The Glass Palace: A Novel

An exhausting read, it is dense with history. If a story can be very intense and boring at the same time, then this book is it. I think this is because the story is secondary to the history. Historical fiction is often a story written in an historical context. This is history written through the vehicle of a fictional story. Everything in this story is created to tell the history of Burma (Myanmar). I felt emotionally connected to the story because the author is, his love for the country and the people comes through strongly. He says, in his Author's Notes:

The seed of this book was brought to India long before my own lifetime by my father and my uncle, the late Jagat Chandra Datta of Rangood and Moulmein - 'The Prince' as he was known to his relatives. But neither my father nor my uncle would have recognized the crop that I have harvested. By the time I started work on this book, the memories they had handed on to me had lost their outlines, surviving often only as patterns of words, moods, textures. In attempting to write about places and times that I knew only at second- and third-hand, I found myself forced to create a parallel, wholly fictional world. The Glass Palace is thus unqualifiedly a novel and I can state without reservation that except for King Thebaw, Queen Supayalat and their daughters, none of its principal characters bear any resemblance to real people, living or deceased.

Perhaps it was the very elusiveness of what I was trying to remember that engendered in me a near-obsessive urge to render the backgrounds of my characters' lives as closely as I could. In the five years it took me to write The Glass Palace I read hundreds of books, memoirs, travelogues, gazetteers, articles and notebooks, published and unpublished; I traveled thousands of miles, visiting and re-visiting, so far as possible, all the settings and locations that figure in this novel...

Well first of all, that is one elegant Author's note. You can see he writes beautifully. But you can also see, even this is dense, how much more so the book.

The story begins in 1885 with the deposing of the King and Queen of Burma, told through the story of Rajkumar who is 11 years old when this occurs. We follow Rajkumar and his family through the 1990's.

Politics, war, philosophy, and history, history, history. A great place, in my opinion, to start to learn the history of Burma, India, and Malaya