A journalist and regular visitor to Burma, Emma Larkin spent a year following Orwell's Burmese footprints to see if there was any more to this joke than unhappy coincidence. 'I began to imagine that Orwell had seen something in Burma, had had some thread of an idea that had worked its way into all his writing.'
The central theme of this engaging work is also its central flaw. If such a thread existed, Larkin, like Orwell's many biographers, cannot find it. However, Larkin's reportage on modern Burma is every bit as fascinating as Orwell's Burmese essays of the 1930s. Her ability to listen to the Burmese without putting words in their mouths and her unexaggerated prose paint an enlightening portrait of the country.
Forty years of dictatorship have left their mark on the population. One per cent of the 50 million Burmese are in the army, another 18 million are members of the Union Solidarity and Development Association, who, in return for better educational and employment opportunities, form a rent-a-mob for the military junta. Of the remaining 30 million an unknown proportion are informers for military intelligence.
As one of Larkin's acquaintances tells her: "It doesn't make any difference whether they have informers or not. It is enough that we believe their informers are everywhere. After that we do their work for them."
Larkin meets many Burmese who smuggle around forbidden texts, make jokes and allegories from their desperate situation and exhort foreigners to spread word of it. This despite the threat, and often experience, of torture and years in jail for any number of vague crimes against the state. 'In Burma prison exists as an ever present underworld into which anyone can fall at anytime.' On top of this repression, Burma has gone, in 50 years, from being the richest to the poorest country in south east Asia, yet people struggle on.
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