'Last Look' pastiche of life in Calcutta under the raj

"One Last Look" by Susanna Moore; Knopf, hardcover, $23

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Book Editor

It has been said that India is impossible. If you made it up, no one would believe you. If you tell it accurately, not only does no one believe you but the place is such an elusive miasma, you're sure to get it wrong in some way.

Susanna Moore's latest novel, set in Calcutta under British rule, is a sensual and sometimes shocking pastiche of the Anglo-Indian memoirs of the raj. Moore based the book on the diaries of three women of the period, though one wonders what they would make of the people and plot line she has constructed from the material they left her.

The opening passages drop the reader without preamble — other than a date, 2 February 1836, and a location, On Board the Jupiter —Êinto the mind of Lady Eleanor, who is going out to India with her sister, Harriet, and brother, Henry. There, he will take up his post as governor general of the colony. The two women — both decorative but both a bit long in the tooth to be still unmarried — will serves as his hostesses, their parents having died leaving them dependent on their brothers' somewhat doubtful abilities. All three are determined to maintain their standing among the minor nobility.

Moore offers the reader nothing to cling to but a few wispy threads woven through Eleanor's diary entries. A tossed-off line makes it clear that she is not a virgin, but no context is given. She writes that she cannot live without Henry, but much of the time he seems distant and dismissive of her, and she in her turn is disconcertingly clear-eyed about his failings. Eleanor's world teems with life like a Bengali marketplace, and it is life that is at all times melting or bursting, rotting or blooming, creeping or lunging, dreaming dully or awakening with a start.

We do not love Eleanor — we are not meant to — but we quickly become tangled up in her damp and molding skirts and her disordered bed linen. Her trenchant tongue amuses us, her clear view of the hypocrisy around her (both English and Indian) interests us, and her quick affections and growing appreciation for India draw us in.

But Eleanor's character is at its core as "off" a fruit past its prime and as wrong-headed as that of the classist milieu into which she was born. Even her ability to see her own failings at times prompts a certain impatience — "so what are you going to do about it?" — and then a kind of despair — "oh, what did I expect?"

Particularly for those with some knowledge of the place and period, Moore's work here is enjoyable at a very deep level, putting the reader in place so firmly that you find yourself scratching fictional mosquito bites. And not to be priggish, but Eleanor's sins and shortcomings prompt soul-searching as to how any of us might have behaved in similarly unenlightened circumstances.