Though it is gratifying to observe the adeptness of the plotting and scale at which it is all accomplished, the competence and interestingness of this project is engulfed by the accumulating magnitude of these grievances
The ambition and rich detail Deepa Anappara brings to this sophomore novel — the follow up to her acclaimed 2020 debut Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line — calls to mind the fine ecological fiction of Janice Pariat, Shubhangi Swarup and, further afield, Amitav Ghosh. Here, she orchestrates a great marriage of archive and imagination, incorporating the idea of ‘native spies’ venturing into Tibetan territories forbidden to the British, trained in colonial surveying techniques, as well as the folklore of the vast, aloof Himalayas into a narrative that might both challenge and reward a reader’s patience.
Careful and philosophical in its movement — it would be too easy to call it glacial — the novel breaks its characters between two parties traversing between the Indo-Nepalese border into Tibet, a land forbidden to the British, across alternating chapters. The first involves Balram, a surveyor employed by the British to map the alien landscape and trace the origin of the Tsangpo river. Accompanying him is a sloppily disguised colonial captain and a group of bearers whose numbers shrink as they ascend further into the uncharted lands. Parallel to them runs the story of Katherine, a half-Indian mem, also under disguise as a pilgrim, who hopes to be the first European woman to document the capital city of Lhasa. Balram and Katherine are both possessed by grief, taking to the mountains to recover a love that appears to them in fits and illusory hauntings across the length of the novel.
Yet it is also marked by an awkwardness to its narration, borne out of the author having to constantly reach back into her characters’ pasts in order to defog the present. Balram is riven with guilt over the disappearance of his lover Gyan, while Katherine grieves the sudden death of her sister Ethel. Though there are reams devoted to the examination of loss, the characters’ first-hand, retrospective testimonies produce a wispy, unsteady image of those whom they mourn — a sentimentality the reader isn’t always able to reciprocate. In other places, particularly in the exposition-heavy early sections in this novel, burdened with scene-setting the racial and gender politics of 1869, the novel sings an overfamiliar postcolonial raag – too frontal and trite for a writer of Anappara’s calibre (“They knew the native’s role well; they had played it all their lives”).
Though it is gratifying to observe the adeptness of the plotting and scale at which it is all accomplished, the competence and interestingness of this project is engulfed by the accumulating magnitude of these grievances. Possessed of the same alienating beauty as the landscape it traverses, the pleasures of The Last of Earth are marred, in the end, by a plateauing of feeling.
The Last of Earth
By Deepa Anappara
Penguin
pp. 384; Rs 899
