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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The second question is raised by the Burmese Larkin meets and who marvel at the accuracy of "Nineteen Eighty-Four": "Orwell was never oppressed himself; how could he write about oppression?" In colonial Burma, Larkin finds conditions parallel to those Orwell described in his novel. As a police officer, Orwell found himself on the other side of intelligence gathering, charged with the task of monitoring the locals. The isolation of a colonial officer becoming disillusioned with the empire, as Orwell was, finds its echo in the isolation Winston Smith feels at being unable to express his hatred of the Party, which reverberates again in modern-day Burma in the placid expressions the Burmese adopt to mask their true feelings. The British too, enforced a strict "gagging act" on the media; in "Nineteen Eighty-Four," the papers are filled only with news flattering to the Party, as is the government-controlled media of Burma today.
Orwell himself wrote, a decade after his service in Burma, that "the strangeness of the scenery" couldn't help but make an impact on a foreigner. "In the beginning the foreign landscape bores him, later he hates it, in the end he comes to love it, but it is never quite out of his consciousness and all his beliefs are in a mysterious way affected by it." Through Larkin's lush descriptions of a fertile wildness of intense colors and sticky heat (in Katha, she sees "a spectacular sunset, with mauve-colored clouds and pink-red streaks that unfurled like ribbons across the sky," and oxcarts that "left rosy clouds of dust in their wake"), it's easy to see what entranced him. And, as she notes, Orwell wrote with a lyricism of the landscape in "Burmese Days" that's noticeably absent from his other novels.
Larkin's fluency in Burmese and determination to slip past military intelligence under the guise of a tourist make her a unique guide, though penetrating the fortress of censorship still proves difficult. She learns that a key to figuring out what is happening in Burma is to look for what is not in the newspapers; the absence of news about rice and gold clues her in to the severe shortage of one and the rising prices of the other. Government agents follow her wherever she goes, and more than once she suspects that the person she's chatting with is a government informer. In a particularly poignant scene, she stops to talk with an old man in a small village in the delta; he's animated and chatty until he sees Larkin's "entourage," including a policeman. "Curiously, he no longer understood anything I said, shaking his head dumbly. He's too old for your questions, said the policeman, laughing."
Besides her forays through Orwell's life, the best parts of Larkin's book are the numerous meetings with locals, like the retired teacher in Rangoon who loves to wander the aisles of her local supermarket, basking in this sign of progress, even though she can't afford to shop there. And there's the 13-year-old tea shop serving boy from the delta, who tells Larkin that he goes home two or three times a year, before fessing up: "No, I haven't been home yet. Maybe I'm not going home anymore." "All you had to do, it seemed," Larkin writes, "was scratch the surface of one of the town's smiling residents and you would find bitterness or tears." And like truly Orwellian characters, not a single person Larkin talks to has a happy story to tell.
The tasks Larkin sets for herself -- to argue for Burma's influence on Orwell, to describe the current conditions of the country, to sort through its history -- could easily fill three books, and sometimes this relatively slim volume feels too light, the evidence too vague. Her weakest contention, that Burma's current woes are the fault of British colonialism, would be more convincing if she had compared it with India; the two countries, ruled by the same colonial government, couldn't have evolved more differently. And though she hints at the country's shadow economy -- Burma is second only to Afghanistan in heroin production -- it remains a largely untouched subject.
But considering the obstacles to her reporting, Larkin gleans an admirable amount of information. Hers is a book designed to pique curiosity but not sate it, and perhaps that's for the best; Burma could use a little more attention from the outside world.
