Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Having lived and worked in the British Protectorate, Nyasaland in the 1960s, Singapore in the 70s and England after that, Paul Theroux is well-placed to write a book on the in-and-outs, snobberies and brutalities of the British Empire. He also has the language of the Raj down pat with all its sahibs and wallahs. Here is an American writer who understands the British, but is no Anglophile.
Theroux works a lot of Orwell’s later writing into the story, like his essays about Burma, Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging. He also shows where some of the ideas for Down and Out in Paris and London and 1984 may have come from.
Orwell here is tortured, shy, misanthropic (especially towards the Scottish), an animal lover, and a brothel frequenter. He is a man of his time with snobberies and racial prejudice — but through experience, these fall away and we see the moral core underneath.
Lots of descriptions of landscapes and some repetition make this a novel of nearly epic length — well just normal length for Theroux.
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