BPS Review of The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh ( read June 2025)
First of all congratulations to all of you who actually finished this book. At 560 pages it has to be one of our longest book club reads. An absolute epic of Burmese and Indian history, it would make an insightful companion on a back packing holiday around the border countries of the current Myanmar … and definitely benefits from being read in substantial chunks. For those who enjoy historical fiction, it was a riveting and dramatic read.
As with all good ‘saga’ type stories there are families and characters aplenty. Whilst we did have a map in the front, a character list might also have helped. As the book / years go on, there are so many ‘son of’ and ‘daughter of’ connections it was hard to keep track. Each chapter is chock full of historical information and drama. We particularly enjoyed the emotional conflicts of the young men beguiled into fighting for the colonial armies who are then forced to confront their own feelings of nationalism, the arguments were nuanced and well characterised through two friends.
It was well described as “developmental not suspenseful” – a narrative full of life, as it happens, rather than gasping turning-point moments, with a cast of characters used to demonstrate the various factions and changes in Burma.
The story of Burma ( Myanmar) is a sad one, a country which was ripe for exploitation – wealth extraction and profiteering by colonial settlers being replaced by successive authoritarian governments, leaving a country in almost permanent civil war. Amitav Ghosh has represented the full history as best he can, with extensive research.
However, whilst this gives us remarkable insights, it does mean he has to rattle through more modern history to ‘reach the end’ – and that caused quite a bit of annoyance, as he “went shallow” on the history and characters, and wrote with a discombobulating pace, in order to reach his end point. Perhaps if he had picked an earlier finishing point that would have made a more consistent novel. Or even considered publishing the book as a trilogy? Overall the inconsistent pace - from ponderous to perilous - was what caused most eye-rolling in our group.
In terms of scores, 71% of us gave it 4 / 5 or higher – an enjoyable and informative read, but the ‘niggles’ as mentioned above made 10% of us so frustrated that the score was 2.5 or less.
A final word from Taarini who grew up in Calcutta and is very familiar with Amitav Ghosh! She recommends The Shadow Lines as another of his novels, set between Calcutta and London. Thank you for your input Taarini.
