February 8–15, 2001

books

See-Through

by Andrew Ervin

The Glass Palace

By Amitav Ghosh
Random House, 476 p., $25.95

There’s nothing seriously wrong with Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, The Glass Palace. The story is engaging, the characters curious, the settings grandiose. But at no time does the writing ever jump off the page, seize you by the heartstrings and transport you to the furthest reaches of the British Empire. You never get too far into the minds of the characters and, tragically, that turns out to be just fine.

Ghosh is a better storyteller than writer, but any lover of romantic fiction in the costume-drama tradition will treasure this book. It’s so ham-handed in its political correctness and faux-exoticism that it’s a shoo-in for the year’s literary prize short-lists. You got your basic racism, your environmental destruction, your imprisonment of native peoples at the hands of greedy white folks. Somewhere, right now, Merchant-Ivory Productions is probably in a furious bidding war with Disney for the movie rights.

Our hero is an outcast Indian orphan named Rajkumar, which we’re told means "Prince." After the British colonize Burma, Rajkumar grows up and makes his fortune under the tutelage of a kind older fellow named Saya John. The ideal teacher-cum-multicultural action hero, Saya John appears to be of Chinese origin but wears European-style clothes and speaks fluent Hindustani. Because his own son, Matthew, is off in America, he takes Rajkumar under his wing.

But Rajkumar remains in love with Dolly, a maidservant of the deposed Queen of Burma whom he met twice as a child and who has remained in exile with the royal family. So with his teak fortune, Rajkumar goes on a ragas-to-riches journey to the Indian coast in order to win her hand. It proves easier than one might expect.

A minor functionary watches over the exiled King but dies in a boating accident. The functionary’s wife, Uma, befriends Dolly but, now widowed, she leaves for Europe and America leaving Dolly behind. In New York, Uma finds Matthew and convinces him to return home with his new bride.

Rajkumar, now with two children of his own, goes into the rubber-production business just in time for World War I and some serious profiteering. The only bad guys in our little adventure are the British, who are heard but never seen. Fans of Masterpiece Theatre are going to eat this up, believe me, and we’re not even halfway through the novel yet.

If the days of serialized fiction weren’t dying before our eyes, this book would be a perfect candidate for weekly installments over the course of a few months, à la Dickens or Maupin. It would be a better novel were it twice as long, and that’s extremely rare. The pacing is awkward at times:

"Soon after this, Dolly learned that she was pregnant again. She forgot about Matthew and Elsa and even Uma: all her energies went into making sure that nothing went wrong again. Seven months went quickly by and then, on the doctors’ advice, she was moved to a mission hospital…"

It’s a story told only in the broadest of strokes; Ghosh never delves into much detail. Many of the similes fall flat. Water is "cold as ice" and a crowd of people is likened to "a sea of heads and faces."

With its underlying nationalism, political intrigue and enormous dramatic range, The Glass Palace is on a par with some of the big 19th-century Russian fiction: your War and Peace, your Anna Karenina. But the 21st-century ideologies propping the story up actually belittle it to such an extent that The Glass Palace will be remembered only as well as, say, The Doll by Bolesaw Prus, a forgotten Polish novel with which it shares many, many plot turns and ideas. But The Doll was enormously popular in its day, and this book too will be flying off the shelves and, to be sure, selling a lot of popcorn.