MixedBookforum\"... Baker stays with no one for very long, cutting back and forth between her characters’ private lives and the public history of the war, her roving camera leaving her principals for extended periods to focus instead on some other minor figure lost to history ... [Baker] is not an academic historian, but she has written what is, despite the novelistic arrangement, a book that belongs on the same shelf as the many recent revisionist histories of India’s war ... Baker’s accounts... give a vivid sense of what it was like in that dawn to be alive, young and open-minded, with the entirety of Asian and European thought to choose from. Baker’s control over her material is not always secure. Even with her helpful list of dramatis personae and the full range of narrative devices to which she helps herself, the chapters not set in high mountains can feel a little overwhelming. Baker’s text is written in a pacey free indirect style that mimics the spoken and written voices of her principals. The results are mixed ... Baker’s most fluent prose comes when her characters are alone with their thoughts in the mountains, where they are afforded a vision of their concerns from the geologist’s point of view, one radically removed from the political anxieties of the moment.\
