One Last Look [Paperback]

Susanna Moore (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 2004

After several wretched months at sea, Eleanor Oliphant arrives in Calcutta with her brother Henry and sister Harriet. It is 1836, and her beloved Henry has just been appointed England’s new Governor-General for India. Eleanor is to be his official hostess.

Despite the imported English gowns and formal soir?es, India makes a mockery of Eleanor’s sensibilities. Burning heat, starving people, insects as big as eggs–it is all an unreal dream, rife with tumultuous life. Harriet gives herself over to the adventure. Henry busies himself with official duties. Eleanor, though groping for bearings, slowly finds her isolation punctuated by moments of elation: her first monsoon, graceful women in vibrant sarees, Benares rising out of the mist. She discovers she likes curries and her native servants; and often dislikes her compatriots. Over the course of six years and a trek from Calcutta to Kabul and back, India manages to unsettle all of her “old, old ideas.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Moore's captivating fifth novel takes the form of entries in the diary of Lady Eleanor, a British aristocrat who travels in 1836 to Calcutta with her sister Harriet and her brother Henry, who has been appointed Governor-general of the colony. Like the narrator in Moore's 1995 thriller In the Cut, eloquent but snobbish Eleanor is not especially likable-she's convinced of her own superiority, even over her own "inordinately sensitive" sister. But she's a fascinating heroine-not only because she teases readers with hints of her unusually close relationship with Henry. During her six years in India, Eleanor undergoes a striking transformation, realizing that her "life-once a fastidious nibble-has turned into an endless disorderly feast." The Eleanor who likened Calcutta to hell becomes a woman able to admire her sister (who quickly falls in love with India), appreciate her exotic surroundings and recognize the folly of her stuffy fellow Englishmen and their attempts to recreate British culture on the subcontinent. She starts to question the idea of empire and to respect Indian culture; by the time Henry's tenure is up, she mourns the loss of her "elation of toiling through isolation and wonder." In precise, elegant prose, Moore vividly evokes the country's beauty and overwhelming otherness, but her exploration of character is even more interesting. Moore spent two years studying England and India in that era, and her novel was inspired by the diaries of Emily Eden, an Englishwoman in Calcutta; as a result, her protagonist is nuanced and convincing. As Eleanor writes in her diary, "The writing of women is always read in the hope of discovering women's secrets"; Eleanor and her creator reveal just enough glimpses to keep readers transfixed.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

There is a certain kind of historical fiction which excels at evoking time and place—the dresses and the narrative voice just so, the moans of the mango bird in the tree exquisitely described—but, like this novel, Moore's fifth, fails to build into something larger. Henry Oliphant, the new British Governor-General of India, comes to Calcutta with his two sisters in 1836. They discover the country's emeralds, brocades, and phalanxes of servants, but are sheltered, at least for a time, from its grotesque poverty, and from political dynamics that will cause Henry's downfall. The narrative takes the form of a journal kept by the elder sister, and Moore has relied on contemporaneous accounts by British women in India both for factual details and for her prose style. The over-all effect, however accomplished, is so studied that it brings to mind the virtuoso performances that the narrator herself records: the snake charmer, or the monkey who climbs tall trees to pick tea leaves.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400075416
• ISBN-13: 978-1400075416
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,234,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Our innate goodness is not appreciated by our servants.", November 16, 2003

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: One Last Look (Hardcover)

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

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Marvelous, December 5, 2003

By 

Candace "thepageturner" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Last Look (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegantly told and completely mesmerizing, November 2, 2003

By A Customer

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This review is from: One Last Look (Hardcover)

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.