'A Woman of Angkor'
'Burgess has done something that I believe is unique in modern writing: set a credible and seemingly authentic tale in the courts and temples of ancient Angkor to stir the imagination and excite our historical interest.'
--John le Carré
The time is the Twelfth Century. In a village behind a towering stone temple built by Cambodia's lost Angkor civilisation lives a young woman named Sray. Her beauty and spiritual glow lead neighbors to compare her to the heroine of a Hindu epic. But in fact her serenity is marred by a dangerous secret. One rainy season afternoon she is called to a life of prominence in the royal court. There her faith and loyalties are tested by attentions from the great king Suryavarman II. Struggling to keep her devotion is her husband Nol, palace confidante and master of the silk parasols that were symbols of the monarch's rank.
This lovingly crafted first novel by former Washington Post correspondent John Burgess revives the rites and rhythms of the ancient culture that built the temples of Angkor, then abandoned them to the jungle. In telling her tale, Sray takes the reader to a hilltop monastery, a concubine pavilion and across the seas to the throne room of imperial China. She witnesses the construction of the largest of the temples, Angkor Wat, and offers an explanation for its greatest mystery--why it broke with centuries of tradition to face west instead of east.
* * * *
Much has been written about the Khmers and the glory of the Angkorian kingdom in northwest Cambodia where thirty-nine illustrious kings ruled for more than six hundred years. At its peak of political power and territorial extent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Khmers controlled not only Cambodia, but also parts of Thailand, Burma and Laos. Angkor conjures up visions of antiquity, majestic temples, gods and kings, Hinduism and Buddhism, and stone and bronze sculpture--all of which embodied the mighty kingdom. However, pressure from Thai invasions, loss of manpower, overbuilding, and increasing autonomy in the provinces, forced the Khmers to leave Angkor in the mid-fifteenth century, move southward, and establish a capital at Phnom Penh. The rapidly growing jungle soon enshrouded the temples. Some 400 years later, in 1863, France gained administrative control over Cambodia and, in efforts to explore the archaeology of the temples, rescued Angkor. Clearing the dense growth and resurrecting the fallen stones brought the temples back to a semblance of their former glory and without the tireless work of the French they may be nothing but heaps of stone today. The work, nevertheless, revealed little about the people who built the temples to honor their king, or those who grew rice to feed the population, or those who served in the army to defend and to protect their kingdom or the women and children. Despite a century of study by historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, geologists, and others, the people of Angkor still remain an enigma.
John Burgess addresses this gap in a historical novel, A Woman of Angkor, and provides an unprecedented glimpse of daily life for the ordinary people in the twelfth century. The author pieces together existing fragments of historical and archaeological evidence and combines it with his extensive experience and knowledge of Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia and Thailand, to unfurl a compelling and engrossing account.
The story is written in the first person--Sray (A Woman of Angkor)--and centers on her family (husband, Non One-Ear, the son of a parasol master to a late prince, and their two children). They live in a village behind the mountain-temple of Pre Rup, northeast of the wall enclosing the royal city and palace.Nol dredges canals to support the family, Sray sells duck eggs in the market, and the children play in nearby streams. They are poor, but content. Then, one day, a Brahmin priest, representative of the palace, walks up the stairs of their humble abode, built of wood with a roof of thatch. He summons Nol to accompany Prince Indra on a trip to an estate in Chaiyapoom. This encounter changes the lives of Nol's family forever.
Sray's life is dictated by her undying faith in spirits, her daily worship of Bronze Uncle, and her duty-bound position as a wife and mother. By destiny, perhaps, the family is taken into the service of the king just before construction of the great temple of Angkor Wat begins. Drama ensues. It's a big, bold story where feelings of love, hate, greed, deceit, intrigue, corruption, grief, loyalty, allegiance, trust, and distrust emerge in words as if they were reality. Burgess entwines emotive descriptions of people and the palace with the landscape and war. Above all, it is a story of Sray, a steadfast woman of Angkor.
Burgess, a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, is well known for his extensive and insightful coverage of Southeast Asia. He has a long family association with the region that began with his great-great-grandparents who were Baptist missionaries in Japan. And, his diplomatic family lived in Bangkok, New Delhi, and Jakarta in his childhood. He made his first visit to Angkor in 1969 when he was a teen-ager. Ever since, his paths have taken him in and out of the region--editing positions with the now defunct Bangkok World, and twenty-eight years with The Washington Post. Following early retirement, he wrote Stories in Stone, (Bangkok, River Books, 2010), a book about a small, yet significant, temple that he came upon serendipitously while covering refugees from the Khmer Rouge regime who were living on the border of Thailand and Cambodia.
—Dawn F. Rooney, Author of Angkor--Cambodia's Wondrous Khmer Temples
* * * *
‘A wonderful and compelling story that vividly evokes the glory, violence, and beauty of the vanished Khmer Empire, as told through the testimony of one remarkable woman. This is a real page-turner of a narrative in which Burgess brings us into the dangerous world of palace intrigues and into the lives of Angkor's ordinary people.’
--Michael D. Coe, author of Angkor and the Khmer Civilization
* * * *
‘A Woman of Angkor is a powerful work of imagination that takes the reader to a faraway time and place and makes the story vividly real. Through the voice of his heroine, Sray, John Burgess conjures a story of a Khmer family whose lives are interwoven with the building of the magical, mysterious temple of Angkor Wat. This is historical fiction with a difference—about a people whose history has been obscured and abandoned like the magnificent shrine that for so many centuries lay hidden in the jungle.’
—David Ignatius, columnist for The Washington Post and author of Bloodmoney
ISBN 978-6167339252
Buy the book.
--John le Carré
The time is the Twelfth Century. In a village behind a towering stone temple built by Cambodia's lost Angkor civilisation lives a young woman named Sray. Her beauty and spiritual glow lead neighbors to compare her to the heroine of a Hindu epic. But in fact her serenity is marred by a dangerous secret. One rainy season afternoon she is called to a life of prominence in the royal court. There her faith and loyalties are tested by attentions from the great king Suryavarman II. Struggling to keep her devotion is her husband Nol, palace confidante and master of the silk parasols that were symbols of the monarch's rank.
This lovingly crafted first novel by former Washington Post correspondent John Burgess revives the rites and rhythms of the ancient culture that built the temples of Angkor, then abandoned them to the jungle. In telling her tale, Sray takes the reader to a hilltop monastery, a concubine pavilion and across the seas to the throne room of imperial China. She witnesses the construction of the largest of the temples, Angkor Wat, and offers an explanation for its greatest mystery--why it broke with centuries of tradition to face west instead of east.
* * * *
Much has been written about the Khmers and the glory of the Angkorian kingdom in northwest Cambodia where thirty-nine illustrious kings ruled for more than six hundred years. At its peak of political power and territorial extent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Khmers controlled not only Cambodia, but also parts of Thailand, Burma and Laos. Angkor conjures up visions of antiquity, majestic temples, gods and kings, Hinduism and Buddhism, and stone and bronze sculpture--all of which embodied the mighty kingdom. However, pressure from Thai invasions, loss of manpower, overbuilding, and increasing autonomy in the provinces, forced the Khmers to leave Angkor in the mid-fifteenth century, move southward, and establish a capital at Phnom Penh. The rapidly growing jungle soon enshrouded the temples. Some 400 years later, in 1863, France gained administrative control over Cambodia and, in efforts to explore the archaeology of the temples, rescued Angkor. Clearing the dense growth and resurrecting the fallen stones brought the temples back to a semblance of their former glory and without the tireless work of the French they may be nothing but heaps of stone today. The work, nevertheless, revealed little about the people who built the temples to honor their king, or those who grew rice to feed the population, or those who served in the army to defend and to protect their kingdom or the women and children. Despite a century of study by historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, geologists, and others, the people of Angkor still remain an enigma.
John Burgess addresses this gap in a historical novel, A Woman of Angkor, and provides an unprecedented glimpse of daily life for the ordinary people in the twelfth century. The author pieces together existing fragments of historical and archaeological evidence and combines it with his extensive experience and knowledge of Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia and Thailand, to unfurl a compelling and engrossing account.
The story is written in the first person--Sray (A Woman of Angkor)--and centers on her family (husband, Non One-Ear, the son of a parasol master to a late prince, and their two children). They live in a village behind the mountain-temple of Pre Rup, northeast of the wall enclosing the royal city and palace.Nol dredges canals to support the family, Sray sells duck eggs in the market, and the children play in nearby streams. They are poor, but content. Then, one day, a Brahmin priest, representative of the palace, walks up the stairs of their humble abode, built of wood with a roof of thatch. He summons Nol to accompany Prince Indra on a trip to an estate in Chaiyapoom. This encounter changes the lives of Nol's family forever.
Sray's life is dictated by her undying faith in spirits, her daily worship of Bronze Uncle, and her duty-bound position as a wife and mother. By destiny, perhaps, the family is taken into the service of the king just before construction of the great temple of Angkor Wat begins. Drama ensues. It's a big, bold story where feelings of love, hate, greed, deceit, intrigue, corruption, grief, loyalty, allegiance, trust, and distrust emerge in words as if they were reality. Burgess entwines emotive descriptions of people and the palace with the landscape and war. Above all, it is a story of Sray, a steadfast woman of Angkor.
Burgess, a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, is well known for his extensive and insightful coverage of Southeast Asia. He has a long family association with the region that began with his great-great-grandparents who were Baptist missionaries in Japan. And, his diplomatic family lived in Bangkok, New Delhi, and Jakarta in his childhood. He made his first visit to Angkor in 1969 when he was a teen-ager. Ever since, his paths have taken him in and out of the region--editing positions with the now defunct Bangkok World, and twenty-eight years with The Washington Post. Following early retirement, he wrote Stories in Stone, (Bangkok, River Books, 2010), a book about a small, yet significant, temple that he came upon serendipitously while covering refugees from the Khmer Rouge regime who were living on the border of Thailand and Cambodia.
—Dawn F. Rooney, Author of Angkor--Cambodia's Wondrous Khmer Temples
* * * *
‘A wonderful and compelling story that vividly evokes the glory, violence, and beauty of the vanished Khmer Empire, as told through the testimony of one remarkable woman. This is a real page-turner of a narrative in which Burgess brings us into the dangerous world of palace intrigues and into the lives of Angkor's ordinary people.’
--Michael D. Coe, author of Angkor and the Khmer Civilization
* * * *
‘A Woman of Angkor is a powerful work of imagination that takes the reader to a faraway time and place and makes the story vividly real. Through the voice of his heroine, Sray, John Burgess conjures a story of a Khmer family whose lives are interwoven with the building of the magical, mysterious temple of Angkor Wat. This is historical fiction with a difference—about a people whose history has been obscured and abandoned like the magnificent shrine that for so many centuries lay hidden in the jungle.’
—David Ignatius, columnist for The Washington Post and author of Bloodmoney
ISBN 978-6167339252
Buy the book.