Burmese Days: Orwell’s Colonial Novel

Abstract

Burmese Days is Orwell’s only truly conventional novel. It has two interlocking plots: the main one concerns the hero Flory’s courtship of Elizabeth Lackersteen and his moral dilemma about the election of his friend, the Indian Dr Veraswamy, to the European Club; the secondary one describes the plans of U Po Kyin, a prominent Burmese, to be elected to the club himself. Early in the novel Flory claims he is immune to U Po Kyin’s schemes, but Kyin disgraces Flory, who loses Elizabeth and kills himself.

What lured him to life in the tropic? Did he venture for fame or for pelf? Did he seek a career philanthropic? Or simply to better himself? But whate’er the temptation that brought him, Whether piety, dulness, or debts, He is thine for a price, thou hast bought him, O Land of Regrets!

Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall, ‘The Land of Regrets’, Verses Written in India (1899)