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Finding George Orwell in Burma Paperback – March 6, 2006

by Emma Larkin (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 366 ratings
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A fascinating political travelogue that traces the life and work of George Orwell, author of 1984 and ANIMAL FARM, in Southeast Asia

Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, also known as Myanmar, she's come to know all too well the many ways this brutal police state can be described as "Orwellian." The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. But Burma's connection to George Orwell is not merely metaphorical; it is much deeper and more real. Orwell's mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. When Orwell died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma. It is the place George Orwell's work holds in Burma today, however, that most struck Emma Larkin. She was frequently told by Burmese acquaintances that Orwell did not write one book about their country - his first novel, Burmese Days - but in fact he wrote three, the "trilogy" that included Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese intellectual if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet!"


In one of the most intrepid political travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma using the life and work of George Orwell as her compass. Going from Mandalay and Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the places where Orwell worked and lived, and the places his books live still. She brings to vivid life a country and a people cut off from the rest of the world, and from one another, by the ruling military junta and its vast network of spies and informers. Using Orwell enables her to show, effortlessly, the weight of the colonial experience on Burma today, the ghosts of which are invisible and everywhere. More important, she finds that the path she charts leads her to the people who have found ways to somehow resist the soul-crushing effects of life in this most cruel police state. And George Orwell's moral clarity, hatred of injustice, and keen powers of observation serve as the author's compass in another sense too: they are qualities she shares and they suffuse her book - the keenest and finest reckoning with life in this police state that has yet been written.

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  1. Print length
    304 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin Books
  4. Publication date
    March 6, 2006
  5. Dimensions
    5.1 x 0.74 x 7.72 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0143037110
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0143037118
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Well-researched and fascinating...Remarkable."—San Francisco Chronicle

"One of the most unusual travelogues to come out of Southeast Asia in some time, and a truer picture of authoritarianism than anyone has written since, perhaps, Orwell himself."—Mother Jones

"[This] mournful, meditative, appealingly idiosyncratic book is a hybrid, an exercise in literary detection but also a political travelogue that uses Burma to explain Prwell, and Orwell—especially the Orwell of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four—to explain the miseries of present-day Myanmar (as it is now known)."—The New York Times

"This is one of those rare books, a beautifully crafted account of a journey which actually takes the reader somewhere new and unusual. Emma Larkin did not just go searching for Orwell, she found him. Along the way, she made the chilling discovery that in modern-day Burma, the totalitarian tyrannies he evoked in Nineteen Eighty-Four are horrifyingly alive and well."—Jon Lee Anderson

"Combining literary criticism and solid field reporting, [Larkin] captures the country at its best, and more often, its worst."—San Francisco Chronicle

From the Back Cover

"A truer picture of authoritarianism than anyone has written since, perhaps, Orwell himself."
 Mother Jones

"Mournful, meditative, appealingly idiosyncratic . . . an exercise in literary detection but also a political travelogue."
 The New York Times

"Combining literary criticism with solid field reporting, [Larkin] captures the country at its best and, more often, its worst."
 San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] sobering, journalistic memoir . . . A disquieting profile of a country and its people."
 Newsweek

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; 60314th edition (March 6, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143037110
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143037118
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.1 x 0.74 x 7.72 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 366 ratings

About the author

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Emma Larkin

Emma Larkin

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EMMA LARKIN is the pen name of an American journalist who was born and raised in Asia, studied Burmese language at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and has covered Asia widely in her journalism from her base in Bangkok, Thailand.

Finding George Orwell in Burma was also published in the UK (by John Murray under the title Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop). In the US, Finding George won the Borders Original Voices Award for Non-Fiction in 2005. In the UK, the book was short-listed for the Index on Censorship's Freedom of Expression Award 2005. The Japanese-language edition, published by Shobunsha in Tokyo, won the Mainichi Shimbun's Asia Pacific Grand Prix Award in 2006.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
366 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

hh
5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and disturbing
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2005
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This is a powerful, well-written book that will open eyes - especially for anyone not familiar with what is happening in Myanmar today. The present regime is killing the soul of the country, bit by bit, despite much propaganda that insists otherwise. Yes, new and refurbished hotels look swell and whirlwind tours have become expert at whisking visitors past the glorious sites at mind-numbing speed, but if you are smart enough to venture off the beaten track just a little, as Ms Larkin does, you will learn much. Larkin shows how Yangon and other cities have been reduced to "memory" (ghost of their former selves) and "meaning" (if you care to ferret out the "real" state of affairs in the country). Larkin does a wonderful job of interviewing a broad range of citizens to lend a personal, emotionally-gripping view of what could easily be intellectualized and safely kept at a distance while reading this book in a room, in a house, in a country far, far away. She also does a bang up job of connecting the dots between Orwell's life, his writings and the country that became so deeply imprinted upon him. Having said all this, do I have any gripes? Yes. First, Larkin occasionally comes up with odd descriptions that seem to reveal more about herself than her subject. A group of men huddled in a tea house are described as "girlish and secretive." ?? Second, while railing against a regime which censors whatever is politically inexpedient, since commits the same sin herself. She is a journalist in Asia and soft pedals the Burmese-Chinese tensions (lest she offend those with whom she does business should her cover be blown?) Yes, those mansions in Maymyo are often owned by the military elite and drug lords (as she says), but many are also owned by Chinese who are given preferential treatment due to their business investments while local Burmese are forced out of the way to make room for these invaders. The tension cannot be missed; it is palpable. Also, likely out of fear of alienating other powerful entities which can make life nice or nasty for her, she deliberately "misses" every opportunity to draw parallels between policies and practices of Myanmar's oppressive regime with similar policies and practices which have crept into what is supposed to be the model democracy in the world, the Shangrila with a system so craved by the Burmese people (Myanmar government officials censor every written article and news broadcast while pretending this doesn't happen; the Bush administration blacklists any journalist who asks "difficult" questions - denying that journalist access to future press conferences, etc - so that all journalists impose strict, self-censorship while pretending that this doesn't happen). Drawing such parallels would force the reader not to simply see this as a tale of what can happen elsewhere under extreme circumstances, but, ironically, what can happen even under his nose, under "ideal" circumstances. And that would add an important message to this worthy project, one summed up by the exhortatory words of a citizen quoted in the book: "We Burmese are experts at looking for what is not there. It's something you should learn to do, too."
3 people found this helpful
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H. Schneider
4.0 out of 5 stars Orwell the Prophet: biographical footnotes
Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2008
Verified Purchase
I learned some new things about Orwell. Most importantly: did you know that O. wrote 3 books about Burma, not just 1 as I had thought, naively?
After 'Burmese Days', there was also 'Animal Farm' (how the pigs with the dogs overthrew the farmers to take power) and then '1984' (how the powers control the minds and the records). These are predictions on Burma! Who would doubt it?
Second: when O was on his death bed, dying from TB at a much too young age, he was working on another novel or story about Burma. That was really new to me.
This book by an American journalist written under a pseudonym works on 3 levels, like a layer cake.
There is the Orwell biography; and frankly speaking, that is a disappointing part, because when the author followed O's traces in Burma, she didn't really find much. That is mainly because she was travelling as a tourist and couldn't do open research. Not her fault. What she injects is from other sources, like visits to London libraries and the Orwell archive. The visits to O's Burma places serve more for background colour than for new insights.
Second layer: this is a travel book about the places where O lived in Burma. We get to look at Mandalay, the Delta, Rangoon, Moulmein, and Katha.The book delivers the travel account without much passion. Let's put it this way: Larkin as a travel writer isn't exactly sparkling. She may never make it to the top ten of the genre.
Third layer: maybe the most important part or level of the book is the description of the totalitarian routine of life in Burma. While even this lacks spark, it is certainly an important contribution to the international knowledge of a tough subject to be informed about. The descriptions of daily life are continuously set against a background of 1984 scenes.
In short: a book worth reading that somehow remains short of expectations.
16 people found this helpful
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Retired Reader
5.0 out of 5 stars Burma in the Raw
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2006
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Well the book exceeded my expectations in every way. It does provide a good deal of really fascinating information about Orwell and his adventures in Burma as an agent of the British Empire, but it does a lot more than that. It is a brilliant travel book that describes in beautiful prose the towns and countryside of central Burma. More significantly it describes the political nightmare that has afflicted Burma since the days of Ne Win (1962). The author follows Orwell's postings as a police officer in Burma and provides fascinating descriptions of the places he was stationed and more interestingly presents wonderful stories of the people now living in those places. This book is undoubtedly banned in Burma because it presents a devastating account of the repressive and corrupt rule of the Burmese Army over the last 40 odd years. Yet I think the author is both fair and accurate in describing present day Burma.

The author of this book is a remarkable person in his or her own right. "Emma Larkin" (a pseudonym) is a unique American who has actually taken the time to learn to speak and read Burmese. Written Burmese is based on Sanskrit and looks to the uninformed, like myself, as a serious of small circle or half circles tied on lines. Anybody who can read it certainly has my admiration. Further `Larkin's' affection for Burma and the Burmese is obvious and as a result the book provides a very sympathetic picture of the people of central Burma. My one disappointment in the book is the author spends very little time discussing the non-Burmese hill tribes (Shan, Kachin, etc.), but that wasn't the intent of the book. This is a wonderful book about as little known and reclusive country by a well informed and perceptive observer.
5 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Amazonia
5.0 out of 5 stars We are making the same mistakes
Reviewed in Canada on March 13, 2021
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Aren't we? But we persist to be daft and blind to what's been told again and again.
Great piece, must read even must have. But what then.
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Tom101
5.0 out of 5 stars Orwells Zeit in Burma
Reviewed in Germany on March 12, 2019
Verified Purchase
Die Autorin wandelt auf den Spuren Orwells in Burma. Wir erfahren viel über das Land heute und wie es zu Orwells Zeiten war. Spannend und gut geschrieben. Allerdings umfasst die Dokumentation nur eine sehr kurze Zeitspanne in Orwells reichem Leben.
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furb71
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book on Orwell and contemporary Myanmar
Reviewed in Australia on December 1, 2016
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A great book for anyone who is an Orwell fan and preferably travelling around Myanmar at the same time. Larkin is obviously a fan too but wiling to recognise the contradictions in the man. I am not sure I subscribe to her theory that his time in Burma was the largest inspiration for Animal Farm and 1984 which I think came more from, or were certainly refined by, his Spanish experiences. You can certainly see how his Burma days were a building block in his world views however. His eyes were opened to the futility of imperialism but he was at times the annoyed victim of the derision and hatred of the Burmese for their British occupiers. They probably faced more of this on a widespread level than in India but that would be another argument. His book, Burmese Days, certainly exposed the vile and pointless racism at the core of the British raj. Larkin's description of the oppressive nature of the current regime provides excellent insights for the casual visitor or tourist to Myanmar who is not so readily confronted with this aspect. A brilliant read for those who are interested in the subject matter.
One person found this helpful
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Judy Cottrell
5.0 out of 5 stars A chilling account of the Burma that tourists don't see
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 21, 2015
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I read this book on my return from a visit to Burma and I found it a really interesting and illuminating read. It is quite the best book I have read about Burma and I think that is because the author speaks Burmese, and is able to have many conversations with ordinary Burmese people. It is quite true that as a tourist you get a very superficial impression that things are better in the country than you expected. So it was especially revealing to read in this book about what really goes on below the surface and behind-the-scenes that tourists don't get to see. I read this book straight after reading George Orwell's "Burmese Days" and along with all his other books which I know well, I found it very interesting and enjoyable to read more about his life in Burma and the places where he worked, some of which I had visited on my trip. I also found it interesting, but chilling, to read about the parallels between "Animal Farm" and "1984" and the military dictatorship in Burma. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone thinking of visiting Burma.
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Julian Bedale
4.0 out of 5 stars Description of Orwell's formative years as a writer
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 25, 2018
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Very interesting book about Eric Blair's 5 years working as a military policeman in Burma, which changed his outlook from that of a privileged ex-Eton schoolboy at the start of his tenure to that of George Orwell, the "wintry conscience of a generation" as Jeffrey Meyers (I think) termed him, by the end. EB clearly didn't relate well to his contemporaries, & was seen as a "loner" (albeit one who picked up the local languages very well) pretty much from the word go. This probably explains why he was sent for c 2 years to the difficult, violent, uncomfortable, mosquito ridden Delta region.

The author, who assiduously tracks EB's progress up & down Burma (one wonders how, even as a Burmese speaker herself, she was able to get to some of these very remote places !) spends most of the book describing the restrictions of life in modern-day Burma, & trying to show (not always 100% sucessfully) how events depicted in "Animal Farm" & "1984" also relate to life today in the country.

The most interesting chapter in the book is the one about EB's last posting in Katha (the model for Kyauktada in "Burmese Days"), where the author spends a lot of time identifying the Clubhouse & other buildings depicted in the novel. It is a pity that she was unable to identify at least some of the people who were the basis for the numerous truly ghastly characters in "Burmese Days" (which, despite it's well-known "gloomy" reputation, is my favourite Orwell book !) - such as the violently racist timber merchant Ellis, the "club bore" (although in other respects harmless) MacGregor, the self-centred Lieutenant the Hon Verrall, & (above all) the selfish, cold-heartedly opportunistic Elizabeth Lackersteen. However, given the depth of the author's research in the rest of the book, no doubt she would have shed more light on the background to these characters had it been possible to do so. What is very interesting towards the end of the book is a synopsis of the novella set in Burma "A Smoking Room Story", which Orwell was beginning to work on at the end of his extraordinarily varied, but tragically short life.
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