FICTION
Burma Sahib
Paul Theroux
Hamish Hamilton, $34.99

A few years ago, well after midnight, at a bar during the Sydney Writers Festival, a bunch of us crime writers were pitching high-concept thriller or potential series ideas to one another. “George Orwell: Detective, is a procedural series waiting to happen,” someone said. Orwell’s first job had been as a colonial policeman in Burma for five years and we drunkenly envisaged White Mischief-style sex, violence, corrupt colonial officials and the shooting of elephants.

Fortunately, the hack version of this story never did get written. The good version, however, has just arrived from Paul Theroux, called Burma Sahib.

Eric Arthur Blair (Orwell is a nom de plume) was born in Bihar, India, where his father was an official in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Theroux’s book begins on the ship to Rangoon, as a painfully shy 19-year-old, fresh from Eton, embarks on what he hopes might be an adventure right out of the boys’ weeklies. The family can’t afford to send Blair to Oxford, so the tall young man tries out for the Burma Police, daring to dream that perhaps like Kipling he will find material to make poems, stories or even a novel.

Rangoon transfixes young Blair with its heat, exoticism, strange trees and animals. He is sent up country to police school and, always the good scholar, excels in learning the penal code, Burmese and Hindustani. Not wishing to stand out, he hides his contempt for the “whole racket that is the Raj” and actually becomes a good policeman, arresting several murderers and sending a dissident monk to jail.

He reads voraciously, writes detailed letters home, all the while building his literary muscles. Few people are let into Blair’s secret literary ambitions but his Eton classmate, future literary critic Cyril Connolly, sends back the occasional encouraging letter.

Two years into his police career another Eton chum visits and is shocked to find how changed Blair is by his profession. Gone is the bolshie schoolboy and in his place is a ramrod-straight police superintendent, frowning on mixed marriages, kicking disobedient schoolboys, visiting brothels and spouting propaganda about the empire.

For a book such as Burma Sahib to work well, you need three interlocking elements: a skilled writer, who is familiar with the country of Burma (now known as Myanmar) and who is also a bit of an Orwell nerd. Theroux has clearly done his Orwell homework, he has travelled extensively in Burma and he writes charmingly with his usual understated humour. The period details are rich and Theroux’s grasp of 1920s slang, Raj argot and British regional dialects is impressive. The Ulster Scots word “thrawn” (meaning contrary) appears on the same page as bollocking, gadabout, dacoits, topee and a common vulgarism for vagina.