Burma Sahib

Reviews

[An] ambitious dramatization . . . With piercing prose, Theroux lays bare the fraudulent and fiercely despotic nature of the British Empire. This brims with intelligence and vigor Compelling. Theroux is always great with setting; here it’s not just Burma but the mind of Orwell that he persuasively inhabits Theroux’s engrossing, suspenseful novel incisively maps the start of Blair’s metamorphosis into George Orwell, resounding critic of malevolent power Theroux gives us something that Orwell couldn’t: a sense of how current and relevant his concerns about imperialism remain from the viewpoint of the present . . . Theroux has woven a much bigger narrative around what we do know [about Orwell's time in Burma] and improvised imaginatively around the things we don’t A thoughtful, fully rounded portrait of a young man coming of age in a baroque, baffling and completely fascinating place and time. At aged 82, Theroux is still a curious, thrawn, uncompromising traveller and writer. Young Eric Blair would have admired that Remarkable . . . Theroux, of course, has a parallel reputation as one of our greatest travel writers, and the Burma that he conjures in these pages is wonderfully present in lush and dense prose A vibrantly descriptive narrative Captivating . . . An engrossing story . . . Theroux, the accomplished travel writer, skillfully maps the lay of the land and transports his reader to one vividly depicted Burmese location after another . . . At the same time, Theroux, the adept novelist, ensures his reader is invested in his protagonist’s journey — both his professional arc and his emotional trajectory Thoroughly engaging . . . Theroux is now in his eighties, and has written more than fifty books, but his writing is as potent as ever. A renowned travel writer, he recreates colonial Burma with loving accuracy, showing both its great beauty and the effects of its otherness on a homesick nineteen-year-old . . . meticulous and laudably authentic . . . [Theroux’s] approach is like that of a skilful, subtle barrister who patiently lays out his evidence, gradually ensnaring the reader in the apprehension of how this might all have appeared to be necessary and acceptable . . . Burma Sahib is a work of profound relevance to the present day for the way in which it demonstrates how human beings become enslaved to systems, institutions and social codes Expand reviews