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Mariner

In “<a href="https://amzn.to/42bdSMG" target=_blank>Burma Sahib</a>,” the renowned novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux imagines the life of young Eric Blair (the future George Orwell) when he was a novice police officer in colonial Burma. At that point, Orwell was still Blair’s “secret self, the aspiring writer, the skeptic, the notetaker.”

In this novel, Theroux combines elements familiar to his oeuvre — politics, history and travel (to the jungle in particular), all packaged in a vibrantly descriptive narrative — and applies them to Orwell’s formative days as a colonial authority, which would inform his anti-colonial, anti-authoritarian work to come. Theroux spoke to me about the book from his home in Hawaii.

“I can easily relate to Orwell’s life as a poorly writer,” Theroux explained. “Publishing novels, essays, travel pieces, somewhat sneered at — or dishonestly envied — by academics and struggling to make a living. Occasionally having a success but always feeling slightly behind the eight ball. I’ve been at it — scribble, scribble — for almost 60 years.”

Orwell’s Burma years seem like an apt topic for you to tackle considering your general background, but what specifically about Orwell and this period of his life attracted you?

I started my working life in late 1963 as a teacher in a bush school in the British territory of Nyasaland — Central Africa — with the Union Jack hanging limp on the flagpole and, in town, no African members in any of the British clubs. This was a dramatic introduction to colonialism, and I consider myself lucky to have seen it. Independence came seven months later, when Nyasaland became Malawi. Conrad said, “Before the Congo I was a mere animal,” and I felt the same in Nyasaland. It was the making of me. Burma was the making of Orwell.

Pictures From History/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

He was a gawky 19-year-old named Eric Blair when he sailed to Burma to become a policeman. He was someone entirely out of his depth. That is perfect for a novel. The Jungian process called “individuation” interests me greatly — the way in which a person, usually by leaving home, comes to understand his or her inner self. It is not a straight line, Jung says, but a random back and forth. Imagine an Etonian — [Blair] didn’t go to Oxford like his friends — becoming a policeman in the British Raj, with authority, and servants and obedient native sub-inspectors smoothing your way. He later said he hated those five years, and he atoned for it by dropping out and becoming a tramp and a dishwasher. And with his first book, Blair changed his name to Orwell, and he lived in near poverty until the last months of his life, when “1984” was published and was a success. This transition from a schoolboy in a top hat to a policeman supervising hangings and the flagellating of convicts to underpaid writer with a pen — all this I found riveting, and I wanted to dramatize it; something Orwell never did, not even in his novel “Burmese Days.”

How did you perform your research? And how much of “Burma Sahib” would you say is factual vs. imagined?

I have been reading Orwell since about 1960. I taught his essays in Africa and Singapore, and when the biographies began to appear — slowly, because Orwell did not want anyone to write his biography — I read them. I have also spent a lot of time in Burma — three visits, over the years, the first time in 1970 when it looked much the same as when Blair was there, but decrepit, the elegant buildings in a state of decay. I even visited the prison in Insein where Blair worked — a so-called panopticon — still in use, full of political prisoners now. I found memoirs by old colonials, lots of mentions of Burma by Orwell in his essays and books and newspaper columns, and from these fragments I saw my novel.

Here’s how I look at it. Consider one of those astonishing Greek vases in museums that have been re-created out of brilliant fragments. The shards and broken pieces suggest its shape, and the vase is formed — I think the word I’m looking for is “tessellated” — of both fragments and clay, but is convincingly a lovely vase. I think of my book like that, a sort of reconstructed amphora. I found all the right fragments and set them in my own clay.

It was interesting to see W. Somerset Maugham pop up in the novel because I was struck by a vague similarity between your portrayal of Orwell and Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge” — a kind of spiritual journey from naiveté to sociopolitical consciousness. Does that comparison ring true to you?

Yes. Certainly, Blair was a different and more humble person at the end of five years than at the beginning. But “spiritual” is not a word I’d use with him. He was not spiritual or religious, and indeed was stridently anti-Catholic. He had a great feel for nature, though — animals, flowers, gardening — a reverence for the natural world. He admired Maugham’s prose, also the novels of H.G. Wells, and was an early booster of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.”

Steve McCurry

You write that “The empire is a colossal bluff.” Why?

Blair the policeman had a vivid revelation: that a small number of British colonials lorded it over millions of Burmese. And by the way, the subjects — Burmese and Indians — did most of the hard work, which is always the imperial scam. The bluff of the British Empire was that these subject peoples needed them, whereas the truth was that the British needed the colonies in order to grow wealthy. Look at the sugar barons in the West Indies. And not only colonies. The British went to war with China in order to force them to buy opium, and when the Chinese lost, Britain punished them by demanding immense amounts of silver as well as the territory of Hong Kong. I think every schoolchild knows this, or should. Blair was ashamed of his time as an enforcer, but his life in Burma had a pleasant side, too — women, freedom and a chance to live a life like the sort of Kipling rascal he’d read about in “Plain Tales From the Hills.”

The book may be set a century ago, but it hints at some of the contemporary issues in Myanmar and the surrounding region. Did that come naturally out of the telling of Orwell’s tale, or did you intentionally choose Orwell as a vehicle to explore regional politics?

Great point! Yes, someone in the novel says, “In a hundred years this place will still be a mess,” or words to that effect. That was 1923, and this year Insein Prison is full of Burmese dissidents. I named one of the rebellious monks Ashin Wirathu — he is a vociferous Buddhist monk today in Burma. Burma was under the thumb of the British. Today it is under the thumb of a military dictatorship. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

At some point you refer to the deforestation of Burma, which happens as a consequence of the empire opening the region to industry.

All empires are dedicated to plunder, and when countries become independent, they continue the plunder, remorselessly. The blight of globalization has intensified it. It’s a wicked world, and of course Orwell saw it and deplored it, and after reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s masterpiece “We” — a novel of the dystopian future — Orwell created his own version of it as “1984,” to alarm and enlighten us.

Nick Hilden writes about the arts, travel, technology and health for numerous publications.

Nick Hilden

Paul Theroux discusses ‘Burma Sahib,’ a new novel about George Orwell

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