Burmese Days

"For fiction about Burma, I suppose you should start with the classic of all time, which has to be Orwell’s Burmese Days. It’s based on Orwell’s experiences in Burma from 1922 to 1927. The story is about John Flory, a timber merchant in Burma, who’s a bit disillusioned and nothing much is happening to him. Everything is based around the English Club, with all the tiny things that put you wrong, and it’s such a mean, bitchy little place. It’s terribly snooty, and they don’t want Flory’s Indian friend Dr Veeraswami to become a member. Just like the Scots and English the Burmese have these animosities that go back for ever, and they look down on Indians, and call them ‘dog Indians’. Flory has a Burmese mistress, but then this girl Elizabeth arrives, who’s come out to Burma to stay with her uncle. She’s pretty dreadful but better than no one. Flory is very pro-Burma and the Burmese, but Elizabeth is full of English prejudices and racism and can’t stand it. The book’s very funny in that way that Orwell is funny. Flory shows off – they go shooting and he shoots a leopard and decides he’ll have it skinned and give it to Elizabeth as a rug, but then he has it cured badly and it absolutely stinks. Anyway, a scheming local official pays Flory’s mistress to come back and cause a scandal, and Flory is wretched because Elizabeth is horrified. It’s terribly sad, terribly good and brilliantly written, and says an awful lot about British prejudices and British colonialists. Burma’s a very strange place generally, because it wasn’t like India, with an infrastructure. If you went there, there wasn’t so much of that high Calcutta social life and the racecourse and so on. It got like that later on, and Rangoon airport became the busiest airport in Southeast Asia in about the 20s. Academics went out there, it was a great place, and Rangoon got to be on a par with Calcutta, but certainly not upcountry like in this book, where it was like the Wild West – a frontier place. You know where you are with Burmese Days, though, because it’s Orwell and he’s never written a bad sentence in his life. It’s just wonderful: funny, ironic, a horribly sad portrait of colonial life."