by D. J. Taylor
The Sunday Times, 22 August 2004
George Orwell is an elusive quarry at the best of times, but the five years
that he spent in Burma as a servant of the Indian Imperial Police are a kind
of black hole in his early life. No letter home survives, and barely a
handful of reminiscences from the people who knew him there. Most of the
official government records of his career were lost in the Japanese invasion
of 1942. His important writings about Burma - the novel Burmese Days and the
famous sketches A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant - were published some
years after his return to England in 1927, his health already shattered by
the ruinous local climate. Of the 2m or so words assembled by Peter Davison
in his 20- volume Complete Works, all that can be dated back to the Burma
years is a handful of amateurish poems.
Post-Orwell, the Burma of the fading colonial Raj, whose oppression he came
to detest and whose remembered horrors informed his critiques of British
imperialism, offers a particularly terrifying instance of life's fatal
ability to imitate art. It took only a scant four years after independence
in 1948 for General Ne Win to inaugurate his stifling dictatorship.
Late-1980s democratic stirrings (the word "democracy" is currently
unprintable in Burma) were brutally snuffed out by the current gang of
military tyrants. The world of Animal Farm, in which the pigs steadily
remodel themselves into nastier versions of the humans they overthrew, was
replaced by an East Asian variant of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and there is a
desperate inevitability in the spectacle of the Burmese ancient whom Emma
Larkin questions about Orwell in her opening chapter, referring to him as
"the prophet".
Secret Histories, the record of Larkin's wanderings in modern Burma (or
"Myanmar" as the current bunch of military tyrants prefers to call it), is
an odd hybrid of a book: half a companion guide to the twentysomething
Orwell's time in the East; half a series of dispatches from a country in a
state of internal siege, where informers lurk on every street corner and the
glimpse of a white face anywhere off the official tourist trail is the
excuse for an orgy of form-filling and clumsy surveillance. While the
chronology is vague - the account seems to have been put together from a
number of visits made over a period of several years - the geography is
exact, following the route marked by Orwell's postings in Mandalay, the
southern Delta, the capital Rangoon, Moulmein and finally Katha, which
Orwell acknowledged to be the model for Kyauktada in Burmese Days.
With 80 years gone since Larkin's subject (then trading under his baptismal
name of Eric Blair) was at large in the area, the scent has gone somewhat
cold. Much of the architecture of Orwell's time remains, however - the
police-training school at Mandalay with its haunted room, whose legends
Larkin investigates, and the gruesome prison at Insein, the population now
swollen to four times its size in the 1920s. Any disappointment the reader
may feel at the lack of fresh Orwell material is swiftly anaesthetised by
the glosses of local Orwell-fanciers. From the textual sleuth who deduces
that the elephant in Shooting an Elephant is a giant metaphor for
Imperialism itself to the retired elephant hunter who criticises Orwell's
inability to put the beast out of its misery - apparently the trick is to
aim for the point where the two eye-ear lines cross - these are never less
than fascin- ating: a sudden sulphurous whiff from a world in which a writer
finds himself turned into a glowing personal presence in the lives of
thousands of ordinary people.
Larkin is sensitive, too, to the wider effect that Burma had on the young
Blair's consciousness. The half-decade spent on the further side of the
Indian Ocean is often seen by critics as a dreadful exile, tedious
sequestration in an alien land, thousands of miles from everything he held
dear. In fact, though Orwell may not have liked Burma (a childhood friend
remembered letters in which he claimed to hate the place), the country was
in his blood: his mother's family had lived there for years; his grandmother
and aunts were virtual neighbours at one point. In this context Larkin takes
a welcome look at the fragmentary notes for a novel entitled A Smoking Room
Story, found among Orwell's papers after his death in 1950. Set on the steam
ship making its way home to England from Rangoon, the outline looks like an
attempt to return not only to the Maughamesque narrative conceits of his
apprentice days but also to the scene of his political and literary
grounding.
Unpretentiously written (in the complimentary sense of the phrase) though
sometimes a touch shaky in its biographical detail - Orwell's sanatorium in
the "green and pleasant Cotswolds" was actually a freezing hill settlement
so spartan in its arrangements that Orwell's friends feared the stay might
further undermine his health - Secret Histories contains several striking
vignettes. In the most memorable of all, Larkin questions a 13-year-old boy
sent up from the country by his impoverished parents to drudge in a Rangoon
teashop for four dollars a month. "How often do you go home?" she wonders.
There is a pause. "I haven't been home yet. Maybe I'm not going home any
more." Later she peers through the shutters of the locked-up shop and sees
him fast asleep on a table with his fellow-waiters. Yet more depressing than
these accounts of ground-down lives and state-ordained misery is the thought
that no Burmese citizen will ever have a chance to read them.
