Burmese Days: A Novel

Protagonist James Flory is a timber merchant, whose facial birthmark serves as an outward expression of the ironic and left-leaning habits of mind that make him inwardly different from his coevals. Flory appreciates the local culture, has native allegiances, and detests the racist machinations of his fellow Club members. Alas, he doesn't always possess the moral courage, or the energy, to stand against them. His almost embarrassingly Anglophile friend, Dr. Veraswami, the highest-ranking native official, seems a shoo-in for Club membership, until Machiavellian magistrate U Po Kyin launches a campaign to discredit him that results, ultimately, in the loss not just of reputations but of lives. Whether to endorse Veraswami or to betray him becomes a kind of litmus test of Flory's character.

Against this backdrop of politics and ethics, Orwell throws the shadow of romance. The arrival of the bobbed blonde, marriageable, and resolutely anti-intellectual Elizabeth Lackersteen not only casts Flory as hapless suitor but gives Orwell the chance to show that he's as astute a reporter of nuanced social interactions as he is of political intrigues. In fact, his combination of an astringently populist sensibility, dead-on observations of human behavior, formidable conjuring skills, and no-frills prose make for historical fiction that stands triumphantly outside of time. --Joyce Thompson

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Pox Britannica, 2008-07-01
With his very first novel, Orwell earned an honorable position on the crowded shelves of Raj Lit. It was a kind of self-liberation, so he could drop the subject henceforth.
He had spent 5 years in Burma as a police officer. Why had he done that? His family was of the shabby genteel class, and his father's pension from the imperial service in India was barely enough to carry him through school. So he skipped university and did what the people in his novel do: sign up for the colonies in the hope of reasonable wealth and career.
When he quit after 5 years, he had some explaining to do. He did it with this novel.
Most first novels are autobiographic to some extent, but Orwell did something different: he figured out what he himself would have become had he stayed. His 'hero' Flory is an alter ego under the hypothical assumption of having stayed for 15 years instead of quitting after 5.
Flory has a different job, but that doesn't matter much. He is a deeply lonely and frustrated man without prospects. He is disgusted with himself and with his social crowd, the sahiblog, who enforce conformism in the most primitive way. They are generally a disgusting group of people.
Flory meets a young woman who seems the answer to his loneliness problem. For her, he might be the solution to her problem, which is the expectation of spinsterhood in poverty. They misunderstand each other thouroughly and make a huge mess of it.
The personal tragedy of Flory is framed by stories of imperial intrigues, by local officials playing Machiavelli and by the sahibs sinking into delirium tremens.
I read it first when I was working and living in other parts of the by then former Raj. I think everything would have been different if the poorpeople, the sahiblog, had had airconditioning. They might have been able to use their brains more.


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The Best Was Yet To Come (3.5/5), 2008-05-05
BURMESE DAYS is my least-favorite Orwell novel - not because it is badly written (in some ways it features his very best descriptive prose outside of 1984) - but because it is the only book he ever wrote which lacked an overt political purpose. By his own admission, Orwell was at his best when he was writing politically, and at his worst when he was "betrayed into purple passages" by his love of language for language's sake. And while BURMESE DAYS is most definitely an anti-imperialist work from start to finish, it was penned mainly so that Orwell could exorcise the demon of his own years in the Southeast Asia from his head. As he later wrote, "The scenery of Burma so haunted me I later had to write a novel just to get rid of it."

BURMESE DAYS is the story of a young British official named Flory working in the jungles of Burma during the middle 1920s. What Flory actually does for the Empire isn't relevant to the story; suffice to say that he's simply one of the many lower middle-class Englanders who were able, by virtue of being white and in the East, of living in a style they never could have afforded in England - horses, mistresses, servants, whisky, club life. Despite the petty priveleges he cannot bring himself to relinquish, however, he hates the Empire and the psychological burdens it imposes on those who serve it - especially the necessity of isolating oneself from the naitives (whom Flory likes much better than the drunken, racist, morally decayed British officials he is forced to associate with). The plot of the novel revolves around two separate, yet linked storylines: the first is Flory's politically inconvenient friendship with a Burmese doctor, whose nomination to the hitherto whites-only club is the cause of much ugliness, gossip and plotting; the second is his clumsy pursuit of a husband-hunting Englishwoman whom he sees as a refuge from his terrible isolation. Both situations put Flory through an emotional wringer, as he awkwardly tries to protect his friend and at the same make a vital emotional connection with a woman who is much, much less than she appears.

Please don't mistake me: I love Orwell and here is much to recommend the book. The atmosphere of Imperial Burma in the 20s - the heat, the humidity, the sleepless nights, the hunting parties, the boring, endlessly recycled conversations, the [...] everybody keeps and nobody talks about, the gin-drinking, the hypocrisy and loneliness - is expertly captured by Orwell's pen. The descriptions of Burma are unbelievably vivid, and Flory himself is a refreshingly weak and complicated protagonist - strong enough to have subversive opinions but not quite strong enough to stand up for them. And yet BURMESE DAYS is one of those books that is a bit less than the sum of its parts - most of the individual scenes work, and Orwell's descriptive prose is often startlingly beautiful - but taken as a whole the book doesn't precisely know what it is trying to accomplish. Is it just a novel, with anti-imperialism as recurring subtext, or is it an anti-imperialist screed in novel form? The fact that this question can be asked at all shows how much Orwell grew as a thinker in the years after it was published.






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everything a novel should be, 2008-01-02
This is by far the best book I have read in a long, long time. Orwell's mastery of the English language is apparent and the words flow so elegantly from cover to cover, it will be over before you know it. The story is powerful and interesting.

If you liked 1984 or Animal Farm, you need to read this too. While less famous than his later works, this novel is excellent in every sense of the word.


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Burmese Days by George Orwell, 2007-10-25
The book is an easy read with insights into the current state of Burma's (Myannmar) affairs. The colonial dismantling of traditional social structures with the resulting chaos is common throughout the world. George Orwell prophecies the future of Myannmar with this book and "1984". A common joke in Myannmar is " We have many dentists but no one goes because in Burma we are not allowed to open our mouths" This is a good book to read before reading Emma Larkin's "FInding George Orwell in Burma"

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