One Last Look

...not someone to trust or like, but an astonishing portrayal. Eleanor's voice stayed with me long after I read the book. I have read several of Susanna Moore's books now, and am in awe of the unique perspective she gives her characters. They tend to be passionate but amoral, intelligent but capable of making terrible decisions. I hesitate to say that they are realistic women, because that implies that realism is somehow a virtue, which is not necessarily true. Rather, they are vibrant and galvanizing. Recommended to read alongside this novel: Philip Hensher's The Mulberry Empire, in which these characters take a secondary role.

I've always been a fan of Susanna Moore's deft and descriptive writing style, but I wasn't prepared to be as fantastically impressed by this book as I was. She really captured the excesses of the characters' material lives as well as the yearnings of their interior lives, with a real feel for the values of the period. I couldn't put it down.

Susanna Moore used the letters and diaries of three Englishwomen in India at the time of the Great Game with Russia as basis for this novel, sometimes using their actual words. The result is a sly, funny, sad, and moving story of transformation and Empire. Eleanor Oliphant, her sister, and cousin, accompany her brother to India in 1836. The King has appointed brother Henry Governor-General of the colony to help the noble Oliphants after the loss of the family fortune. After all, everyone gets rich in India. The four have been very close all their lives (Eleanor and Henry's relationship is certainly too close) and remain unmarried in their twenties and thirties. The story starts with Eleanor's second diary, the first having been ruined during the nightmarish trip on the Jupiter, a wretched ship that takes on a great deal of water. "Rather that we were shipped to Botany Bay on a ship full of Irish poachers than this," Eleanor writes. "At least we'd have the pleasure of a little felony."They arrive in a hellishly hot Calcutta and settle into Government House. There are mobs of servants (her dog has a servant, the servants have servants, there's someone whose job it is to blow on tea to cool it) and shocking insects. Her sister Harriet is enchanted by it all, but Eleanor begins to disintegrate in the heat along with their paintings, books, and clothes. She dabbles in various drugs. She smokes a hookah. Red-faced and frizzy, she presides over sweaty events of state. She also finds her respect for Indians increasing, and her respect for the English decreasing. Henry is not having a successful Governorship. To prop up his failing rule, so he takes his show on the road, a three-year trek to the Punjab that includes ten thousand soldiers and servants, elephants, sedan chairs, tents, exotic pets, Harriet, Eleanor, and cousin Lafayette. The trek coincides with several unfortunate British misadventures in Afghanistan made all the more horrible by what the Oliphants are learning about India, English rule, and themselves on this trip. Susanna Moore is right on the mark with every word. You dive into this world and it sweeps you away. Forget the romantic Raj-everyone in this world is addled and raddled by trying to be English in this climate. And yet, "One Last Look" is a breath of fresh air.

Basing this story on real journals of the period, Susanna Moore recreates the lives of English nobility in India in 1836, just prior to the reign of Queen Victoria. Lady Eleanor Oliphant, through whose journal the story unfolds, accompanies her brother Henry to India when the family fortunes plummet and the King appoints Henry to be Governor-General in India, his base to be in Calcutta. Reflecting the attitudes of the early British colonialists, Eleanor tells us that she has twenty-seven servants, five of whom are needed whenever she washes her hands. More reflective than some of the other Englishwomen she meets, she admits that "The danger of this place is that I am learning to deny myself nothing." By contrast, her sister Harriet, also on the trip, finds India to be exhilarating, freeing her from the restrictions placed on women of her station in England and allowing her to make a real, independent life for herself.Charged with winning over Afghanistan for Britain and preventing it from falling under the influence of Russia, Henry and his entourage travel from Calcutta to the Punjab to win the help of a raja there. Accompanied by ten thousand traveling companions, including his sisters and his household staff, Henry's caravan involves ten miles of beasts and men. As they travel in relative comfort west across the subcontinent, Eleanor records outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever, drought, and starvation so severe that 400,000 local people die in one area alone. Many deaths occur en route, and crippling loneliness sometimes overtakes the travelers, but Eleanor finds herself unexpectedly growing from the experience. In Delhi, where they meet the Emperor, Eleanor admits, "I find I am no longer very fond of Englishmen."One Last Look is character-driven, rather than plot-driven, and Moore's depiction of the language and attitudes of the times is flawless--formal, restrained, and often self-indulgent. Though real memoirs were used as resources, Moore compresses time and scenes in ways uncommon to real memoirs, employing a novelist's sense of drama and a psychologist's sense of observation to lend the novel a real beginning, middle, and end. Lovely observations and descriptive passages revealing the vastness of India provide a welcome contrast to the smallness of the lives of the British aristocracy, whose insensitivity is presented with considerable irony. Though Eleanor grows enormously from her time in India, she never becomes a character with whom the reader feels immense sympathy, and it is clear that that is not Moore's intention. When Eleanor admits that "Nothing will ever be the same" after her India experience, the reader can only think of the extent to which that is the case for her Indian "hosts." Mary Whipple

This book was at once fascinating and a bit horifying. The sometimes sad and often funny, but I am sure always accurate, accounts of India in the early 1800s under the stultifying colonial rule of the English, and of the lives of those who came there, can be a history lesson on the ways of the English empire, good and bad. The only thing I might find fault with is that unless one knows history, the book can leave some gaps in explanation. But I loved it and marvel at Ms. Moore's ability to portray an atmosphere that one can almost touch, feel, and smell. And the naive haughtiness of the English upper classes of that time is described in such a true manner - one sometimes has to laugh out loud.