A fascinating political travelogue that traces the life and work of
George Orwell, author of 1984 and ANIMAL FARM, in Southeast Asia
Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling
in Burma, also known as Myanmar, she's come to know all too well
the many ways this brutal police state can be described as
"Orwellian." The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in
Burma, and it long has. But Burma's connection to George Orwell is
not merely metaphorical; it is much deeper and more real. Orwell's
mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and
Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a
young man working for the British Imperial Police. When Orwell
died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma. It is the
place George Orwell's work holds in Burma today, however, that most
struck Emma Larkin. She was frequently told by Burmese
acquaintances that Orwell did not write one book about their
country - his first novel, Burmese Days - but in fact he wrote
three, the "trilogy" that included Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty-Four. When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese intellectual if
he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment
and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet!" In one of the most
intrepid political travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells
of the year she spent traveling through Burma using the life and
work of George Orwell as her compass. Going from Mandalay and
Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station
towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the
places where Orwell worked and lived, and the places his books live
still. She brings to vivid life a country and a people cut off from
the rest of the world, and from one another, by the ruling military
junta and its vast network of spies and informers. Using Orwell
enables her to show, effortlessly, the weight of the colonial
experience on Burma today, the ghosts of which are invisible and
everywhere. More important, she finds that the path she charts
leads her to the people who have found ways to somehow resist the
soul-crushing effects of life in this most cruel police state. And
George Orwell's moral clarity, hatred of injustice, and keen powers
of observation serve as the author's compass in another sense too:
they are qualities she shares and they suffuse her book - the
keenest and finest reckoning with life in this police state that
has yet been written.
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