Burma Sahib – Paul Theroux

In 1922 an 18-year-old Eric Blair, provisional police officer in the Indian Police went off to Burma. His four year stay, with a less than sterling record, was instrumental in his gradual opposition to colonialism and becoming a writer known as George Orwell.  Theroux’s fictionalized account of this phase of Blair’s life makes for easy reading unmatched in his fiction since his long-ago Mosquito Coast.  The brutish behavior of the British in Burma, portrayed here, is in stark contrast with the benign portrait of British colonization of Malaysia in The House of Doors.