Fanny was aware of what people were like ... she had a sensitiveness, within her limitations, to human beings, that amounted to a talent, whenever her judgment was not obscured by her personal wishes. She was aware that she knew what the three men in the room were like far better than did Agatha, who had been seeing them for several days past. She didn't think consciously about them, for her interest in human beings began and ended with her own relationships with them ... (p. 61)

Fanny Moroni, half Burmese and half European, was educated in England and returned to Burma as a young woman c.1880. These were the last years of the Konbaung Dynasty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konbaung...), just prior to British rule. Fanny befriended a young princess, Supayalat, and found herself a regular guest at the palace. When the reigning king died, leaving no successor, Supayalat and her mother engineered the ascension of a minor prince,Thibaw, to the throne. Supayalat became his queen and Fanny was appointed the European Maid of Honour at court. Thibaw's rule was filled with violence and subterfuge, but Fanny was oblivious to all of this. She was too caught up in beautiful clothing and lavish parties. The political events swirling around her were understood only insofar as they affected her social life and luxuries.

Fanny's character was not unlike Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair: attractive, witty, and completely self-centered. And the more she immersed herself in court life, the more she lost touch with her European heritage and the French, British, and Italian friends living outside the castle walls. She even took action to benefit her personally, which brought disastrous consequences to others. A few years later she found herself alone, and getting older:

What had happened to her? I can't be old, not at twenty-six, though Fanny desperately, unaware that the swift doom of her Eastern and Latin blood was upon her. She only knew that somehow she had grown used to seeing herself in the pretty concealing Burmese dress, that this event of trying on a Paris frock for hte first time in two or three years had suddenly made her see herself with new eyes. Without her having noticed it, the glow and life which had been her chief charms were gone, and gone too was the suppleness that had been her chief beauty. (p. 287)

This was a sad state of affairs for Fanny, but I couldn't find much sympathy. I enjoyed the action and drama as political events unfolded, but the book didn't hold my interest as much as it would have with a more likeable protagonist. ( )

Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse, Lord Alfred Tennyson's great niece, started her career as a journalist and was best known for her crime reporting and mystery novels. The Lacquer Lady then is a departure from her usual ventures. In this novel, she tells the story of the downfall of the Burmese kingdom in the 1880s. In her Preface to the novel, Jesse states, "To the late Rodway Sinhoe, expert in matters Burmese and 'the Father of the Mandalay Bar', I owe my first thanks, for it was he who told me the true story of the causes which led to the Annexation of Upper Burma --how it was 'Fanny' and her love affair, and not the pretext (justified as that would have been) of the Bombay-Burma Corporation that drove the Indian into action at last."

Fanny Moroni, the protagonist of the novel is introduced to the reader as a young girl, the daughter of an Italian father and Burmese/British mother, at school in Brighton. She is called back to Burma as her parents have found favor at the court in Mandalay. She is accompanied on her return trip by the daughter of a missionary, Agatha Lumsden.
The author contrasts the characters and social positions of the two young women. Fanny is described as a rather shallow, but vivacious, young flirt, who is dazzled by the court at Mandalay. Agatha's role is to be the comfort of her widowed father and a virtuous paragon for the British missionary community. She eventually marries her father's young assistant, Edward Protheroe.

Jesse had access to members of the European Burmese community, some of whom were intimate with court life, so the details and descriptions of the Burmese court during the reign of its last monarch, King Thibaw, are vivid and memorable. I found this glimpse into a long, lost world the most intriguing and valuable aspect of the novel.

The story of the downfall of King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat, as related by Jesse, is no doubt accurate to some degree, but it seems highly colored by a British colonialist bias. Oddly the characters of Fanny and Agatha are more described than enlivened. The one character who has a dimensional being is Edward Protheroe who actually ponders and considers the situations before him.

Given the current situations in the erstwhile British colonies of Myanmar, Afghanistan, and Pakistan -- this novel offers valuable historic insights into how we got here from there. ( )