The streets were probably swept free of garbage, and the dogs that swarm through them today would have been taken care of in brutal fashion. Back then, I suppose, on empty Sule Pagoda Road next to the park, gangs of boys did not play soccer under streetlamps, their naked backs glistening with sweat. It is strange to think of a young and unknown Orwell, who was born in India to a father who worked as an overseer of the colonial opium business, perhaps pacing around the ghostly Sule Pagoda 90 years ago and taking in this same view that I often enjoy when walking around the Maha Bandula park late at night.

Times, though, have changed: at the first Irrawaddy Literary Festival earlier this year, copies of Orwell books were handed out to participants, and the organizers of Britain’s Orwell Prize came to the country to celebrate their man’s Burmese past. Seen after midnight, they recall the state prisons and labyrinths of “ 1984,” a novel that, like many of the works by a onetime Burma resident then known as Eric Blair, was once nominally banned here. They rise up under a monsoon moon, massive and darkened and ill placed - the High Court a Queen Anne-style brick castle with a gloomy clock tower, like a London railway station reproduced here by some demented committee. Yangon’s old British buildings have the look of Gothic ruins gone astray in a tropical forest that cannot accommodate their scale. His prospects seem to improve when he meets the orphaned niece of a timber merchant, Elizabeth Lackersteen, who appears to reciprocate his feelings of love – but the arrival on the scene of another suitor, the boorish police officer Verrall, and the scheming of a disgruntled local magistrate threaten to shatter Flory’s dreams and put him on a path to tragedy.īased on the author’s own experiences in Burma as a young officer in the Indian Imperial Police, Burmese Days – here presented in the version published in Britain in 1944, which follows the text of the first American edition – is George Orwell’s debut novel, invaluable both as a faithful description of life in Burma during the twilight of the British Raj and as an exposé of the failings of colonial rule.Wandering around Yangon, the former capital city of Myanmar, always makes me think of George Orwell. In the provincial Burmese town of Kyauktada, the world-weary John Flory – a thirty-something English teak dealer – leads a life of quiet disillusionment, hardly mixing with the natives or the expat community, and deriving some comfort only from his conversations with an Indian friend, Doctor Veraswami, and the attentions of his local mistress.

Burmese days