Burma Sahib — discovering the mind of George Orwell – before he became Orwell

George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. (Photo: medium.com / Wikipedia)

By J Brooks Spector

23 Jun 2024

Famed travel writer and author Paul Theroux has crafted a biographical novel of the formative years of the man who became George Orwell. In the book, he searches for the inner core of a writer who became one of the great moralists of the twentieth century.

His new book, Burma Sahib is the US novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux’s reimagining of the early life of Eric Blair/George Orwell. In attempting this, Theroux has taken on one of the more difficult balancing acts of creative writing.

The book is an inversion of the novelist’s more usual technique of inserting a fully fictional character of their own imagining (think Sydney Carton in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, perhaps) into well-known historical circumstances, and using that character’s adventures to illuminate the mores and behaviours of that period or even to drive home an ideological point about their own time.

burma sahib george orwell US novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux. (Photo: Supplied)

Instead, Theroux has embraced the real life of a well-known, actual historical person — and another famous writer no less. He has tackled the development of a writer on the road to becoming one of the twentieth century’s most important moral voices. And yet, Theroux’s book is not quite biography. Instead, Theroux uses the stylistic devices and approaches of fiction in his search to locate the inner Orwell struggling to emerge from Eric Blair.

The object of Theroux’s attention is, of course, Eric Blair, rather than the man who Blair would become — George Orwell. But the latter is not there yet and only arrives in the last few pages.

Theroux’s novel — or perhaps we should call it a fictive biography — begins as Blair, a teenager fresh out of Eton, eschewing the more normal path for someone in his cohort of going on to Oxford or Cambridge, enlists in the Indian Imperial Police Force in Burma, at the time part of the British Raj. This occurs to the astonishment of just about everyone who knows Blair.

(Importantly, on his mother’s side, family members had lived and worked for generations in Burma in the timber trade. His father had been an opium agent for the British government of India and Blair was born in India. There was also his half-understood urge to become a writer as he dug deep into distant realms.)

George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. (Photo: medium.com / Wikipedia)

In Theroux’s recreation of Blair’s saga, there was his initial absorption of the British ruling class’s prejudices in tandem with his creeping disdain for all that, and thus the crucible for his eventual travails. These feelings begin on his sea voyage to Burma as he becomes increasingly inculcated in the ways (and deep-seated, vulgar prejudices) of those “servants of the Raj”. The narrative moves on to the police training college in Mandalay, and then to a series of probationary, apprenticeship assignments in smaller outposts, and eventually to Rangoon, the colony’s capital.

Along the way, though, there are Blair’s growing misgivings about his suitability for his job choice, the deeper purposes of his policing and the meaning of the entire imperial system of which he is now a lowly cog. Blair has affairs with Burmese women, including his house servants, as well as an intellectually adventurous English woman who is bored with her memsahib-style life. But paradoxically, Blair also demonstrates still-ingrained prejudices towards his relatives in the city of Moulmein, some of whom have married into Burmese families, and various individuals — especially Indians — who befriend him.

Eventually, increasingly sickened by the realities of his poorly chosen career, Blair resigns from the police and becomes a Parisian hotel kitchen worker — experiences Orwell will movingly depict in his first major writing, his book Down and Out in Paris and London. It is with this book that the pen name George Orwell is fully launched.

Bullying and oppression

Of course, there is also the writing Orwell created that looks back at his youth and experiences in Burma, all of which are foretold in Blair’s life as set out by Theroux. Orwell drew upon those school experiences for a major essay, written years later: Such, Such Were the Joys.

Theroux presages how Orwell will remember an experience filled with bullying and oppression by upper-class fellow students — bitterly, mostly — and how it helped give him a template to excoriate the entire imperial system from the inside. One sidelight to this class consciousness and support for the underdog is that during his life, Orwell continued to hold a low regard for the spiritual father of India’s redemption from colonial rule — Mahatma Gandhi.

Any reader of Burma Sahib even modestly familiar with the Orwell canon will recall the writing Orwell eventually created to integrate his Burma experiences into his own metamorphosis as a leftwing moralist. Like so many other readers, I initially encountered the force of Orwell’s writing in junior high school English classes through reading those two astonishing essays Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging.

The actual events they depict show up in Theroux’s fictionalisation of Blair’s unfortunate carrying out of his police duties. And, just as Orwell did in those essays, Theroux imbues those experiences with much larger lessons, further estranging Blair from his ill-chosen career path.

Because this is also a work of imagination, rather than a straightforward biography, Theroux has filled in (or invented) events that make perfect sense in the ways of colonial Burma of the 1920s, even if there is less than full documentation of their having happened to Blair as a colonial policeman. Some reviewers, such as Darcy Moore, have taken Theroux to task for recasting some of Blair’s experiences and for fictionalising some of the very real people who populated Blair’s Burma life.

However, it should be understood that this is not a biography in the usual sense of the word and this way of describing things is very similar to the way real events have fictional elements introduced into them when they are the source material for televised or cinematic dramas.

Even if actual events were recomposed by Theroux, other similar ones at the outposts of colonial officialdom in small towns and Rangoon would undoubtedly have occurred. Moreover, in Theroux’s telling and from the evidence of Orwell’s writing, events like those became the clay Orwell would draw from and reshape as fiction when his first novel, Burmese Days, emerged nearly a decade later.

What Theroux aims to deliver is an exploration of the way a writer’s real life can become the raw material for his fictional creations, as well as the mysterious process that happens when a would-be writer finally achieves a public voice.

Curiously, in some ways, that evolution has echoes in Theroux’s own life. Blair/Orwell goes from the Indian Imperial Police to dishwasher in Paris, to chronicler of the lives of indigent farm labourers and coal miners, to soldier in the Spanish Civil War on the side of Republican Spain, to a position as an increasingly well-known essayist and novelist and then, ultimately, to the deeply disappointed socialist who sets out in unforgettable precision the great terrors of the future in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Beyond an ordinary life

In confronting the disruptions of our current era, Orwell’s predictions and fears have become increasingly relevant yet again, a topic I explored in an essay in this space two years ago.

Meanwhile, with his own trajectory, Theroux goes from a quotidian life as a student in the US to being a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, then a university lecturer in Uganda after he is forced to leave Malawi, to a time as an itinerant writer and teacher in Singapore, and finally to a career as one of the 20th and 21st centuries’ great travel writers. This lifetime of experiences has allowed Theroux to reveal the underbelly of the global political and social order — even as he manages to squeeze in a lengthy public squabble with another writer of a similar sensibility, VS Naipaul.

In Theroux’s output, works like The Consul’s File, Saint Jack and The Great Railway Bazaar emerge out of his own life as a sojourner in places well beyond the world of his upbringing. In his travels through Southeast and East Asia, his dry, wry outlook collided in so many ways, as did Blair’s, with the vast, colourful, exotic, mysterious (or inscrutable?) universe that is Asia.

In my youth I also had the itch to move beyond an ordinary life, joining the Foreign Service to explore Africa and Asia. Reading Orwell’s oeuvre, as well as stories and novels by others who tackled such places — Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene, EM Forster, JG Ballard, VS Naipaul, William Boyd, the memoirs of early travellers and diplomats in Asia, among others — excited me.

Theroux and my paths seemed to have crossed several times. One of Theroux’s short stories, A Funeral in Surabaya, echoes my experiences living in Surabaya, Indonesia. Theroux’s story describes the quarrels surrounding a funeral in a regional city in eastern Java for a member of the remnant Jewish community there. There can’t be many Western writers who have described such a small community in a distant Indonesian city — even if that city had been the commercial hub and big city of the Dutch East Indies in Conrad’s novels.

And yet while I was living there, oddly enough, I ended up officiating over a Passover Seder for that actual community — even as we were observed by a class of Indonesian students at a Lutheran seminary. The old synagogue there was by then under the protection of the Muslim widow of a Baghdadi Jew whose family had migrated to Surabaya in the early 1900s. As the community slowly passed into history, that house of worship was soon to be deconsecrated and sold off.

A few years later, in Sapporo, Japan, shortly after I arrived there, one of our staffers proudly showed me the chapter in Theroux’s travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar where that employee had played a visible role. While Theroux had called him Watanabe-san, not his real name, the similarities in style, behaviour, and even physiognomy were unmistakable.

In fact, “Watanabe’s” assistance made it clear many of our diplomatic offices across Asia had been instrumental in Theroux’s journey across the continent, rather than it having been serendipitous, accidental explorations. Had I been in Sapporo just two years earlier, Theroux and I would have explored Japanese nightclubs and cabarets together.

Rediscovering Orwell

But let us return to the contemporary relevance of Orwell and why Theroux may have elected to tackle this challenging project. In the post-Cold War world, Orwell’s dire predictions and fears sometimes seemed misplaced; a leftover from those more perilous, dangerous times.

But more recently, especially with the rise of a belligerent, increasingly authoritarian Russia, its threats and then invasion of Ukraine, a resurgent China, and what seems to be a forever conflict in the Middle East, Orwell’s foreboding of an unending, three-sided global conflict, once more seems more prediction or prophecy than a novelist’s lurid imaginings.

There is now a burgeoning Orwell industry. New primary source materials have become available, new biographical works, and even a feminist retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four — Julia, by Sandra Newman, which was authorised by the administrators of Orwell’s literary estate.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Sandra Newman’s ‘Julia’ is a Nineteen Eighty-Four with a feminist twist

Theroux’s Burma Sahib allows readers an opportunity to rediscover the Orwell before he was a harbinger of a dire future; when he was just beginning to figure out who he was and what he would like to become. A fictionalised rendition of an author’s beginnings delves into how his unpromising start in his first professional effort became the crucible that helped turn him into the writer he ultimately became.

In Burma Sahib’s epigraph, Theroux quotes Orwell: “There is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever.” Theroux is intent on focusing tightly on that very short period in Burma when Blair/Orwell’s character is cast, and the outlines of the writer Orwell became emerge in the experiences Theroux offers his readers. DM

Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux, 2024, Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Books), hardback, ISBN 978-0-241-63334-2; paperback, ISBN 978-0-241-99894-6

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Bullying and oppression

Beyond an ordinary life

Rediscovering Orwell