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One Last Look

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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

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.

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.

When Lord Henry Oliphant is appointed Governor-General to India in 1836, his devoted sister, Lady Eleanor Oliphant, a 34 year-old spinster, agrees to accompany him as does Harriet, their artistic younger sibling, and also their cousin Lafayette, a lady's man and a libertine. Lady Eleanor keeps a journal in which she recounts the significant events that occur over the six year period they spend on the subcontinent, as well as the more personal changes in character and points of view.

Susanna Moore, a superb writer, brings vividly to life the grandeur, beauty and squalor that was India - a place so far removed from anything the Oliphant's had previously experienced as to be totally unimaginable. The small group of family members arrive in the country, like so many before them, with great confidence in the superiority of their British aristocratic heritage and their right to rule. Each is to change slowly over the years, and as they become accustomed to the heat, the brilliant local color, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the claustrophobic inbred social life, each one grows to love India, and all are transformed.

Elegantly written and well researched, Ms. Moore recreates with great accuracy the language and experiences of an English lady living in early 19th century India. "One Last Look" is loosely based on the lives of a real governor-general and his sisters who went out to India in 1836 to serve the British Empire. The diary is fictional and spans seven years, but primary sources for the narrative are the published writings of sisters Emily and Fanny Eden, who accompanied their brother George, Earl of Auckland, when he was sent to Calcutta as Governor General. The author also consulted the diaries of another period traveler and contemporary of the Edens, the wife of a civil servant, described by Moore as "the sublime Fanny Parks."

Governor Oliphant's reign has been largely unsuccessful. Hoping for support in his quest to win Afghanistan for Britain, he undertakes the "Great Progress" in 1937, a two-and-a-half-year journey from Calcutta to Kabul to cement an alliance with the Maharajah Ranjit Singh, an old warlord. Accompanied by a huge retinue of 12,000 people, Lady Eleanor asks: "Why must we travel with scribes, equerries, victualers, cooks, officers with their wives and children and parrots and spaniels, tent pitchers, herdsmen, syces, grass cutters, musicians, dancing girls, water bearers, butchers, sweepers, tailors, valets, hairdressers, the Bombay Troop, the queen's 12th Regiment, the Irish guards and 2,000 native archers?" Because everything is a big production in India. Much of the author's extraordinary descriptions of this dramatic trip is taken directly from the journals of Emily Eden.

Eleanor, Harriet and the "sublime Fanny" were adventurous, spirited women, who opened to their new bicultural experience and thrived. "The danger of this place is that I am learning to deny myself nothing," writes Eleanor. And, "My life - once a fastidious nibble - has now turned into an endless disorderly feast." These women were far different from the memsahibs who came later to India in the early 20th century. The staid latecomers felt it necessary to enforce their hierarchical society, and to maintain English dress, customs and culture, rather than to adapt more and to enjoy.

"One Last Look" is an atmospheric novel, the action is character driven, the conflicts internal. With richly textured, lush prose, Susanna Moore evokes a most exotic world, a time long past, and characters forever transformed. Highly recommended.
JANA

I enjoyed this book because it showed the clash of two cultures- that of the English versus that of the Indians. At a time when Britain's power was almost limitless, it was indeed true that "the sun never set on the British Empire. India was an important part of Britain's empire because of the riches it possessed. This is the backdrop for an enchanting story which "took my breath away," so to speak.

In 1836 Lady Eleanor accompanies her brother to India when he appointed Governor of the colony. It is a much harsher climate that that which she is accustomed to; a different culture and way of life to the extreme. How Eleanor adapts is only a small part of this fine novel.

One Last Look is a brilliantly written book, one which tries to capture the essence of the British at the height of their empire. It is well-researched, and written in diary form, covering some ten years of time. During the course of this novel we see Victoria become Queen; and while this fact had no direct bearing upon those British stationed in India at the time, everyone foresaw the coming of a great era. In addition, it shows the great haughtiness of the English, and how they saw themselves as superior to what they saw as low-caste (low class).

...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.

This is a fine example of a book that is both based on research, and imaginary context. I was first taken by Moore's depictions of life at sea in the opening pages, making me think of a book that I had read many years ago, An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf. Both, tell us about a way of life that goes beyond what even the seasoned traveler, one who has been to the open Savannas, or, as far as Katmandu, takes for granted about the immediate context of todays world and our current way of life. One last Look is an evocation of the sensually exotic, and there is something about its texture that wafts through the pages as luxurious and heady as the scent of Hermes' Un Jardin Apres La Mousson. Both imaginary tales take us on a journey that one could call spiritual, awakening, hard, filled with meaning, and about personal enlightenment. Moore's tale tweaks our desire to look into the past through a personal lens that is both naive and hopeful. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who loves adventure and is a lover of exotic sojourns.

If you have not been to India, this book will, alas, mean less.Horrible to read (racism, savagery, curelty to animals), but also fascinating and beautiful (naturalist wonders, exotic animals and plants, gorgeous scenery). A book filled with the unpredictable as well as predictable characters of the British Empire amid the strange oddities of India. But what is astonishing is the depth of detail (Moore researched this with love for years). The main characters, the Brother and two Sisters and their servants, are so well drawn it is hard to say goodbye at the end. And the subtlety of how the various sexual relations is handled is marvelous (what exactly is going on between the brother and sister?). Anyway, I was surprised at the excellence of the desciptions of the 4 month sea voyage to get there (awful experience), the gardens and peculiar customs, the food, the dress, the superstition, the architecture - - everything drawn in painstaking detail and reads like an adventure page-turner. I loved it.

Yes, as one post stated, this is a somewhat difficult book to follow, mainly because of the indian words. However, it is worth reading. I could not put it down half-way through.