Paul Theroux is a well-travelled man. He has travelled to most places in the world and has written novels, short stories and travel writing reflecting his travels.
He began his writing career as a novelist in the 1960s (Waldo) and since then has published 29 novels. Many of these successful, some of them turned into movies and television series such as The Mosquito Coast. As well as the novels, Theroux has also produced eight collections of short stories. All of these reflect the fact that he has travelled to and lived in a number of different places.
It is, perhaps, the travel writing that most people know him for. Starting with The Great Railway Bazaar and including The Happy Isles of Oceania, The Old Patagonia Express, he has documented his journeys around the world. Most recently he wrote On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey. All these books provide a vivid portrayal of the places he has visited and make him one of the best travel writers of his generation.
His latest novel, Burma Sahib, is somewhat different to what has gone before. It is a novel, but it is a novel based on the early life of George Orwell. It covers the period Orwell – or Eric Blair, as he was at the time – was a member of the colonial police force in Burma.
Eric Blair was born in India, his father being a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service overseeing the production of opium for sale in China. Moving back to England, the Blairs were not well off, but Eric did go to Eton and his time there is reflected on during the book. His more affluent school mates going on to Oxbridge, something the Blair family could not afford, Eric thought a way forward would be to join the Indian Imperial Police.
Deciding on a post in Burma (at the time a province of India) because his maternal grandmother lived there, in 1922 19-year-old Eric Blair left for Burma where he was, at the outset, to be Assistant District Superintendent (on probation). He spent five years working in various parts of that country and it clearly formed an important part of his early development as a writer.
His first novel, Burmese Days, is a “a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj”. Telling the story of John Flory, the novel is about a “lone and lacking individual trapped within a bigger system that is undermining the better side of human nature”. It describes both “indigenous corruption and imperial bigotry”. These are the thoughts which Blair was developing while in Burma and the views which led him to leave Burma, return to England and pursue a career as a writer and a future as George Orwell.
It is these five years which are the focus of Theroux’s novel. He follows Blair to Burma and creates a fiction about his life there, albeit based on some known facts. His family in Moulmein play a part in the novel and the famous story Shooting and Elephant, published in 1936, is there, but much of the story is a fiction created by Theroux to explain how the Orwell developed the views which became a significant part of the novels and essays he wrote years later.
In Burma Sahib Eric Blair is not a successful policeman. He finds it difficult to form successful relationships with his colleagues. They are conscious of his Etonian background and make much play of this. They are resentful or exhibit an inverted snobbery.
Nor is he able to understand or develop relationships with the Burmese. “In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves”.
Blair is embarrassed by his family, who have married outside of the British community and found themselves, as a result, failures in business and excluded from society. He is looked down upon by his superiors and unable to become integrated into the life of the British Clubs, which were a central element in the imperial community. He also did not believe in and could not take part in the church.
In Theroux’s novel Blair spends his time in books, visits brothels and has sexual relationships with his servants. There is one affair with the wife of a British trader. She has a deep dislike of the Empire and together they share their thoughts about the way the Empire is there simply to purge resources from the local population. But this is an affair with a married woman and it Cn not, and does not, last.
In the end, Eric Blair spends his time reading books and developing the ideas which would lead him to become a writer and a trenchant critic of the politics which supported the Raj.
Although there is little known about Orwell’s time in Burma. Theroux has built a story about what is known and has developed a believable character who becomes George Orwell. While the story is not gripping, it is compelling.
The experience which Theroux used to make him one of the best travel writers of his time allows him to create an image of Burma in the 1920s which is very believable. He manages to develop a picture of Burma which is at once beguiling and, because of the impact of colonialism, horrifying. The treatment of locals is at best patronising and at worst tyrannical and abusive.
As a whole the book is a believable explanation of how Blair developed from the ungainly and uncertain youth who left Eton and, after his all too bitter experiences in Burma, became the George Orwell who would become a doyen of the left. It also explains where some of his experience of tyranny and exploitation, central to Nineteen Eighty-Four, was first encountered.
This is an interesting book to anyone interested in Orwell. It is an fascinating book to anyone interested in finding out what the Raj looked like from inside the British mind. It is also a very good read.
