THE LAST OF EARTH, Tibetan national survival has been under threat forever

THE LAST OF EARTH
DEEPA ANAPPARA
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line comes a stunning historical novel set in nineteenth-century Tibet that follows two outsiders—an Indian schoolteacher spying for the British Empire and an English “lady” explorer—as they venture into a forbidden kingdom.

1869. Tibet is closed to Europeans, an infuriating obstruction for the rap¬idly expanding British Empire. In response, Britain begins training Indians—permitted to cross borders that white men may not—to undertake illicit, dangerous surveying expeditions into Tibet.

Balram is one such surveyor-spy, an Indian schoolteacher who, for several years, has worked for the British, often alongside his dearest friend, Gyan. But Gyan went missing on his last expedition and is rumored to be imprisoned within Tibet. Desperate to rescue his friend, Balram agrees to guide an English captain on a foolhardy mission: After years of paying others to do the exploring, the captain, disguised as a monk, wants to personally chart a river that runs through southern Tibet. Their path will cross fatefully with that of another Westerner in disguise, fifty-year-old Katherine. Denied a fellowship in the all-male Royal Geographical Society in London, she intends to be the first European woman to reach Lhasa.

As Balram and Katherine make their way into Tibet, they will face storms and bandits, snow leopards and soldiers, fevers and frostbite. What’s more, they will have to battle their own doubts, ambitions, grief, and pasts in order to survive the treacherous landscape.

A polyphonic novel about the various ways humans try to leave a mark on the world—from the enduring nature of family and friendship to the egomania and obsessions of the colonial enterprise—The Last of Earth confirms Deepa Anappara as one of our greatest and most ambitious storytellers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Tibet closed itself off from the Western powers playing "the Great Game," as it was dismissively described from 1840 onwards, because they saw its awful effects on India, Nepal, Burma, and China. The British took this as a challenge, like Katherine in this story...a mixed-race woman thwarted in desire to join the Royal Geographical Society despite her surveying achievements. They set about circumventing the Tibetans' desire to be left in peace (Katherine by disguising herself to become the first European woman to enter Lhasa) by training Indians like Balram in this story to survey the land for them. These men and one pretender disguise their purpose by the faking the trading of goods into and out of the country, pretending to be religious pilgrims visiting the holy places, and other subterfuges. (When your country covers the headwaters of the main waterways serving multiple billions of people, isolation is an untenable fantasy.)

The novel begins in 1869, a time when Tibet was also fighting the Qing Dynasty for territorial integrity. Its diplomatice relations with Nepal were strained by this series of wars. It is, then, a story of people doing things that are reprehensible and selfish at a time of upheaval engineered by reprehensible and selfish colonial powers. The different PoVs are each checked in with in alternating sections. It's a technique with many advantages, like avoiding awkward and forced joinings of forces, as well as perils, like leaving one PoV at a critical juncture for long enough to vitiate the plot's momentum. Both happen here. It is not as though there is a shortage of story; it's action that takes the hit.

Duty, freedom, self-willed assertions of independence, are all present in micro- and macro-scale facets of the plot. It never gets terribly deep into the whys and wherefores on the personal or the political scales. Like the prose itself, it limns the surfaces and reflects the highlights but leaves off before any deep diving takes place. I was utterly rapt at the descriptive language used for the landscapes, the customs, and the cultures around the characters. I felt distant from them, though, like they were cameras and I was viewing their footage played back after editing into a narrative.

Distanced as I was, I was quite clearly inspired to go poking around into the faxtual history of the time and place. Author Anappara has done this to me before: taken a truly epic story with ramifications reverberant well beyond the slice she chooses for her focus. It's clearly working on me at one level. I am once againg stopping short of a full five-star rating because I'm in too many places, too much is touched on but not explored, for the read to merit that accolade.

It's not like it was a failure of a read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was ready to pick it back up, but I was also ready to put it down to look up the details I wanted to know more about.