Burmese Days - George Orwell

Burmese Days was Orwell's debut novel in 1934. It is however set in 1926 and, like many first novels, is heavily autobiographical. Orwell was resident in Burma, then part of the greater British Empire of India, until 1927. He was a member of the Imperial Indian Police, unlike his counterpart in the book John Florey, who works for a timber firm. Orwell's stay was terminated by a bout of dengue fever; Florey, without giving anything away, finds another way out.


Obviously, I have read Animal Farm more than once. I have recently read key works of non-fiction - Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. None of these prepared me for the skill and immersive storytelling of Burmese Days.


Florey is a peripheral member of the ex-pat community in this up-country maidan. He keeps a Burmese mistress and is on friendly terms with the local Indian doctor. Life for the Europeans centres on their club. It is not much of a bulwark against the natives - they can't even guarantee ice for their gin - but it is all they have. When notice comes from Delhi that they should consider admitting at least one local to their club, sparks fly. Similarly, the corrupt local magistrate O Po Kyin begins to plot against Dr Veraswami, his only serious rival for the honour.


The routine of ages is further disrupted when the Lackersteens' niece Elizabeth arrives from England. Elizabeth is very modern with her cropped hair, but insufferably old-fashioned regarding her mission in life. Her mission is marry a suitable man. To return from Burma without a husband would be unthinkable. There is not much choice in Kyauktada; Florey perhaps, albeit he has socialist leanings, a disfiguring birth mark on his face and talks too much; or the dashing young policeman, Verrall, who talks hardly at all, loves Polo and bears the title The Honourable.


All narrative strands are pleasingly resolved, by no means all in foreseeable ways. There is much comedy, smart, authentic-sounding dialogue, and the occasional laugh-out-loud comedy. The characters are brilliantly drawn and Orwell takes us inside their heads to reveal the beliefs and attitudes they would never dream of voicing.


I was hugely impressed.

Animal Farm – George Orwell

Perhaps the ultimate classic of left-wing English literature in the Twentieth Century, Animal Farm deserves re-reading at various stages in life.  I read it at school, enjoyed it, but didn’t really get the allusions.  I’ve re-read it now, as I approach one of life’s later milestones.  I get the references now, pretty well all of them, and I still enjoy the book at its surface level.  As a child I probably identified with either Boxer the hero-carthorse, or Snowball the renegade porcine revolutionary.  Now I identify with Benjamin the grumpy but long-lived donkey.

What has to be remembered is that Orwell wrote his satire in 1945 when Russia was our number one ally and, incredible as it seems to us now, suffered censorship for daring the criticise the regime.  It doesn’t seem strange that he was censored because we still are (as Orwell himself said in the suppressed preface, “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that is largely voluntary); no, the incredible thing is that the silent censors were pro-Russian.  Today, of course, you can have a profitable career writing any old bollocks about Russia so long as it’s hostile.

What I really liked about this 1989 Penguin edition is that it assumes you are literate and reasonably knowledgeable.  There are, thankfully, no pompous notes or tendentious polemics from the editor.  There is an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury, currently in post-mortem obscurity and probably overrated in life, but who at least understood satire and the Eastern Bloc, and a note on the text from the editor Peter Davison which I certainly found useful.  To flesh out the volume (the fable itself is only 95 pages) we have the original preface aforementioned and a further preface for the Ukrainian edition which I skipped.

The best thing about the fable is its length.  I don’t know how much Orwell re-wrote or cut; what we are left with, however, is just about perfect.  There are enough twists and turns to keep us hooked and sufficient jokes to remind us that it is, after all, a caprice.

Great fun from a good writer at his peak.  What more could we want?

The Aerodrome - Rex Warner

The most striking thing about Warner's dystopian classic is the date of its composition.  The Shape of Things to Come and Brave New World were both written in the Thirties and allegorised the rising threat of Fascism,  Animal Farm and 1984 are both postwar Forties and reflect the perceived Soviet threat.  But The Aerodrome came out in 1941, when the war was well under way and Germany and Russia were still allied.  What threat is Warner dealing with here?

It seems to me he is dealing with a much earlier threat, one which never came to anything.  In the immediate aftermath of World War I, when Britain had faced airborne invasion for the first time, when millions had died for no apparent gain and millions more were dying from Spanish flu, spread by the returning survivors of war - back then it must have seemed that revolution was a real possibility and the most likely revolutionaries were the newly skilled servicemen, especially those masters of the newest war technology, airmen.

That is certainly what they are up to on the unnamed aerodrome outside Warner's unnamed country village.  The airmen are unaccountable - the Flying Officer shoots the Rector, by accident, at the fair and succeeds him as Rector in time for the funeral.  Then the Air Vice-Marshal, who attends the funeral, takes a shine to young Roy, who has only just found out he isn't really the Rector's son, and persuades him to join the Air Force.  The Air Vice-Marshal has a plan; it seems to involve taking over; but we never find out what it is because---

And underneath all this is the question who is actually the child of whom?  It's not just Roy.  No relationship in this neck of the woods seem to be what it really ought to be.  It doesn't help that only three characters are referred to by name - Roy, Bess and Dr Faulkner.  Everyone else is the Rector's Wife, the Squire's Sister, etc.

It's all very enigmatic, almost deliberately obscure.  Take, for example, the subtitle, 'A Love Story'.  Oh no it isn't.  Yet it is constantly entertaining and beautifully written.  Chapter Twelve, in which the Air Vice-Marshal addresses his new recruits, is a masterpiece of dystopia in its own right.  This Vintage edition also has the bonus of an excellent introduction by Michael Moorcock.  Well worth checking out.