In nearly every chapter he does something to debase himself, something for the reader to cringe at. But he is, like most of Orwell’s leading men, uncomfortably and almost unbearably human.

There are hints throughout Burmese Days of the future themes for which Orwell would later become so well known. Flory is the lone and lacking individual trapped within a bigger system that is undermining the better side of human nature. Like Flory, Orwell was surrounded during his time in Burma by people he felt he had nothing in common with and to whom he could not fully reveal himself. When Flory muses on the constraints of colonial society, he could just as well be in the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

‘It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored… even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism. Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.’

When Burmese Days was first published in the 1930s it came as a surprise to some old Burma hands. A colleague of Orwell’s who had received training with him at the Mandalay Police Training School felt that Orwell had ‘rather let the side down’. The training school’s burly principal was reportedly livid and threatened to horsewhip Orwell if he ever saw him again.

In defence of his harsh portrayal of colonial society, Orwell wrote simply, ‘I dare say it’s unfair in some ways and inaccurate in some details, but much of it is simply reporting what I have seen.’

It is a curious twist of fate that Orwell’s later novels have mirrored Burma’s recent history. In Burma today, there is a joke that Orwell didn’t write just one novel about the country, but three; a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The link begins with Burmese Days as it chronicles the country’s period under British colonialism. Not long after Burma became independent from Britain, a military dictator who took power in 1962 sealed off the country from the outside world, launched ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’ and turned Burma into one of the poorest countries in Asia. The same story is told in Orwell’s Animal Farm, an allegorical tale about a socialist revolution gone wrong in which a group of pigs overthrow the human farmers and run the farm into ruin. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s description of a horrifying and soulless dystopia, paints a chillingly evocative picture of Burma today, a country ruled by one of the world’s most tenacious military dictatorships.

Intellectuals in Burma laughingly refer to Orwell as ‘the prophet’. And, just as Orwell’s shadow continued to fall across Burma, so Burma never really relinquished its hold on Orwell either.

There are physical affectations that Orwell picked up in Burma which remained with him throughout his life. While in Burma, he acquired a moustache similar to those worn by officers of the British regiments stationed there. Orwell also acquired some tattoos while he was there; on each knuckle he had a small untidy blue circle. Many Burmese living in rural areas still sport tattoos like this – they are believed to protect against bullets and snake bites.

A decade after Orwell had returned to England, he slipped the following paragraph into a book review he wrote:

‘For an average Englishman in India [Burma was then ruled as part of the Indian empire] the basic fact, more important even than the loneliness or the heat of the sun, is the strangeness of the scenery. In the beginning the foreign landscape bores him, later he hates it, in the end he comes to love it, but it is never quite out of his consciousness and all his beliefs are in a mysterious way affected by it.’

When Orwell wrote about Burma in Burmese Days he produced his most elaborate descriptive writing and the novel is given a supremely exotic backdrop, drenched in mist and tropical flowers. Orwell’s other books seem to lack the fervour of Burmese Days. Neither his writing on Spain, nor England, produced such vivid ‘purple passages’, as he deridingly called them. The scenery of the East clearly got under Orwell’s skin.

Two of Orwell’s most powerful essays, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’, are based on his time in Burma. And, on his deathbed, it was to this setting that Orwell’s mind wandered once again as he sought inspiration for another novel. Though doctors at the Cotswolds’ sanatorium where Orwell was being treated for pulmonary tuberculosis had confiscated his typewriter and advised him to stop writing, he stubbornly continued. He scribbled letters, composed essays, reviewed books, and corrected the proofs of his soon-to-be-published novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Also simmering in his fevered mind was an idea for another book entitled ‘A Smoking Room Story’ which would re-visit Burma.

‘A Smoking Room Story’ was planned as a novella of thirty to forty thousand words that would tell the story of how a fresh-faced young British man was irrevocably changed after living in the humid jungles of colonial Burma.

Orwell didn’t have a chance to make much headway on this; he died shortly after beginning, and left behind only an outline for the tale and a short vignette written in an inky scrawl. Burmese Days remains the only major piece of writing which charts the compelling and long-standing connection – part reality, part fiction – between George Orwell and Burma.

Among the documents in the archive where Orwell’s papers are stored at the University of London is a poem written on Government of Burma writing paper. The poem is an unpublished epitaph for the main character in Burmese Days, John Flory. Orwell imagined the poem carved in the bark of a peepul tree above the place where Flory is buried in Burma:

JOHN FLORY
Born 1890
Died of Drink 1927

Here lie the bones of poor John Flory;
His story was the old, old story.
Money, women, cards and gin
Were the four things that did him in.

He has spent sweat enough to swim in
Making love to stupid women;
He has known misery past thinking
In the dismal art of drinking.

Oh stranger, as you voyage here
And read this welcome, shed no tear;
But take the simple gift I give,
And learn from me how not to live.

EMMA LARKIN

A Note on the Text

Burmese Days poses difficult editorial problems. The book was published first in the United States by Harper & Brothers on 25 October 1934; 2,000 copies were printed and, probably on 11 December, a second impression was issued.