One Last Look by Susanna Moore (Knopf)
“No matter how loud I scream, no one can hear me,” Lady Eleanor Oliphant writes in her journal. Wracked with seasickness in a cramped and dirty ship’s cabin, she’s two months away from England and faces another month at sea before her journey ends at Calcutta. A half-century after England lost its American colonies, it’s turned its attention to India, where Eleanor’s brother Henry has been named Governor-General.
Accompanied by his sisters Eleanor and Harriet, Henry travels in squalor that’s just marginally different from what his company of soldiers and 84 hunting hounds experience below deck. He weathers it with stolid aplomb, Eleanor is almost incapacitated with misery and disgust, and Harriet is “having a lovely time.”
All three are greeted with a heady mixture of luxury and the unknown, which they face in the same way they endured their 100-day voyage. In “rooms as spare as a gibbet...a trifle less fiery than a kiln,” even their lapdog has its own servant and five men are employed in the simple task of Eleanor washing her hands. Their meals are heavy and British, and the sisters’ daily schedules are dominated by periods of rest. “There are no locks on the doors,” Eleanor observes, “indeed there are seldom doors,” and the floors outside of the bedrooms are covered with servants, sleeping.
Eleanor becomes lethargic and relies upon a sedan chair; her chief activity is observing what surrounds her and writing about it all in her journal. Harriet hurls herself into her new life with enthusiasm, collecting a lemur and a gazelle as pets, and “making a life for herself,” always in the company of her jemadur who serves as a butler and interpreter. Both sisters learn to deny themselves nothing,as they take on the privilege and richness of the lives led by Indian royalty.
Henry discovers that the commercial ventures of the East Indian Company are possibly more important than political concerns. His colonial government rests upon financial success. When he discovers that the government in Kabul threatens the four million pounds a year that flows to England from the subcontinent, he decides to overthrow the current leader and replace him with someone more acquiescent, someone “Indian in skin, but English in thought, English in morals.”
Meanwhile Harriet returns from a tiger hunt with the habit of smoking a hookah filled with sweet grass, tobacco, and cardamom. Eleanor, plagued with savage headaches, is introduced to opium by the mother of a raja. For Christmas that year, Harriet gives her an ivory opium pipe. Eleanof’s gift to her sister is a bejeweled lotus-shaped mouthpiece for her hookah.
When Russia threatens England’s presence in Afghanistan and the Crown’s hold upon India, Henry makes a disastrous move. British women and other civilians are captured and imprisoned, while 700 soldiers are slaughtered in a surprise attack. The Great Game is imperiled and Henry is recalled from his post.
He returns to England as a marquis, his sisters come back indelibly transformed. While Henry was absorbed in matters of strategy and empire, Eleanor and Harriet discovered India’s secrets as best they could and are now “most unprepared for London,” where there are “no pearls, no monkeys, no betel...no color...no smell.” Neither of them is able to escape the changes that India has cast upon them.
Susanna Moore has mined the letters and diaries of Englishwomen living in India during the Raj. Her research is staggering and her details of daily life in 19th century India, along with the debacle of British foreign policy in that country, is told with the assured voice of someone who experienced this time and place herself. Through the words of Lady Eleanor, Moore takes the convention of the historical novel, twists it viciously and veils it with enormous subtlety. The result is a book that is decadent but never sensational, a story that’s sensuous, languid, and illuminating.~Janet Brown