The Last Englishmen
The Last Englishmen by Deborah Baker came out in August of last year (2018) and I was eager to read it but had many other books on my list so I decided to hold off and wait. This past month I finally picked up a copy and after two weeks of struggling through it I finished a bit underwhelmed. Throughout the book there were multiple issues and at times I didn’t want to finish it. Unfortunately it met few of my expectations and fell far short of most of them.
The book is set in India and Great Britain, specifically focusing on how British rule affected India in its days of the slowly crumbling empire. The time period is right after the Great War and through to the end of World War Two. It follows numerous people who helped shape India and Britain during this period, many of them relatively unknown nowadays.
The book had three glaring issues that can really kill any book that has them. First off it seemed to have a bit of an identity crisis. The book is listed as a biography but of who I’m not sure. At first I thought that John Auden was the main focus but then you would have chapters all about his mistress and his friends and communist resistance leaders that didn’t even have much to do with him. I think it’s fine for a biography to dedicate a chapter or two to someone who is a big part of a person's life but I would read multiple chapters without John Auden even being mentioned. I really do not know who the books focus was supposed to be on, it didn’t seem to really have one and it just made the book confusing. Which leads into the second major issue.
The book was so disorganized that I became confused as to what was happening, and I’m not the only one. A lot of other reviews I read said that they were confused throughout the book. There were subsections in each chapter and they all had dates as to when the event happened which did help but then there were even issues with this. You would read one part of the chapter and it would be at a certain date and then the next section of the chapter would fling you back 10-20 years and just confuse you if you didn’t pay close attention to the sub headings. Then there were also sections where it was dated but in the middle of the whole thing the author started talking about a different event that happened at a different date, and oftentimes this was not clearly expressed.
With the disorganization comes the sin of leading on a subject. Stories would lead on for chapter after chapter and would be told alongside other stories and you would forget what you were even reading about unless you were paying extremely close attention. The date sub sections I mentioned played into this because if you did not watch those and realize you were in a different story then you would get confused real fast. It needed to be more concise and the stories need to be contained in their own chapters and sections, not intermingled with others where it becomes a confusing mess.
The single pronunciation in the book
On top of these there were many smaller issues. The book for the most part was set in India and being someone who is not particularly familiar with the region I struggled with the names of people and places. There is only one instance where the author put pronunciation and it wasn’t even for anything important. It was for an obscure piece of photography equipment for crying out loud! There were numerous names that I would have liked help with and all I get is one for a piece of photo equipment, really? It just does not make any sense to me. While on the subject of names there were at least 20 different names to remember while reading the book. There is a list of them at the beginning of the book that tells you who the people are but even that was confusing because instead of being in alphabetical order they were organized by the characters status or job or where they are featured in the book. If I tried to go back and look up a character in the middle of reading then I would have to really search for it and by that point I forgot what I was reading about.
There are two more pages of names after this first one
Along with better name recognition the book also could have benefited greatly from a map. Being someone who lives in the United States and has never been to India I am not too familiar with their geography and I imagine many readers are not either. I know where the major cities are but as for the less prominent regions I do not know, let alone specific mountains that are mentioned. A map of the areas that shows where the story is taking place would have been greatly appreciated.
The last thing that might not be an issue to some people but rubbed me the wrong way was how informal the writing was at certain points. I don’t expect a biography to have the wording of an official document or even a research paper but some of Miss Baker's word choices seemed juvenile and sometimes even distracted me as I thought certain areas could be worded better.
Most of these problems could have been fixed easily. As for the minor ones just put the character list in alphabetical order and put pronunciations next to names. As for the bigger issues I think just removing some of the less important people would help clear up confusion tremendously and make the book more reader friendly. If all the people in the book have to be there then I would recommend that they each have their own labelled chapters that are not mixed with one another unless they have to be and if a chapter has more than a couple people in a scene then it needs to be written more concisely. The book is 385 pages long and I think a lot could have been cut out, the book could have honestly been between 50-100 pages shorter and conveyed the same information.
I know I’ve been berating this book throughout the entire review but there were things I liked about it. The author used letters from the people she was writing about in her research and it helped to add a personal touch as if she really knew them. Another thing I really liked was the amount of events she covered and how they affected not just India but the world as a whole. For instance she talked about how the Nazis were trying to climb some of the highest mountains in India to prove their dominance and no one was allowed in the region while they were making their trek. Since many of the characters had to be idle at these times and could not perform their jobs she explained how this Nazi propaganda affected other parts of the world, in particular the British Empire. I found that extra detail good because it added to the story and showed the sentiment of the British and other European empires at the time, which fed into the overall theme of the book.
That brings me into the main upside of the book. Miss Baker did accomplish what she set out to do with this book. She told how the British Empire ended and how people felt about it and how they reacted to it. It was confusing at times but overall she did accomplish the goal of the book, and she did it through both the perspectives of the British, the Indian people, and British living in India. It was a very well rounded book in that respect.
With all that can I recommend The Last Englishmen? No, not to the average person at least. To someone who already has some knowledge about India and the British Empire during the early to mid 1900s then yea I would say try it and see. As for me I doubt I will be rereading it but at least it will look pretty on my bookshelf.
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Have you read this book? Leave a comment and tell me what you think about it.
