The Brothel Boy and Other Parables of the Law

"Yes, it so happened that another icon of colonial writing was there at the same time: Eric Blair, aka George Orwell. And Blair/Orwell is the protagonist of The Brothel Boy, a collection of stories by the late Norval Morris, a legal scholar better known for his expertise on criminology than on Burmese history. I first came across Morris through a series of University of Chicago monographs titled ‘Parables of the Law’. These appeared to be summaries of legal cases arising in Burma and mediated by a British official named Eric Blair. Intrigued, I wrote to its author. This led to an exchange of letters and telephone calls in the course of which – or so I like to think – the seeds for The Brothel Boy were sown. Oh, only in the sense that I suggested publishing the separate parables, so called, as a book. It actually took a while for the idea to cohere – and for Morris, who was then emeritus professor at the University of Chicago law school, to find a publisher. When the book, published by OUP in 1992, finally arrived on my desk (with an inscription I’ll always treasure), I kissed it. Eric Blair, as we see him in these stories, is a young magistrate wrestling daily with moral, ethical, and legal ambiguities during his tour of duty in Moulmein. But instead of the mature George Orwell telling the reader what it is like to shoot an elephant mainly to avoid looking like a fool in front of the natives, the young Eric Blair in The Brothel Boy lets the reader into his private doubts and deliberations as he struggles to do the right thing. Each story is both a parable and a legal precedent, on issues as charged as child custody, domestic violence, and capital punishment. Norval Morris was such a modest and unassuming correspondent that it was really only after his death in 2004 that I discovered the range of his formidable publications on crime and punishment. What impressed me most when I knew him was the rather rare phenomenon of a lawyer seeking clarity in the law through fiction!"