Reluctant servant of the Raj: Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux, reviewed

Eric Blair, to give George Orwell his baptismal name, arrived in Burma (present-day Myanmar) as a 19-year-old trainee police officer at the end of 1922 and left it in mid-1927 just before his 24th birthday. Not much of his time there had a direct impact on his work beyond a solitary novel, Burmese Days (1934), two luminous essays, ‘A Hanging’ (1931) and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936), a poem or two and a scattering of autobiographical fragments, most of which turn up in the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). None of his letters home survives and only a handful of reminiscences by people who knew him as a servant of the Raj.

All this is fertile ground for the Orwell speculator, and Paul Theroux’s latest novel offers a well-informed (the Orwell scholar Jeffrey Meyers is thanked in the acknowledgements) extrapolation of Blair’s time in the East. Half of it is a burnished-up version of things we know, or assume, to have happened and the other a series of events which can only have taken root in Theroux’s imagination.