...a dense, rich, exhilarating piece of work that moves deftly between worlds and peoples, between locations (Tibet, Cornwall, London, the Karakoram range, Berlin, Calcutta, the Garhwal mountains), between the private dramas of individuals and the tectonic shifts of history ... Part of what the book achieves is a lucid rendering of the complex web of filiations and affiliations that connected not only these three central figures but also others in their orbit and in their disparate, often far-flung worlds ... it is to Ms. Baker’s credit that she keeps the big events always in view, dramatizing and humanizing the workings of history, particularly the story of empire and its machinations, in a way a novelist would—by making it a story of individuals. She understands everything about these people, the details of their lives, the connections and the criss-crossings, intersections, overlaps, friends-of-lovers-of-friends. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that there is something Tolstoyan to her vast project. Ms. Baker’s other great achievement is an unsparing depiction of the hypocrisy, venality and inhumanity of British colonialism.
The portrait Baker seeks to paint turns out, perhaps, to be near-impossibly ambitious. She attempts to chronicle and assess the behavior and achievement of a raft of these self-deludingly superior Englishmen and their kin ... they are faults that make for a reading experience some will think hugely colorful and minutely observed. Most, I fear, will find the labyrinthine narrative of The Last Englishmen just too rich, too stuffed with an 'inside-cricket' chumminess (amplified with gratuitously inserted chummy slang: 'knackered,' 'the trots,' 'nicked') and its assumption that all will know their K2 (a real mountain) from their F6 ... Baker’s book is itself not unlike the Calcutta adda. One can imagine it being debated, phrase by well-turned phrase, over endless cups of Coorg kaphi, with the aromas of bidis and State Express 555s lacing the air, until another steamy dawn arrives over the Maidan and everyone stumbles out into the brief damp cool of morning, wondering what all that was really about, while the Hooghly River groans on like syrup to the bay.
This is a thoroughly researched, relentlessly engrossing epic tale. Baker is adept in all areas—on the slopes of Everest or within corridors of power, among Calcutta’s intellectuals or London’s art crowd. She writes with verve and authority on colonial tension, cultural achievement and global conflict ... Baker’s study of national endeavor and personal struggle throws a valuable light on past upheavals and ideals. There is much to admire and a lot to learn.
This skilfully constructed book explores a number of apparently quite separate worlds ... [Baker's] ties of nationality (she is American by birth, Indian by marriage) give the work a distinctive cultural perspective. It proceeds as a series of cameos of characters and glimpses of incidents and worlds, almost always with a secure evidential base: there is pleasingly little speculation masquerading as special author insight and instead an impressive list of endnotes. What propels the book forward is less an internal narrative than the sweep of world events in a tumultuous period of history. The characters publish works and climb mountains, paint and conduct surveys, but the book itself has no clear narrative drive. This shows itself particularly at the end: The Last Englishmen peters out rather than concluding, while a postscript indicates that the end isn’t really the end anyway ... Baker skilfully holds our interest almost to the end, despite juggling so many actors and despite their unattractive self-interest and sense of entitlement ... Maintaining readers’ interest in such a bunch is a real achievement.
These rulers and liberators appear in Deborah Baker’s narrative, but remain mostly in the background. The result is a refreshingly novel account. She focuses on smaller, but nevertheless noteworthy, fry ... Ms Baker draws from a rich stock of unpublished memoirs, journals, police reports and other documents, deploying fresh material with a light touch ... By focusing on less exalted characters, often of a literary bent, Ms Baker produces a highly readable and intimate view of an unusual time and place.
Baker’s narrative is eventful and diffuse. A cast-of-characters list in the opening pages includes more than 50 names, and the proceedings play out against dozens of backdrops ... Occasionally, it’s tough to keep track of who’s doing what and why they’re doing it. But Baker writes beautifully, and she’s done ample research. Drawing on a host of private and public archives, she crafts memorable portraits of dynamic, flawed men and women ... The 'love' in Baker’s subtitle refers to the relationships Auden and Spender had with an artist named Nancy Sharp (she married the latter). Their romantic entanglements are semi-interesting, but as described in Baker’s vivid prose, Sharp’s wartime reinvention is fascinating.
It’s the reviewer’s duty to read every word meticulously, and I did, going over countless paragraphs twice to make head or tail of them, and taking 15 small pages of notes to whittle down the thing to its essence. The essence was hard to pin down, fractured as the book is into a hundred disjointed scenes with a constant barrage of characters ... There are just far too many political, cultural and personal crises going on, and Baker lacks the crucial skill of making us feel for the huge cast of characters who appear.
... 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.
Baker’s book is an extraordinarily deft account of the complexities of love and empire ... What makes it fascinating is that it tells the large historical story of the end of empire in India as a set of personal experiences that can’t be reduced to a sequence of public events or mass movements ... The world that Baker portrays is one held together by connections that extend across continents, connections that I take for granted in big historical novels like Tolstoy’s but never expect to find in history ... The book’s narrative style is inseparable from its conception of history: it illustrates the essential inwardness of historical experience, and its unexpected conjunctions and coincidences evoke the miscellaneous reality of ordinary life ... Baker has crafted a satisfying and elegant book about extraordinary men and women who have been mostly forgotten by history.
The book is invaluable for moments... when Baker registers the doubts that plagued these men ... Baker writes lucidly about what they must have felt braving the weather and resisting the hollow promise of virility ... While it is refreshing to read text without any ominous numbers pointing to possibly informative endnotes, it also casts a shadow of doubt. How much comes from the private and public correspondence between the 'cast of characters' and how much is reconstruction? ... But such doubts, and the tabulation of the multiple and intersecting affairs aside, The Last Englishmen comes alive—at least for Indian readers—in the last fifty pages or so.
...her most creatively conceived, deeply delving, and wizardly blend of biography and history to date ... Baker’s extensive research is seamlessly subsumed within the flow of her novelistic narrative as she brings to life landscapes magnificent and terrifying; volatile love affairs; seismic political turmoil; and gripping scenes of war. With a uniquely encompassing vision, command of complex information, and profound insight, Baker dramatically chronicles the seminal scientific and artistic explorations of four courageous, ingenious brothers whose achievements enrich our understanding of the still-molten, sharply relevant past.
The drama and devastation of world war and the partition of India add layers of intricacy to the tale, as do the experiences of several other characters: a woman who both men fell in love with, an Indian poet and his intellectual quarrels, the two men’s literary-minded brothers, a communist spy, and more. While the book can occasionally be somewhat convoluted, Baker skillfully navigates numerous interlaced tales, illuminating in a lively and stylistic fashion both the inner lives of intriguing individuals and weightier geopolitical developments.
Seemingly covering disparate topics, Baker beautifully connects them all with an incisive, clear writing style and sharp descriptions of the terrain. A book for any readers curious about India after 1900.
