In my introduction to literature courses at the art college, I often assigned an essay by George Orwell, Shooting An Elephant from 1936. It provoked lively discussion as students pondered the author killing a valuable elephant basically to save face and act as the British soldier the townspeople expected. Although it sickened him, went against his values, and demanded a requisite skill for a humane shot he lacked, Orwell killed the elephant.

It was this brief encounter with Orwell’s writings, so different from those more familiar such as 1984, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Down and Out in Paris and London that led me to read the 2024 novel by Paul Theroux, Burma Sahib. Both a travel writer and a novelist, Theroux proved the ideal author to imagine, using Orwell’s own writings., Orwell’s five years in Burma from 1922 to 1927 when Orwell was 19 to 24. Orwell’s words from his 1934 Burmese Days starts the book. “There is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever.”

Perhaps this book will appeal to a narrow audience, one both interested in life in colonial Burma and the formation of the writer who eventually became known as George Orwell. Born Eric Arthur Blair, he left that name and that patriotic young man behind as he wrote for the public. Beautifully written with descriptions so vivid the book made me feel present in a time and place completely unknown to me. But his time there certainly made him into the man I knew from his later works. The “fixed character” was as far from an obliging colonial soldier as could be imagined.