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.

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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.

DJINN PATROL ON THE PURPLE LINE, a scary-but-fun trip through an unimaginably huge world

DJINN PATROL ON THE PURPLE LINE
DEEPA ANAPPARA
Random House
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a sprawling Indian city, a boy ventures into its most dangerous corners to find his missing classmate. . . .

Through market lanes crammed with too many people, dogs, and rickshaws, past stalls that smell of cardamom and sizzling oil, below a smoggy sky that doesn’t let through a single blade of sunlight, and all the way at the end of the Purple metro line lies a jumble of tin-roofed homes where nine-year-old Jai lives with his family. From his doorway, he can spot the glittering lights of the city’s fancy high-rises, and though his mother works as a maid in one, to him they seem a thousand miles away. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line plunges readers deep into this neighborhood to trace the unfolding of a tragedy through the eyes of a child as he has his first perilous collisions with an unjust and complicated wider world.

Jai drools outside sweet shops, watches too many reality police shows, and considers himself to be smarter than his friends Pari (though she gets the best grades) and Faiz (though Faiz has an actual job). When a classmate goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from TV to find him. He asks Pari and Faiz to be his assistants, and together they draw up lists of people to interview and places to visit.

But what begins as a game turns sinister as other children start disappearing from their neighborhood. Jai, Pari, and Faiz have to confront terrified parents, an indifferent police force, and rumors of soul-snatching djinns. As the disappearances edge ever closer to home, the lives of Jai and his friends will never be the same again.

Drawing on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is extraordinarily moving, flawlessly imagined, and a triumph of suspense. It captures the fierce warmth, resilience, and bravery that can emerge in times of trouble and carries the reader headlong into a community that, once encountered, is impossible to forget.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: One of my take-aways from living through the twenty-first century as an immigrant to its reality is that there are a *shocking* number of souls that just...vanish...with no explanation, no investigation, and no closure for their families or friends. Author Anappara knows this...she is a journalist, she hears the howls. The question I have is the same one I had when the Ciudad Juárez femicides first came to light: What the actual fuck are the police doing?

That being an unanswerable question without delving into immense mountains of sociopolitical research and studies, I'll go to the next part of the issue raised in the story: Caste and sectarian animosities and prejudices come in for scary, extra-believable spotlighting in here. It's like the awfulness I really wasn't privy to before Katherine Boo's book came out (whatever the criticisms Boo gets, I for one hadn't heard anything about these issues before I read it) sprang to life in the eyes of a nine-year-old boy. He's the only one who cares that Bahadur has gone missing...as much, that is, as the child's mother cares.

Very much raised by TV while being resentfully and carelessly monitored by his gifted older sister (a quietly important strand is the terrible, sexist manner that the capitalist system exacerbates her mistreatment, the not terribly bright but terribly endearingly bumptious and energetic Jai gets a scooby-group of kids together to seek out Bahadur. What unfolds is proof that kids are great narrators, if lousy cops. The scooby-group is convinced (well, two-thirds convinced) that there's a Djinn on the eponymous Purple Line of the city's subway. No, there isn't; if you came hoping for a fantasy read, go in peace. What they do discover is, however, very relevant.

There are things in the telling of the story that didn't work well to make it into a satisfying read: The neglected sister who watches Jai does something that removes her from sympathy to distaste. It's not pretty, it was perfectly understandable, but it actually made the central search more complicated and showed that adolescents are not the best choices of parent subsitiutes. The final solution of the mystery at the heart of the book is desperately sad; it's also not what was signaled as one of the book's themes, the complicity of the capitalist world in the destruction of families and ways of life, as well as exacerbating the existing sectarian horrors plaguing India. In my view, this was a narrative error, since it took the wind out of the sails of at least half the book's points. And, perhaps most tellingly, the multiplicity of narrative voices was less an enrichment of the story than a lessening of tension. This is very often the case in crime fiction.

This explains a lot of why this carefully crafted and involvingly told story didn't get all five stars from me.

What was so enriching in this read was the manner of making evident the luxury of a safe, secure childhood anywhere not already rich. What made me think the hardest was the additional, personal light shone on the family of a disappeared child, the struggles of parenting while extremely poor, the harshness of communities that, under threat, are coldly calculatedly indifferent in their actions if not always their hearts...they simply can't afford to be fully realized communities such as existed before capitalism fastened its teeth in India's neck.