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oakleighirish 's review for:
The Glass Palace
by Amitav Ghosh
More of a menagerie than a palace to be honest. It's a very ambitious book and reads more like a popular history than fiction. While Ghosh's narrative style is good, the telling of the story is very uneven - for example more time and detail is devoted to the tale of a cranky elephant than is spent on the final years of the main female character.
The characters are very one dimensional and none of them has a distinctive voice. The last 80 pages of the book is purely an exercise in historical instruction as he speeds through 50 years of post colonial Burma at breakneck speed and the main characters (Rajkumar and Dolly) disappear almost completely from the story. Having loved great Indian novels by Rohinton Mistry, Kiran Desai, Vikran Seth and others, I had hoped that this might have been another tale of the subcontinent to sit alongside these luminaries, but alas it wasn't to be.
The characters are very one dimensional and none of them has a distinctive voice. The last 80 pages of the book is purely an exercise in historical instruction as he speeds through 50 years of post colonial Burma at breakneck speed and the main characters (Rajkumar and Dolly) disappear almost completely from the story. Having loved great Indian novels by Rohinton Mistry, Kiran Desai, Vikran Seth and others, I had hoped that this might have been another tale of the subcontinent to sit alongside these luminaries, but alas it wasn't to be.