In some places, it’s still ‘1984’

IN 1922, a young Englishman named Eric Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police and was dispatched to Burma, then a province of British-ruled India. The job offered good pay and, for a young man intoxicated by the stories of Rudyard Kipling, the promise of adventure.

Once there, however, Blair would shed his romantic illusions about the East. Ridden with crime and roiling with anti-colonial dissent, Burma put Blair to a test. During his five years of service, he enforced laws he grew to hate and suffered a crisis of conscience: Here was the start of Blair’s political education and his gradual transformation into the writer we know today as George Orwell.

In “Finding George Orwell in Burma,” a curious hybrid of biography and political travelogue, a Burmese-speaking American journalist writing under the pseudonym Emma Larkin hopes to explain Orwell through Burma (or Myanmar, as it’s now known) and, in turn, explain Burma through Orwell.

Retracing his footsteps, she gives us pungent glimpses of life in Myanmar, from the bustle of Rangoon and Mandalay, its major cities, to the sweltering Irrawaddy Delta and the lush hill town of Katha, and tries to fathom the predicament of modern Myanmar, which for several decades has been ruled by military junta.

After independence from Britain in 1948, there was a brief period of democracy until 1962, when Gen. Ne Win overthrew Burma’s elected government. Ne Win trumpeted the “Burmese Way to Socialism,” but he ran the country into the ground.

Once one of Asia’s richest countries, Myanmar is now an impoverished backwater. The opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is confined to her home in Rangoon.

Hundreds of political prisoners languish in jail; schools and universities are a shambles; corruption is rampant; police informers lurk in the shadows.

Larkin is a frequent visitor to Myanmar and found herself struck by comments among her friends and contacts. One calls Orwell “the prophet,” and a joke has it that Orwell wrote “not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of ‘Burmese Days,’ ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ ” The last of the books, she writes, “paints a chillingly accurate picture of Burma today, a country ruled by one of the world’s most brutal and tenacious dictatorships.”

With the Orwell archive picked over, if not exhausted -- there are four major biographies, several studies and countless monographs -- Larkin’s focus is a novel, but flawed, gambit. Orwell’s Burma experiences figure in two of his classic essays -- “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” the latter an unsparing look at the deforming effects of imperialism on both ruler and ruled -- and gave him the material for his first novel, “Burmese Days,” but Larkin contends that Orwell’s biographers have “underplay[ed] the significance of Burma.”

This is a debatable point. Anyone who writes about Orwell in Burma is faced with a challenge. Aside from his essays, hard information about Orwell’s time as a policeman is scarce: None of his letters from the time exists, and countless police files were destroyed during the brutal Japanese occupation in World War II.

Larkin is not deterred by such considerations. The slenderest of biographical threads puts her mind to work, but such conjecture adds little to the record. If anything, Larkin overestimates the significance of Burma in Orwell’s life: It was a formative -- if not decisive -- moment, but not the constant preoccupation Larkin thinks it is.

Larkin’s frequent speculations distract from her deft, nuanced reporting. She is a footloose writer; her travels put her -- and her subjects, whose names have also been changed -- at risk, but she pressed on despite threats of deportation, censorship or worse.

Though the government vigorously clamps down on freedom of expression, Larkin finds a lively civil society flourishing in Mandalay’s numerous teashops, where patrons exchange samizdat and talk politics and literature. (The Burmese are ravenous readers.) She forms an underground George Orwell book club and trades notes with Burmese friends about Orwell’s writings.

Traveling up and down Myanmar, she encounters myriad attitudes about the political situation. Some are resigned; others are fatalistic. A history professor rages at her fellow Burmese for receptiveness to social control: “We are trained to listen to our elders. We are trained to obey.” Larkin has a nice ability to draw out her subjects on touchy matters like the complex legacy of British rule.

Given Orwell’s bitter ruminations on the poison of imperialism, you might think that the Burmese would have nothing but contempt for their former rulers, yet some mourn the passing of the old imperial order.

“Under the British we were able to live peacefully,” a retired schoolteacher tells her. “The British looked after the people. We had a secure life. We could go to sleep each night confident that tomorrow would come.” (Indeed, U Nu, prime minister in the ‘50s, once said, “Burma was two thousand times better under the British, two thousand times.”)

Larkin herself is suspicious of such claims, but she is a patient interlocutor who let’s her subjects speak freely. She offers no prescriptions or solutions, only a cautious guess about the future: “[H]istory has shown that regimes which rule against the will of the people cannot last, and it is hard to imagine the Burmese generals will be able to maintain their stranglehold forever.”

We can only hope this comes to pass.

Matthew Price is a journalist and critic based in Brooklyn.