George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, published in 1934, drew substantially on the five years he served in the Indian imperial police force at various stations along the Irrawaddy a decade earlier. You suspect, however, that his alter ego in that novel, John Flory, was a good deal more seasoned than the young writer, still called Eric Blair, had been when he arrived in Mandalay in 1922. Flory was cast as a teak merchant in his mid-30s; Blair was unvarnished and 19 and just out of Eton. Similarly, Orwell’s two peerless eyewitness essays of the period – Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging – were written not in the heat of Rangoon or Mandalay but some years later, on reflection, long after the writer had returned to the family home in Suffolk. Those reports from the messy frontline of empire were shaped by hindsight and more fully rounded sympathies with ideals of independence.
This novel strips back those layers of experience to give you a sense of the unformed Orwell – off into the jungle rather than to Oxford, following in the footsteps of his father (“Don’t let us down, Eric”), who had been a middling official in Britain’s opium trade. Theroux’s contention, the theme of his keenly felt and vividly researched book, is: “There’s a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed for ever” – and that these years represented that period in the life of Orwell the writer.
