Book Review - Burmese Days by George Orwell

Burmese Days by George Orwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Seeing the mayhem in Myanmar these days, the following extract from the introduction rings very true

It is a curious twist of fate that Orwell’s later novels have mirrored Burma’s recent history. In Burma today, there is a joke that Orwell didn’t just write one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and 1984.

In the introduction Emma Larkin goes on

1984, Orwell’s description of a horrifying and soulless dystopia, paints a chillingly evocative picture of Burma today, a country ruled by one of the world’s most tenacious military dictatorships.

As a preview of Winston Smith’s double-speak milieu, Orwell observed that Burma is

a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored… Free speech in unthinkable. All kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.

In this magnificent book, the observant Orwell captures the local atmosphere accurately. Here is the hospital

The patients took the prescriptions across the yard to the Compounder, who gave them bottles filled with water and various vegetable dyes. The Compounder supported himself largely by the sale of drugs, for the Government pays him only twenty-five rupees a month…The Assistant Surgeon’s methods of diagnosis were brief. He would simply ask each patient, 'Where is your pain? Head, back or belly?' and at the reply hand out a prescription from one of three piles that he had prepared beforehand. The patients much preferred this method to the doctor’s

The doctor in question - an exiled Indian - is, however, dismissive of traditional practices

'…they will die of gangrene or carry a tumour as large as a melon for ten years rather than face the knife. And such medicines as their own so-called doctors give to them! Herbs gathered under the new moon, tigers' whiskers, rhinoceros horn, urine, menstrual blood! How men can drink such compounds is disgusting.'

Whether he describes a riot, a hunt, a crowded bazaar, corrupt officials, the burra sahibs lording over the "natives", the torrid heat or the onset of monsoon, Orwell’s simple yet lyrical language is a pleasure to read.

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