The Glass Palace

Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace is in some sense orthogonal to Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown.  The former covers a few characters over a long span of time to illustrate the effects of the British colonization of India, while the latter looks at a period of a few days through a lot of characters' eyes (again, as a way of writing about the effects of the British Raj).  Ghosh's book also covers a vast geographic area, with sections in Burma/Myanmar, India, and Malaysia, where Scott's book all takes place in a small town.

But I'm not sure that The Glass Palace gains from its vastness.  For one thing, some of the time is passed over very rapidly, particularly toward the end where it feels like Ghosh just lost interest.  It feels a bit like he had a long-range plan to bring the story up to the present day, but the last 40 years are so rushed that he could've stopped at the end of WWII without substantially changing the novel.

On the other hand, the passage of time lets his characters have little epiphanies; in particular, his focus on the way the British used the Indians as an armed force to impose their will on other countries in the area was really interesting, and not something I've ever thought about.

On the whole, I liked the opening of the book very much, and more than the rest.  Maybe it's because the setting, Burma in the 1880s was so unfamiliar to me, whereas the 1930s and '40s in India seemed to cover ground I've seen before.