MASSACRE AT THE PALACE

A careful, if sometimes plodding, reconstruction of the regicide/parricide/suicide that captured the world’s attention for a moment or two last summer.

British journalist and travel-writer Gregson makes much of a centuries-old prophecy that promised the Shah dynasty of Nepal would be rubbed out in its tenth generation. Just that happened when, in the midst of a raging war between the royal army and indigenous Maoist guerrillas, Crown Prince Dipendra donned camouflage, strapped on machine guns, and slaughtered his parents and siblings. He did so, it appears, out of disappointment that his mother and father disapproved of his intention to marry a commoner and had threatened to cut off his allowance. A fat boy who loved pizza, Gregson tells us, Dipendra hated failure and let few obstacles stand in his way; he was also notoriously fond of drugs and drink, which he justified as necessary to “de-stress,” and showed signs of mental illness. Warned by an English tutor that his boy was about to pop, King Birendra chose to believe that Dipendra would come around—a fatal error, as the nation would discover. Gregson sometimes lays on the details a little thick: “[The Queen’s] skull was blown apart and most of her brains scattered over a wide area. Fragments of brain tissue, jawbone, and teeth, the red tika she had placed on her forehead, her ear-pins and broken red glass bangles, were found in different places around where she fell.” At the same time, his prose is strangely lackluster, given the dramatic events he depicts. Still, Gregson does a good job of making comprehensible odd events in a distant land and explaining their implications, including the possible loss of Nepal to the very Maoists the king was fighting.

Of modest interest to students of world politics and fans of true crime. Then again, given the Talk Miramax imprimatur, they might want to wait for the movie.