Burma Sahib

Paul Theroux’s Burma Sahib (Mariner, 2024) is a masterful and richly textured novel that immerses the reader in the humid, hierarchized world of colonial Burma, one of the more obscure peripheries of the British Raj. In this novel, Theroux demonstrates his unparalleled ability to evoke atmosphere, which readers have enjoyed in his many celebrated travel books (The Great Railway Bazaar, etc.) and novels (The Mosquito Coast, Blinding Light, etc.). His prose is thick with sensory detail, colonial idiom, and a keen sense of place, rendering the imperial outpost not as a mere backdrop but as a character in its own right.

Through the plausible and compelling portrait of Eric Blair, the young man who would become George Orwell, Theroux explores the contradictions of empire: Blair is already bruised by the cruelty of Eton and yet naïvely steps into the imperial machinery, both repelled by its violence and seduced by its rituals and minor privileges. The novel traces his psychological evolution with subtlety, capturing his growing disaffection with British authority and his dawning awareness of injustice.

Eric Blair as a young
policeman in colonial Burma

Theroux handles this internal conflict not with heavy-handed polemic but through quiet, cumulative moments that feel lived rather than written. The book’s liberal use of Anglo-Indian colloquialisms and period slang might momentarily disorient the uninitiated, but they only deepen the authenticity of the narrative voice. Burma Sahib is a deeply satisfying work—intelligent, atmospheric, and emotionally resonant. In it, Theroux offers not just a portrait of a writer-to-be, but a meditation on conscience, complicity, and the uneasy seductions of power.