Too much key, not enough novel

Susanna Moore’s fifth novel opens on board the Jupiter in February 1836, with the ladies — make that a capital ‘L’ — Eleanor and Harriet, together with their brother Henry (the incoming governor-general), en route to India. Storms rattle the halyards, rats scrabble at the sodden travelling library and Eleanor, our raisonneur, is somewhat put out to find her own excrement floating back and forth through the flooded cabin. Subsequently, as the Bay of Bengal looms before them, she professes herself ‘shocked at the violence I discover in myself’. Later, inevitably, she will be shocked by the violence she discovers in other people.

A first sighting of Calcutta’s chaotic quayside offers only ‘a melancholy absence of official dignity’. Happily this soon yields to the splendours of Government House, where the danger is that ‘I am learning to deny myself nothing’. Already, though, the tocsin of the roman à clef is clanging lustily in the reader’s ear. ‘Henry’ is George, Lord Auckland. His devoted sisters are Emily and Fanny Eden, both of whom left vivid accounts of their time in the subcontinent, to which Susanna Moore has liberally helped herself. Together with various satellites — cousin Lafayette, the homosexual chef St Clery — deutero-Emily settles down to her new routine, receiving news from London and Mr Dickens’s latest from her old suitor Lord Melbourne and compiling dogged inventories of the locale: ‘The rooms of the house were decorated a little too much for my liking: four Raphaels poorly rendered … two dozen hall chairs bearing the Sutherland coat of arms.’

Things pick up a bit on a mass excursion to the Punjab, a prelude to Henry’s inspired scheme to lessen Russian influence in Afghanistan by replacing its ruler, Dost Mohammed, with a British-backed stooge.