In 1920, a young Englishman called Eric Blair sailed out to become a sahib in the Raj. He was stationed in Burma as a policeman, overseeing the Burmese and Indian ‘natives’ who worked in the teak forests and rubber plantations in the service of the British crown. He spent 5 years in Burma before abruptly resigning. He then spent the rest of his life as a novelist writing under the name George Orwell. And obviously, it’s that last part that makes him unusually interesting.
Paul Theroux has taken this relatively unknown part of Orwell’s life — the Burma years — as the subject for this fictional biography. Information about this period of Orwell’s life comes from only a few sources — Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, a couple of short stories, his terse letters home, and perhaps a few other reports from the place and period — so this book is definitely a mix of fact and fiction.
From the beginning of the novel, Blair stands apart from the other empire-runners. He had attended Eton, but bears no love for his alma mater and has miserable memories of the endless beatings and abuse by the older boys. As a scholarship student from a middle-class family, he never quite fits in at Eton, on the ship out to Burma, or as a sahib. He avoids the socialization and fake jollity on the ship, preferring to read in peace by himself, but given the small collection of English people on board, he is the inevitable subject of gossip.
He is a very tall, awkward man, and much is made of this.
As always, among others, he was conscious of his height […]
[…] the tall young man with a prowling gait […]
There is a lot of commentary about accents:
Many had the peculiar plummy accents of English people who’d lived abroad for years, who’d refined and improved their lower-middle-class accents, making the women sound actressy and the men bluff, honking and huffing, “I say, my dear chap…”
The Scottish accent in particular comes in for much disdain:
“And what sort of duffrent muschief were you getting up to at that time, laddie?” Alec said to Blair. “Give us a hent.”
[..] Hearing the hated burr […]
Blair, as portrayed in this book, is a man of contradictions. He is very aware of the logistical oddity of the Empire, where a small handful of English supported by their Indian and Burmese lackeys ruled over a massive number of Burmese — the same situation that existed in all the colonies. He is also aware that this is Burmese land, and willing to internally question the ethics of the situation. He is actively conscious of English brutality towards the colonized. Jallianwala Bagh is mentioned several times.
It seemed that the pukka sahib was often a bully and was elevated so far above the native that he had no clear idea of the reality of Burmese life. But there was something more, something worse, something poisonous in the role: the pukka sahib was always a hypocrite.
At the same time, Blair can be brutal himself.
[He kicks the dhobi for imperfect ironing:] another insolent bandy-legged Madrassi who stank of sweat, who’d provoked him.
[likewise physically abuses his bearer and cook] his hand raised against [..] the maddening Indians, the stubborn Burmese — the men crouched and cowering in their misery when he landed the blow or kicked them.
Blair is also quite sexual in this book: he makes frequent visits to the brothels and has favourites among the prostitutes. He orders his Burmese housemaids into his bed. (The novel suggests that they were willing participants, but the balance of power is such that it is a discomforting scenario for the reader). He also has a relationship with a bored English memsahib.
How much of this grew out of Theroux’s imagination, and how much is verifiable from Blair/Orwell’s own writing or that of his contemporaries? It’s hard to tell.
Blair develops a biting view of the Raj:
The system was deeply flawed. Half the bureaucrats he knew in Burma would have been hard-pressed in England to get a job mending bicycles. How did the empire persist, then? It was the indifference of the majority of natives living in villages, oblivious of government — religion and ancient superstition and lack of education — allowed the system to flourish. And people like him, unfit to be policemen, pretending to keep order.
Unfortunately the novel suffers from repetitiveness. Over and over the reader is told of Blair’s awkwardness, his gangly limbs and the way he stooped. His clothing is always apparently messy and his boots unclean despite the servants who are supposed to be cleaning them. In each of the towns to which he is posted, he is investigating murder, rape, dowry deaths and ‘sedition’, or protests against English rule. In each town there is an English club containing bored and boring drunken Englishmen: Blair hates going to each club, we are told, but then finally goes there occasionally to avoid becoming the subject of gossip. This repetition makes the book seem as though Theroux had limited material to work with, and stretched it out into a unnecessarily lengthy book.
One surprise element is Blair’s acquaintance with an expat Indian called Thackeray, who seems to have been related to the Shiv Sena Thackeray family.
The fact that Eric Blair went on to become George Orwell adds a whole level of curiosity for readers: what can one pick out about his experiences (as portrayed by Theroux, let’s not forget) that prompted his decision to become a writer? Did his life as a Raj sahib surrounded by servants induce him to try the lowpaid life that he portrayed in Down and Out in Paris and London? Did it somehow lead to the subversive 1984 and Animal Farm? Theroux draws some arrows from the Burma moments to foreshadow this evolution, but to me they seemed a bit forced and not very convincing.
There is no sense of a buildup in this book from the callow unhappy Blair heading for Burma to the man who decided to resign 5 years later. Instead, the book slogs through each of Blair’s postings in Burma, until finally there is a social debacle relating to his mixed-race cousin (a Theroux invention, apparently) and an angry Burmese concubine.
It is difficult to mentally match the Blair in this book with the Orwell who wrote the wonderfully elegant Down and Out in Paris and London, or Homage to Catalonia, both memoirs about his atypical experiences in Europe. This book exposed me to more of his background, but didn’t give me a better sense of his personal growth and development (or rather, not one that I really trusted). All in all I prefer to read Orwell in his own words.
Really interesting. I guess we can surmise Orwell/Blair was a man of contradictions. It makes sense he felt himself an outsider and misfit, which then led him onto anti-establishment writing. But agree with you, beyond that, who knows how accurate or otherwise this representation may be.
It is also the case that Orwell might have edited himself in his autobiographical novels. In the ones I’ve read, there is no sense of the violent and sexual being that Theroux portrays. It could be those were aspects of his personality that he chose not to expose in his writing.
I liked Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast, but that focused on the inherent self-importance of an American who moved himself and his family to the Honduras to bring ice (yes, really!) to the natives. This novel is less impressive.