Massacre at the Palace
by Jonathan Gregson
Book
Review by : Matt McConnel
While
the lives and times of the rich, famous and otherwise fascinate
us with a voyeuristic tendency, their deaths satisfy a far
more macabre fetish. On June 1st, 2001 the crown prince of
Nepal took various automatic weapons into an intimate family
gathering and killed all of his immediate family, then turned
the gun on himself. The severity and brutality of the crime
shocked not only the country, but the world. To equate it
to a Western dynasty it would be as if Prince Charles of England
walked into Sunday brunch at Buckingham Palace and murdered
Queen Elisabeth, her husband, his brother, various close relatives,
and both his own sons before killing himself. The question
is then obvious, why would someone destined to be the more
or less absolute monarch of a twenty generation dynasty of
god-kings do this? It is this question that the journalist
Jonathan Gregson sets out to not answer; instead, he provides
detailed background on the royal family, the country, the
prince himself, and on the aftermath. He is determined to
let the reader draw their own conclusions about crown prince
Dipendra and the dynasty as a whole.
The first
half to two thirds of the book are devoted to the history
of the Shah dynasty, and the formation of what is now modern
Nepal. Gregson goes to great lengths to illustrate the setting
and background as best he can. Details and sources can be
sketchy at times, yet the narrative holds. What emerges then
is a steady flow; there are crises and such, but, as Gregson
is fond of pointing out, nothing that matched the scale of
what was to come. There are strong kings, weak kings, and
the entire story is in the fine epic tradition of court intrigue
that prevails in so much Oriental literature. What is most
interesting is the picture that emerges of Nepal's people.
They are in one of the same a proud and marshal people who
have every right to boast that they held off the dual empires
of India, then England, and China for several hundred years,
yet they have always been second to these powers in the region.
The latter
part of the book is devoted to the upbringing of the king,
and then his son the crown prince. It is unfortunate that
this proves to be not as interesting as the rest of the book.
King Birenda was not terribly interesting, yet he was an egalitarian
ruler who wanted the best for his people, oftentimes, to a
fault. His son on the other hand was quiet, brooding, and
Gregson leaves a rather grim portrait of the younger man.
While he oftentimes tries to paint the prince in a sympathetic
light, very often he just comes across as being childish.
When the climax of the book is reached, the titular massacre,
the events are laid out in a cold and systematic manner. Granted,
there were only a very few survivors to tell what happened,
and some events in the narrative must be pieced together from
the scene as all the players were dead, but the overall sense
is that of a crime scene report. The attempts made at sympathy
towards the various members of the royal family are pretty
much lost save for the regard for the younger prince and the
middle child, the princess.
The final
chapters are perhaps the most interesting, and perhaps the
most telling. The aftermath is dealt with by a hodge podge
of both tradition and modern government. There is an odd sense
of macabre semi-regicide when the prince, who is then technically
king, is on life support for three days, and the decision
to pull the plug has to be made by his uncle, who will then
be king, and the king's council. This would be anti-climactic
if not for Gregson's skill in laying out the scene and information;
his weakness in describing the crime becomes his strength
in explaining the outcome. This style has been criticized
for being dry, academic, and not terribly interesting, but
it must be remembered that Gregson is a journalist, and he
writes like one. He is not a historian or speculative fiction
writer who would have punched the narrative up a little; he
presents the facts as he has investigated them. A historian
for instance, might have laid more interest in the father,
and his examples to his son in the face of rising Maoist insurgents,
while a fiction writer might have used the domineering mother
as an overbearing tradition bound woman bent on doing what
was best for her and not for her son or country. His failing
is not in trying to tell a story badly, it is in trying to
tell a story in his own way.
The whole
of the book is very interesting, especially to those who find
court intrigue and dysfunctional families to be recreational
reading. For the rest of humanity, the story is interesting
because, despite Gregson's style, the story is fundamentally
about a nation, its dynasty, and its people changed forever
in the face of an unforeseen and stunning disaster. The fact
that four months after the killings in Nepal Americans suffered
a similarly devastating blow makes the book all the more pertinent.
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