At first glance, the narrator of Susanna Moore's intriguing new novel, One Last Look, would seem to be from an entirely different fictional planet from the heroine of her last book.
That narrator, Lady Eleanor, is a 19th-century aristocrat schooled in the proprieties and manners of imperial England; the unnamed narrator of Moore's previous book, In the Cut (1995), was a late-20th-century New Yorker attracted to dangerous men and dangerous sex. Lady Eleanor speaks -- or rather writes in her journal -- in sly but prim, Jane Austenish prose; the narrator of In the Cut spoke in willfully hip, street-smart slang. Lady Eleanor is a Victorian-era spinster; the narrator of In the Cut was an adventuress in an age of excess.
As it turns out, however, the two women have a lot in common with each another -- and with the heroines of Moore's earlier, Hawaiian novels (My Old Sweetheart, The Whiteness of Bones and Sleeping Beauties). All are conflicted women with complicated family pasts. All leave home to visit strange, exotic worlds that both attract and repel them. All must balance the expectations of society and the imperatives of selfhood in their efforts to define themselves.
Although One Last Look is easily Moore's most organic, most consistently engaging novel since My Old Sweetheart (1982), it draws heavily on the letters and diaries of three real-life women: Fanny Parks (or Parkes), the wife of a colonial civil servant; and Fanny and Emily Eden, who accompanied their brother George to Calcutta, when he was appointed governor-general of India in 1835.
Parks' journal (Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque) traced her evolution from prim memsahib to passionate Indophile (her "chutnification," in Salman Rushdie's words) during the first half of the 19th century, while the Eden sisters' writings (Tigers, Durbars and Kings: Fanny Eden's Indian Journals, Up the Country: Letters Written to Her Sister From the Upper Provinces of India by Emily Eden) recounted their adventures in India, including a surreal two-and-a-half-year journey there with an entourage of 12,000. Additional material for One Last Look appears to have been drawn from Janet Dunbar's book Golden Interlude: The Edens in India 1836 to 1842.
Because Moore has relied to such a degree on these people's lives and writings -- she even acknowledges "using their very words" -- the reader is constantly wondering what she has made up and what she has lifted, what is imaginative invention, what is ventriloquism and what is out and out theft.
What Moore does so well in this book is what she did so well in her early novels set in Hawaii: she conjures the heat and light and color of this hot, beautiful land, its smells and sensual allure. She describes the surreal sights that Eleanor and her siblings witness -- jungles of white roses, funeral pyres on the river, rats as big as spaniels -- and their compatriots' absurd efforts to recreate a little England there in the midst of this alien, antique land: dressing up local musicians in kilts and "pink tights to simulate the color of white flesh," erecting in the town of Simla, "rows of shops with mock-Tudor facades and little painted signs bearing the names of the villas: My Captain's Delight, the Wee Priory, Britannia."
Moore also chronicles with subtle emotional detail the effect that India -- in both its exotic extravagance and its harrowing poverty -- has on the narrator and her family. While Eleanor's sister, Harriet, is captivated by this foreign land, growing from a dutiful, obedient girl into a spirited, defiant woman, her brother, Henry, becomes more and more of an avatar of imperialism, haughty, self-absorbed, unwilling to listen to advice about India or his ill-fated plans to try to meddle in Afghanistan.
As for Eleanor, she slowly, grudgingly abandons her imperial certainties and biases -- "I see all the naked creatures squatting at the doors of their huts and feel nothing but disgust," she declares near the beginning of her stay -- and gradually comes to feel a real appreciation, even love for this country. All her preconceptions have been shattered here, all her assumptions called into doubt.
By 1838, she is writing: "Our prejudices and our ignorance in combination with their strangeness make it difficult to think clearly. I see now that although I have expected -- yearned -- for an enactment of a fantasy, every exquisite moment only serves to reveal the absurd, the comical, the ludicrous. And every ludicrous moment reveals the exquisite.
"Things that once would have seemed incredible to me now seem quite commonplace. The promptings of my imagination turn out to be less fantastical than those of reality."
Among the things that Eleanor will come to question during her stay in India is her relationship to her brother, and their place -- and England's -- in the wider world.
With One Last Look, Moore has worked a satisfying variation on many of her perennial themes and produced a compelling and richly textured story. It's just hard for the reader to tell how much of it is hers and how much came from the lives and works of three real-life travelers to India: Fanny Parks and Emily and Fanny Eden.
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