As National Novel Writing Month began and I finally started writing a novel, I picked up The Glass Palace to reread. I first read the book when I started working with an organization advocating for human rights and democracy in Burma in 2007. Because the book was set in Burma, it was immediately one of my favourites.
In the last year and a half, as I began thinking about my own book, I have for the first time reread some of my favourite novels. Rereading is not at all as uninteresting as I thought it would be.
My familiarity with the plot of The Glass Palace afforded me the opportunity to pay attention to how Amitav Ghosh skilfully built a fictional story in the midst of historical upheavals, how he illustrated the characters and brought it all to life. Rereading this book was just the inspiration I needed, so much so that I kept wanting to read rather than write. It was the historical period and political developments that intellectually drew me into the story, but the characters that pulled at my emotions and kept me submersed in the story even when I put the book down. There were several points in the novel where I was elated by a marriage or moved to tears by the sad outcome for one of the characters.
The point that affected me the most was the second last scene in which Aung San Suu Kyi addresses a large crowd that has gathered around her house in Rangoon to hear her speak through the gate, from the confines of her house arrest. Ghosh successfully illustrated the hope that had been placed on her, the leader who could save the people of Burma from the tyranny of the military regime. In the last couple of years, this hope has sadly been eroded. Aung San Suu Kyi has become the kind of politician that Ghosh so elegantly held her above; she has gone beyond what would have once been her limits in order to gain more power for herself and her party, and allowed politics to take over everything. The final phrase of the chapter, “that it is just a matter of time before [the generals] are made to answer for all that they have done,” could not have been further from the truth of the last years. The generals have orchestrated the widely praised ‘miraculous transition to democracy’ precisely so that they could avoid being held responsible for their crimes. And yet crimes against ethnic minorities, farmers, labourers and human rights activists continue and it will take many more years for genuine democracy to take root.
Burma has taken a different path than the hope portrayed in this scene, but it does not detract from the beauty and vividness of the book. I hope to reread it again, perhaps several years down the road as Burma’s transition continues to unfold. Until then, The Glass Palace will remain an inspiration for my own writing.