One of the great moments of modern Burmese history has the heavily pregnant Queen Supayalat peering incredulously into the distance from a tower of the Mandalay Palace as she listens to the sound of advancing British troops. Having arranged the murder of scores of relatives to clear the way for her husband, the ineffectual King Thebaw, to ascend the throne, the ruthless Queen is about to be thwarted from an unexpected quarter.
It is from this moment that “The Glass Palace,” Amitav Ghosh’s huge multigenerational novel of Burma in recent times, more or less begins. The main story involves three generations of a family, is spread across India, Burma and Malaya, and covers more than a century in time. Its focus is not, however, only on the deposed royal family, but links their fortunes to a wide variety of other people, embracing every race and rank.
As an introduction to the period and the places that it deals with, from the local viewpoint, the book is splendidly informative. It has loving evocations of everything from the fragrant quality of teak, to the strange intimacy between British army officers and their Indian batmen.
But its strongest quality is the account it gives of the shifting loyalties of the Indians whom the British governed, and of the Burmese themselves, trying to escape from subjection to Britain (and later on Japan).
The end of the story comes up to the present, when Burma — now Myanmar — is subject to a different kind of rule and domination. Not surprisingly, the final sections are less surefooted, with the direction of the future still uncertain.
Overall the book is a well-imagined, lucid and engaging read, though one wonders occasionally about details: Today the robes of Buddhist monks in Myanmar are not “saffron”, but terra cotta.