I’m nose-deep in Burmese Days by George Orwell. It’s going … well, it’s going. 1984 reduced me to a state of battered and boggled bewilderment. I don’t feel like that just yet. But you know, there’s time.
It’s quite alarming to encounter so much racism, a jarring reminder of how awful the world was and is and can be. Flory, the protagonist, has strong anti-British Empire sentiments, and yet he’s still going through the motions of being a cog in its brutal machine.
It is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.
page … ah I can’t locate it again
I’ve just left off at page 87 – Flory has just encountered an English girl and I’ve got a terrible feeling he’s going to tumble into love with her and it’ll end horribly.
Actually, you see, I already know the ending because I’ve also just finished ‘Finding George Orwell In Burma‘ by Emma Larkin.
Reading Burmese Days afterwards feels like watching a movie after going ‘behind the scenes’. Larkin visits locations that Orwell uses in his book; she describes how they were during his time working in Burma for the British Imperial Police, and what they were like when she travelled there.
On a surface-level, Larkin is following Orwell’s footsteps in Burma/now Myanmar, but slowly her book unfolds into a sobering and somewhat haunting picture of a country; how its people are trapped by their government, and where the only place they can be truly free is in their own minds.
Finding George Orwell in Burma was published in 2004, I believe, and there’s a lot that has happened in the country since then – if I want to find out the latest news, I’ll have to locate a different book regarding it.
Okay, that’s enough procrastinating. I’d better get back to studying …
of words & books 