Expert opinion is divided on why a teenaged Eric Blair decided to become an imperial police officer in Burma rather than go up from Eton College to the University of Oxford. One biographer, Gordon Bowker, suggested the young Blair wanted to leave his “demons” in England and explore his “dark side”. Others, such as John Sutherland, say Blair, at 19, sought adventure by replacing his Etonian uniform for that of a pukka sahib and going on “tiger shoots”.
Sutherland says this reflected Blair’s cynicism about politics and specifically the British Empire, for which his father had worked for 40 years as an opium tester. Blair, who was born in Motihari (Bihar), Bengal, in 1903, was curious to learn more about what he considered a “racket” – a confidence trick the British had imposed on many parts of the world, including New Zealand.
Paul Theroux, now in his 80s, starts his vividly imagined account with Blair on the Herefordshire steaming towards Rangoon in 1922, avoiding the other passengers and immersing himself in HG Wells and Jack London. Already, Blair was writing the diary of an alter ego, John Flory, who represented the worst Britain had to offer in running its colonies.
The lucrative opium trade to China had ceased in 1916, but teak and other treasures remained profitable activities. Few can match Theroux’s experience in his skills as a travel journalist (19 books) and novelist (33 titles) to turn Blair’s formative five-year stint into a racy story of George Orwell, one of the 20th century’s most celebrated writers.
At nearly 400 pages, the novel follows Blair as he criss-crosses Burma from Mandalay and Kartha in the north to the Irrawaddy Delta towns in the south, including Rangoon. He commands a police force made up of various ethnicities to solve and punish myriad crimes against the native population, as well as the colonial authorities.
Theroux notes that Blair found far more Shakespearean drama in Burmese society than he missed by not going to Oxford: rebellious Buddhist priests, corrupt monarchs and threatening young monks who provided a “wickedness that was real”. Armed robbers, known as dacoits, were common, as were dowry murders, one of which was the subject of an essay, “A Hanging” (1931).
His shooting of an elephant, recounted in another essay (1936), ends in disaster. On the pleasurable side, the young Blair discovers passion aplenty in his encounters with native women and an adulterous memsahib. She is a bored wife in her late 20s and provides the central romantic thread in Theroux’s story. They share a mutual interest in the free-love novels of DH Lawrence, and she disguises herself as a syce (horse groom) on her night-time trysts in a community where few secrets exist.
In 1927, ill health forced Blair to return to England, where he adopted his writing pseudonym. His misogynist and predatory attitude toward his two wives and women in general have lately become a salient issue.
Anna Funder, author of Wifedom, appears at this year’s Auckland Writers’ Festival, while Sandra Newman’s Julia is a feminist retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It can be difficult to separate the views of Blair and Theroux, the latter of whom has had books banned in apartheid South Africa and Singapore. “It seemed 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.” On EM Forster’s A Passage to India, “he only saw surfaces, he had no idea what lay beneath” the brutality at the centre of the Empire. But, as one pukka sahib advised Blair soon after he arrived, “A hundred years from now, there will be disorder in Burma, and alarm and despondency.”
Today’s Myanmar is one of the world’s basket cases, riven by civil war and facing the prospect of domination by China. Politically, China backs the military junta while also protecting the gangs that have taken over the “racket” of “smuggling drugs, gems, timber and people”, as The Economist recently reported.
