Burma has become a favorite choice of novelists looking for an exotic locale with a hint of danger. Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner is set in the colonial period in Burma. A ghost, who accompanies a tour of Burma, narrates Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning. Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage is the story of a fictional activist. Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace describes the last king’s court. These books have placed their authors – some like Tan have been there for a long time — on the bestseller lists.
All my non-Burmese friends who have read these books have liked them, even loved them. But I find them pale and unconvincing, maybe because I am Burmese. In terms of novels by outsiders, I prefer the older generation – the novels She Was a Queen and Siamese White by Maurice Collis and F. Tennyson Jesse’s The Lacquer Lady.