fascinating" translates as "long, soapy, tedious". There isn't one badly composed sentence in the book, except the very last, which seems to have slipped a grammatical cog somewhere; on the other hand, there isn't one particularly good sentence, either.
The prose trundles along on deeply uninspiring lines. "King Thebaw was of medium height, with a plump face, a thin moustache and finely shaped eyes." Police descriptions can be livelier. "After this, in what seemed like an impossibly short time, Dolly and Uma became good friends." Pure Enid Blyton. "Dinu endured his month-long spell in hospital with exemplary stoicism, earning accolades from the staff." And this seems to have strayed in from a parish newsletter.
Thebaw, in case you were wondering, is king of Burma in 1885. When his customs officials get into a dispute with a British logging company, Britain sends Indian army troops to seize Mandalay, his capital, and depose him. Rajkumar, an Indian orphan boy working at a food stall, witnesses the sacking of the king's palace, not by the soldiers but by the Burmese population, who bow and scrape apologetically to the royal family while making off with their trinkets. This is when Rajkumar first sets eyes on the beautiful Dolly, another orphan, serving as handmaiden to the queen.
Dolly is one of the few staff who accompany the king and queen into exile at Ratnagiri on the west coast of India. Rajkumar, meanwhile, grows up and makes his fortune in the teak business; there is quite an interesting account of the logging process, fulfilling the genre requirement for laboriously researched incidental detail. Then Rajkumar also makes his way to Ratnagiri where, courtesy of Uma, the wife of the Indian district administrator, he gains an introduction to Dolly.
They marry and raise two sons, Neel and Dinu, back in Rangoon. Uma, finding herself tragically widowed, travels the world and becomes a leading light in the Indian independence movement. As the second world war looms, Indians are expected to defend an empire they are increasingly fed up with. The now-adult Dinu, a mild-mannered photographer, thinks this is fair enough. He tells Uma, "Hitler and Mussolini are among the most destructive leaders in all of human history."
Uma refutes his argument. "Racialism rules through aggression and conquest. Is the Empire not guilty of all this?" Her nephew Rajun, a newly commissioned Indian army officer, thinks she is batty and sides with Dinu, but once war breaks out he sees the error of his ways and defects to join the pro-Japanese Indian National Army (INA). Ghosh lays on the crisis-of-conscience stuff with a trowel, but fails to make it convincing.
The authorial voice assures us that, to "the Indian public", the INA were not turncoats but heroic resistance fighters. This is, indeed, the received Indian opinion, but it doesn't bear much examination, since a Japanese victory would hardly have advanced the cause of independence. Ghosh goes on to remark that "imperialism and fascism were twin evils, one being a derivative of the other". In truth, they are both offshoots of nationalism, the very vice Ghosh is indulging in.
Towards the end, the novel includes a passage about a rubber plantation in 1950s Malaya. The emergency going on at the time is not mentioned, presumably because it involved a successful British campaign against an attempted communist takeover; and Ghosh, who lives in New York, doesn't want to alienate American readers by suggesting these particular anti-British rebels were good guys. The effect is somewhat comical, unlike much else in this worthy, plodding epic.