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A review by jmiae
The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh
5.0
To use a tired old phrasing, this is historical fiction at its best.
Sometimes those cliches just really say it all.
I do wonder why Amitav Ghosh is not more widely read. Perhaps he has a larger following in the UK; after all, I had the good fortune of first coming across him because his book Sea of Poppies was on the shelf at my local library in London. But in any case, after reading a second book by him I'm only more convinced that he is a master of historical fiction.
I knew very little about the history of Burma, the presence of an Indian population in the country during the British Empire, or about the teak industry in the 19th century. All of these are topics that I might have had to learn about if I'd taken a course on British Imperialism in Asia or something similar at university. Perhaps I might have gotten an inkling if I watched The Railway Man starring silver fox Colin Firth. But Ghosh's novel not only offers a thorough and thoroughly enjoyable education on all those topics, it also brings to life characters that you somehow actually care about and empathise with, despite the fact that this epic spans across over 150 years and introduces you to three different generations of characters whose relationships are intricately intwined. And the cherry on top is his characters' perspectives (Arjun in particular) offer a sharp analysis of the deeper-rooted issues in the British strain of (post-) colonialism, such as the identity crises that plague the subjected nations of the British Empire as a result of centuries of colonialism followed by quickly formed independence movements.
This is one of those novels that I almost didn't want to end (despite it being over 500 pages). The kind that you experience withdrawal after it's over because you miss the characters and the places they inhabited.
Sometimes those cliches just really say it all.
I do wonder why Amitav Ghosh is not more widely read. Perhaps he has a larger following in the UK; after all, I had the good fortune of first coming across him because his book Sea of Poppies was on the shelf at my local library in London. But in any case, after reading a second book by him I'm only more convinced that he is a master of historical fiction.
I knew very little about the history of Burma, the presence of an Indian population in the country during the British Empire, or about the teak industry in the 19th century. All of these are topics that I might have had to learn about if I'd taken a course on British Imperialism in Asia or something similar at university. Perhaps I might have gotten an inkling if I watched The Railway Man starring silver fox Colin Firth. But Ghosh's novel not only offers a thorough and thoroughly enjoyable education on all those topics, it also brings to life characters that you somehow actually care about and empathise with, despite the fact that this epic spans across over 150 years and introduces you to three different generations of characters whose relationships are intricately intwined. And the cherry on top is his characters' perspectives (Arjun in particular) offer a sharp analysis of the deeper-rooted issues in the British strain of (post-) colonialism, such as the identity crises that plague the subjected nations of the British Empire as a result of centuries of colonialism followed by quickly formed independence movements.
This is one of those novels that I almost didn't want to end (despite it being over 500 pages). The kind that you experience withdrawal after it's over because you miss the characters and the places they inhabited.