And Burmese Nights
Orwell in Asia
Burmese Days by George Orwell
John Flory is past it, an old man at thirty-five. And John Flory is, in his own mind, ugly. A teak merchant in British Burma in the 1920s, Flory is painfully conscious of his face. On it is a birthmark, which is blue in colour and looks like a rough crescent on one side of his head. When he can, Flory hides his face. When he’s able, he turns away from new people, people who might be persuaded his deformity (as he sees it) does not exist. In moments of great panic, he brings his hand up to his cheek to hide his birthmark, as if everyone present hasn’t already seen it and made careful note.
Flory lives partly out in the wilds — in a logging camp — and partly in a middle of nowhere place with some white residents. He must live among the whites, although he despises them.
The centre of their social life is the club, where they have native servants but no native members. There are very few whites present and they must stick together. They have a poor library, full of mildewed books. And when they get together it is mostly to drink and to gossip and to complain about their prickly heat. They are all tormented most dreadfully. By the heat in summer; by the rains in the monsoon.
This is not a place where the white man is built to thrive, clearly. That’s Orwell’s point. The white man is morally degraded by being out there, morally degraded by being in charge. An isolated, backbiting clique at the top of a steep-sided social pyramid. Obliged to follow an imaginary code which all whites are theoretically expected to share. A hypocritical code built on deceit and the denial of human nature. A code made solid and material by rumour and uneasy laughter.
Flory has, at the start of the novel, almost given up on life. His ambition, if he has one, is to summon up some courage. Otherwise, he sleepwalks from day to day, from month to month. From year to next weary year.
This place, Burma, interests him; he’s sincerely interested in the non-white inhabitants of his area. Most of them are Burmans, and he has learnt some of their language. Others of them are Indians, and he has one good Indian friend — the doctor, Veraswami — and is happy enough talking with the others.
Among the Europeans, Flory is suspect because he is slightly closer to the non-whites than it is good and advisable to be. He has a kept Burmese woman, Ma Hla May, living off his salary, too. This is not quite decorous — if ever discussed among whites it would be in tones of fake shock and scandal — but the practice is common enough and understood. It is Flory’s politics (or his assumed politics), and his friendship with the doctor, that are the cause of all the scandal and the mistrust. The idea, spoken in whispers, that he might not be a good chap, a good man, a pukka sahib, an old sport. He might even be Bolshie. And we could not have that.
Flory has given up on living. He drinks all day; he exists in stale bachelor squalor. Flory’s certain he was made for better things — for talk of books, of art. Some of this chat he gets from his friend the doctor. But the doctor’s servility — his certainty that the British are right and he, a poor Asiatic, can only be wrong — adds more distance into their friendship than it adds happy argument.
And then a young woman arrives, so young she’s almost a girl. She’s here because her loser parents died one by one and left her with nothing. She’s the niece of the Lackersteens, she a terrible prim, intriguing woman and he her debauched husband; and now she is their problem. It’s Mrs Lackersteen’s hope to get the young woman, Elizabeth, married as soon as possible, or else she might mooch and annoy her relations all her life.
It’s pure chance that, on her first day in the country, Elizabeth is terrified by a placid native buffalo and it’s Flory who happens to be there to rescue her from an imagined peril. She’s grateful that he saved her, although he says it’s nothing really. They spend a little more time together, Flory not understanding that when Elizabeth lived in Paris, she hated it and did not spent her hours and her sous in artistic pursuits — and she thinking, at least for a time, that he hates art and books as much as she does and will be a rugged outdoorsman who does all the right things and follows the code.
And just like that, Flory seems to have a reason to go on living. It’s a bad reason, but he tries to seize it eagerly. But trouble is ever brewing. Trouble is ever near to hand.
We pause, just for a moment, while I tell you the story of U Po Kyin. Most importantly of all, U Po Kyin is a villain. He’s a native in British government employ who is vastly corrupt and disgustingly overweight. U Po Kyin has stolen many rupees from locals in schemes of bribery and extortion. He has ruined many lives, and many women. And all the while, he has been promoted up the chain of offices, the colonial cursus honorum. When his enemies are blackmailed or libelled in the press and in anonymous letters, U Po Kyin is far enough away that no blame goes his way. When rebellions gather and grow, no one believes U Po Kyin may be responsible. And when U Po Kyin has an enemy — as Flory’s friend, the doctor, soon proves to be an enemy — the intriguer sets successfully to work. A devious mind allied to a sprawling network plots the doctor’s undermining and downfall in due time.
How much of a chance can the doctor, and his white friend and sometime shield Flory, possibly have — when facing such a force?