Not long ago, a friend of mine went to Burma.  He lived in Bangkok and had been to every other country in Southeast Asia.  Burma was the last and strangest of all these places.

When he came back, he told me odd tales of people who’d never heard of September 11, of horrendously bland food, and of a long and complicated search for the “village pen” so his guide could write something down.

That’s right:  One pen for a whole village.

It’s hard to believe that a place like this still exists in a region of the world home to booming economies like Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.  But it does.

Now, thanks to Emma Larkin’s fascinating new book, Finding George Orwell in Burma, we have a much clearer picture of just how this came to be, and of what life is like in this brutal and reclusive dictatorship, which makes Laos and Cambodia look like progressive democracies.

Larkin (a pseudonym to protect herself and her Burmese friends) is a Bangkok-based journalist who speaks Burmese and who has been visiting the country for the past 10 years.

EMMA LARKIN’S BOOK PICKS All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of Asia by James Fenton. “I’m not sure it’s a travel book exactly, but it’s one of my favourite books. This collection of reportage-style journeys from around Asia seems to me to bring both the region and a particular period of history to life with great humour and humility.” No Mercy: A Journey into the Heart of the Congo by Redmond O’Hanlon. “An epic book about a fairly epic journey and I think O’Hanlon is a wonderful narrator/travel companion; he’s enthusiastic, honest and astoundingly well-informed.” From the Land of Green Ghosts by Pascal Khoo Thwe. “Another not-quite travel book, it charts the author’s journey from a tribal village in the remote mountains of Burma to the medieval halls of Caius College at Cambridge University in England; it’s a spellbinding odyssey between two very different worlds.”

Because Burma is a country where big brother is everywhere, where people (alive and dead) are whisked away routinely, and where the military is called the “State Peace and Development Council,” Larkin found the perfect vehicle for exploring the country: tracing George Orwell’s life as an Imperial police officer there.

Orwell, then known as Eric Blair, spent five years in the country in the 1920s before hanging up his billy club and picking up his pen.  As Larkin visits the places he lived—Mandalay, Maymyo, Moulmein (where Orwell’s mother was from) and Katha, where Orwell set his novel, “Burmese Days”—we can see how much and how little has changed.

Burma is a country rich in resources that should be as wealthy as its neighbors. But half a century of corruption and mismanagement have led it to be labeled one of the least developed countries on earth.

Larkin finds many things in her search for Orwell: his old home, a street named for his mother’s family, and people with dim memories of “Uncle Eric.”

She also makes the forceful case that Orwell’s time living in Burma (overlooked by many biographers) had a profound and lasting impact on Orwell’s thinking about power, exploitation and the politics of the oppressed.

It’s a cruel irony, then, that the country which set him on this path would also become the fullest realization of his distopian dream set out most famously in the novel “1984.” Burma today may be the most Orwellian place on earth.

Lately there has been an increase in tourism to Burma, but most travelers will only see so much. One tourist told Larkin, “Everyone smiles at you—it can’t be that bad.”

But guides receive strict government training about what they can and cannot discuss with tourists, and the punishments are severe—jail, torture, disappearance.

Fortunately, Larkin draws back the bamboo curtain far enough for us to see what’s behind it. In one encounter, she talks to an impassive old woman who suddenly breaks down and tells Larkin she has no hope for the future.

“All you had to do,” Larkin writes, “was scratch the surface of one of the town’s smiling residents and you would find bitterness or tears.”

Lately, a few writers like Andrew Marshall ("The Trouser People") and Mark Jenkins ("The Ghost Road,” “The Best American Travel Writing 2004") have begun to fill in the some of the silence that drifts up from the country.

Larkin, however, gives the most elegiac account of life in Burma, and what is probably the best travel book on the country since Norman Lewis’ “Golden Earth: Travels in Burma” was published in 1952.

And what comes through most clearly in her, and Orwell’s, Burma is a colossal sadness, as well as the humor and patience that lets the Burmese bear it until the day when some of the last people living Orwell’s nightmare can finally wake up. 

Frank Bures is the books editor of World Hum.