Burmese Days (#121)

Burmese Days by George Orwell


What I said then:

[Part of] another inherited boxset. If I don't like the first one I read there could be trouble.

What I say now:

Jeeeeeeesus, George Orwell was one pessimistic motherfucker. Okay, having read 1984 and Animal Farm (which are the two that I figure nearly everybody's read), I guess I already knew that. But man, the ending of Burmese Days is such a downer that it's almost ridiculous. It's the kind of ending that a mopey sixteen year-old boy would come up with ... on a bad day. Everybody either dies, is forced to live out their lives in misery, or is revealed to be completely shallow and unthinking. Or some combination of those three. It's not a surprise to find out that this was his first novel: it's denouement is too naive, too un-nuanced for it to be anything else.

Anyway, until the last twenty pages, Burmese Days was fascinating. It's set in Burma (duh!), then part of England's Indian colony, in the late twenties, and it's a brilliantly realised portrayal of the moment in time when Britain's Empire had reached its zenith and was finally fraying at the edges, about to collapse. In a remote jungle station, eight whites comfortably dominate a village of a thousand local Burmese and a handful of itinerant Indians - a distinction which is completely lost on most of the English, who dismissively reject anybody outside their circle as a 'damned nigger.' They all drink way too much, do way too little, and are generally idling their days away in a miasma of sweat and gin and sharp-eyed local mistresses and boring evenings at 'the club' (the Englishman's Club, complete with tennis court and butler, becomes the focal point of the book's obsession with race and privilege). 

Orwell can write beautifully, and his evocation of time and place is brilliant. I love books that educate me about moments in history of which I wasn't aware, and on this score Burmese Days is a triumph. As a kid I was a massive Roald Dahl fan (okay, okay, as an adult I'm still a massive Roald Dahl fan) and parts of his memoir Going Solo occur in a similar 'outpost of Empire' in East Africa. Orwell's much more frank depiction of a tiny society of Englishmen and women existing in a place of (as they believe) utter savagery, makes me re-evaluate Dahl's light-hearted romp of a book, and wonder at all the things he left unsaid. 

In Burmese Days, three things happen to change the cosy lassitude of the white inhabitants: the niece of the only married couple on the station comes to stay, sparking every single Englishman to compete for her affections; the government decrees that every 'Englishman's Club' in the country should, in an effort to appease the restless populace, admit one native member; and a bitter feud erupts between a good-hearted Indian doctor and a conniving Burman magistrate. While it's a bit convenient that all these things come up at the same time, there's probably never been a novel where nothing 'convenient' happens, so I'm happy to forgive this. The English characters are all weak, or vain, or mean, but they're also the people who had to run to the other side of the world to make a life, so that makes perfect sense.

There is a moral conscience in the shape of Flory, the protagonist, who is just as uncomfortable in the company of his racist clubmates as he ever was back at home in England - he has a hideous birthmark across half his face, which marks him as an outsider in whatever company he keeps. Flory thinks differently about the natives, and about England's place in Burma, than anybody else, and one can't help but assume that his (infinitely more compasionate) opinions are those of Orwell himself. But the book goes out of its way to show the horrible price Flory pays for deliberately standing out from the crowd, lending it a curious air. Flory is heroic but constantly depressed, while the other English characters end the novel believing themselves content but living lives that are completely vapid and meaningless. The unbearably depressing ending almost suggests that: "Life sucks. You can either acknowledge it sucks, and be miserable, or ignore that it sucks and be a buffoon. Your call." I really enjoyed most of Burmese Days, but the ending spoilt it a bit for me, which was a shame.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
books to go: still 121

--- So I got to buy a book! I went with Never Let Me Go because I've had it recommended to me by a bunch of people over the years, because Ishiguro is supposedly one of the best writers around at the moment and it fills a hole in my reading, because of all his books this one has a bit of a sci-fi bent to it which is attractive to me, and because the movie's coming out soon and I want to read the book first. Fair enough?