Culture Watch
One Last Look
Susanna Moore
Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pp
Susanna Moore's heroine, Eleanor, is part of the retinue that her
brother, India's new Governor-General, brings to India. She comments,
complains, criticizes and narrates their stay as colonialists and
draws you into an erotic, mesmerizing world seen, smelled, tasted
and, ultimately, unforgettably experienced. (Eleanor's character
is based on the diaries of Englishwomen Emily Eden
and Fanny Parks*.)
The Indian climate is inhibiting to Eleanor, as it must be to all
who arrived from England in the 1830s: "Two punkahs run the
length of my sitting room. Censers in every corner dispel plumes
of incense. Large cupboards called almirahs hold everything from
my Sèvres chocolate cups to my Windsor soap. At the door
are ribboned reed blinds, very pretty, wetted through the date to
render the rooms a trifle less fiery than a kiln. As the windows
are kept tightly shut from morning to night, a deafening contraption
called a termantidote blows iced air through the rooms. No effort
is spared at Government House to assure our coolness; thirty-two
men have no other concern than to keep us from dying of the heat.
Night and day, they water the paths, pull the punkahs, dampen the
blinds, moisten the mats."
The descriptions are vivid and surreal: "Instead we are besieged
by conjurers, snake men, puppeteers, fire breathers and mendicants
who lunge halfheartedly at the carriage...Every evening we see two
elephants, each carrying sick Europeans to hospital."
Warnings of corruption are issued by European and English women
too long on the continent themselves: "The first telltale
sign, of course," she said, "is when a lady discards her
stays and takes to layout about in a soiled morning gown. The dew
of arrival is quickly exchanged for — how shall I say? —
a certain sordidness."
Cures and distractions are also suggested: Burton recommends chess
as a cure for melancholy. Fit for idle gentlewomen, soldiers,
and courtiers that have naught but love-matters to busy them.
Descriptions and indeed, the reality of the dress of the privileged
noblewomen are lush in detail: I wore a gown of gros de Naples the
colour of bruised peaches with bunches of organdy lily-of-the-valley
sewn by my Dacca children, white satin slippers with crisscross
ribbons and a bonnet dashed with egret plumes. I carried the fan
with my monogram in yellow diamonds...
Occasionally, Eleanor refers to a book that rarely will be referred
to such as The
Memoirs of Babur which Daniel Waugh describes as "The memoirs
offer a highly educated Central Asian Muslim's observations of the
world in which he moved. There is much on the political and military
struggles of his time but also extensive descriptive sections on
the physical and human geography, the flora and fauna, nomads in
their pastures and urban environments enriched by the architecture,
music and Persian and Turkic literature patronized by the Timurids."
Another character reads The
Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Smollett and Sleeman's Vocabulary
of the Peculiar Language of Thugs.
One Last Look is indeed worth just that.
*Wanderings
of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque by Fanny Parkes
Tigers,
Durbars and Kings: Fanny Eden's Indian Journals by Frances
Eden
Up
the Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces
of India by Emily Eden
— T.G.
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