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With her peripatetic and philosophical second novel, Deepa Anappara travels into uncharted territory. Her dazzling 2020 debut, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, was part caper and part social satire, set in an Indian shantytown. In The Last of Earth, she points her writerly compass towards the mountains of mid-19th-century Tibet – a region then closed off to European imperialists – to meditate on the chequered history of colonial exploration, cartography and the impermanence of human existence.
“It’s in the nature of white men to believe they own the world, that no door should be shut to them.” For years, the British train, coax and bribe Indians to cross over, conducting surveying expeditions on their behalf; they also venture into the “Forbidden Kingdom of Tibet” in thinly veiled disguises. Intricately researched and meticulously plotted, this immersive novel is told through the alternating perspectives of two protagonists. Balram is an Indian schoolteacher and surveyor-spy who plays guide to an English captain, clumsily dressed as a monk and intent on being the first man to personally chart the route of the revered river Tsangpo and discover where it meets the sea. Meanwhile Katherine, of part Indian heritage, is on a mission to become the first European woman to reach Lhasa and set eyes on the Potala Palace after being denied membership of the all-male Royal Geographical Society in London.
Each embarking on an epic, perilous odyssey, in “a strange country whose terrain changed every few miles”, their paths inevitably cross. The cast of characters find that “at eighteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, here they were closer to gods than mortals, but this proximity to the divine had brought them no blessings, only burdens”. Storms, snow leopards and soldiers, meandering rivers and the full force of the elements are but minor obstacles in their path to glory, to writing history and leaving their mark on the world. The true test will ultimately come down to human feelings and emotions: hubris, obsession, doubt, power, guilt and grief.
Like many journeys, Anappara’s narrative is full of false starts and stops, digressions and revisions. In scale and architecture, it feels reminiscent of recent novels such as Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches and Funeral Nights by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih. Here, too, maps deceive. History deviates from the truth. The natural world is alive. Death is always looming around the corner. “The lines the captain drew on paper appeared to Balram to be no more than a child’s scribbles on mud. If the earth shrugged, mountains would cleave, rivers would surge, seas would swallow cities and fields alike, and every map would be rendered incoherent.”
The greedy, dirty colonial enterprise swallows entire communities and landscapes whole. For “this was the way the world worked. The white man had a want and to sate it brown men gave up their lives. How many native men had died triangulating Hindustan for the Great Trigonometrical Survey? Balram didn’t know because no book, no map, recorded their names or numbers.” Balram often hears the voices of those left behind: his best friend Gyan, a fellow surveyor-spy rumoured to be imprisoned in Tibet, and his own wife and children. The death of Katherine’s sister Ethel both motivates and haunts her journey and journalling on the road. The Last of Earth is scrupulous in its excavation of our spooky, imperfect pasts.
Late in the novel, Balram says that “the river wasn’t a blue spiral on a map but a living thing, a creature capable of renewal. It emptied itself into the sea and recast itself every few months.” With The Last of Earth, Anappara has shown that history, too, is often not what it seems; it is a living thing, which, when recast in a different light – a novelist’s light – can offer a renewal of sorts.
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The Last of Earth by Deepa Anappara is published by Oneworld (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
