Don't get me wrong -- Emma Larkin does her groundwork, stays in cubicle-sized rooms, sits on hot buses and tries to rent a bicycle or go into an old building when the authorities are less than eager that she should do so. And there is all the material most people are going to need or want on Orwell and the Burma of his day. These things aren't the problem.
The problem, rather, is that the whole enterprise is more than a touch predictable. If anyone proposed such a scheme to you, you would just know for certain in advance that there would be stories of colonial stuffiness, modern restrictions and actual repression, historical snippets and people coming up to the author in the half-light and asking her to tell the world about their plight. Anyone who knows Burma, in addition, will know all about the teahouses, the strange mix of Westernness and Easternness in educated Burmese, the street puppet plays, the pagodas and the terrible record of the junta. What's missing, however, is something else. What this book doesn't have is fire in the soul.
I feel I'm being unkind. What, then, are the book's strengths?
Mainly, it's conveniently laid-out and reliable. Orwell based Burmese Days on the northern town on Katha. He sketched a town plan of the place and followed it closely, so much so that his London publisher thought it was too close to reality and might therefore be libellous. As a result it was first published in the US, and only a year later, with many details altered, in the UK. Emma Larkin tells us all this, considers the tennis club where so much of the novel's action is located, and gives us the historical information about a move to admit token Burmese to such places. She does the same for the other towns Orwell lived in, interspersing records of her chats with locals and more thorough-going interviews with well-placed and well-informed people. She describes the scenery and the traveling conditions. This book, in other words, is above all else supremely competent. You can, you feel, always trust the author -- as far, that is, as she goes.
But the sad fact is that intemperence, bias, anger and people losing their cool generally make for far better books than calm, measured accounts of not-all-that-dangerous travel. Emma Kirby is thus as far as it's possible to imagine anyone being from a writer such as Hunter S. Thompson. And that leaves me with an unavoidable thought: how very, very much I'd rather have read a book about Burma, any book about Burma, by THAT particular writer! A title such as Secret Histories would have set him off in directions undreamt of by Emma Kirby.
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