The Last Englishmen
Love, War, and the End of Empire
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A sumptuous biographical saga, both intimate and epic, about the waning of the British Empire in India
John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalaya. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers—W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender—achieved literary fame, they vied to be included on an expedition that would deliver Everest’s summit to an Englishman, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain’s struggle to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine where each man’s wartime loyalties would lie.
Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep.
Dense with romance and intrigue, and of startling relevance for the great power games of our own day, Deborah Baker’s The Last Englishmen is an engrossing story that traces the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Baker (The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism) provides an elegant and complex narrative of India and the British Empire in the interwar, wartime, and postwar years through the lives of geologist John Auden (1903 1991), brother of W.H.; surveyor Michael Spender (1906 1945), brother of Stephen; and assorted others. Based on extensive archival research, the book chronicles the two Englishmen's efforts to explore, map, and understand the Himalayas within the political context of a waning British Empire, in which quests to reach the summit of Mount Everest "neatly dramatized Britain's struggle... to project its imperial power over a restive India." 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.
