[In the following review, Siddiqi praises Ghose's ironic prose in The Beautiful Empire.]

The Beautiful Empire is a checkered history of Gregorio Peixoto da Silva Xavier's life during the rubber boom in nineteenth-century Brazil. Son of a Brazilian father and English mother, he fights for Brazil, visits his widowed father in England after the war and returns to become fabulously rich as a rubber magnate, but chiefly as an owner of luxurious floating brothels. Times change, the Amazon loses its rubber monopoly, Gregorio's beloved wife dies, and he travels south to recover from shock. He is taken for a god at one place and for the reincarnation of a long-deceased national hero at another. He is also involved in a revolution before he returns to Manaos. He is about to leave for England when he is arrested for treason—a crime, ironically, committed during the war more than fifty years earlier.

The novel is also the story of the utterly selfish and depraved world of the affluent European rubber merchants who ruthlessly exploit the natives by virtually killing them with labor at starvation wages. They treacherously wipe out the Indian settlements and publicly rape the little Indian girls for amusement. This glittering but rotten world collapses as suddenly as it had prospered. The Singletons, Hofman, Lopez Gama, the Dariers and Baron Aikman all die natural or unnatural deaths in quick succession. The ghost city of Manaos also witnesses Gregorio's betrayal by the enigmatic beauty Gloria, the wife of his childhood friend Alfredo, who is torn between love and hatred for her lover.

Underneath all this lies the deeper theme of the search for one's identity which recurs frequently in Ghose's works. Ghose's style is chaste and descriptions of scene and event exquisitely vivid. A poignant touch is added to romance and adventure by subtle irony which, intermingled with delightful humor, makes the earlier chapters the most enjoyable.