Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux

Published by Mariner Books on February 6, 2024

One pleasure of reading lies in the vicarious opportunity to live a different life, if only for a few hours. One pleasure of reading Paul Theroux is that he transports the reader to unfamiliar places, to lives unlike our own. Burma Sahib takes the reader into the life of young Eric Blair as a supervising officer in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma during the 1920s, before Blair began to publish novels under the name George Orwell.

Blair hates the nickname “Lofty,” a reference to his height. He attended Eton, suffered the beatings by faculty and older boys, passed up the usual path of an Oxford education and a life of privilege, and is now taking a probationary position as assistant district superintendent of police in Burma. At the age of 19 (he will turn 20 in 1923), Blair has accepted a three-year contract and will need to repay the cost of his passage (and incur his father’s wrath) if he quits. The novel’s initial chapters begin with Blair’s travel on a ship that is sailing to Mandalay and follow him to his first posting.

Great Britain is administering Burma as a colony, taking its resources and offering a dubious path to “civilization” in return. The constables Blair supervises are Burmese and Indian. Natives automatically refer to Blair as Sahib, but he is expected to become a Pukka Sahib, a title that suggests both authority and an exemplar of gentlemanly behavior. Unfortunately, most Pukka Sahibs are gentlemanly only toward other white Europeans. They belittle, berate, and beat Burmese and Indians without giving their ungentlemanly behavior a second thought.

The novel follows Blair through various postings in Burma, most of which don’t end well. He has unfortunate encounters with a rogue elephant (Blair is too violent in the opinion of his superior) and with a crazy man (Blair is not violent enough). To his colonial bosses, elephants are more important than Asians because elephants help the timber industry make money and are less easily replaced than native workers.

Blair was raised to believe in the correctness of British colonialism and in the superiority of white men, the British foremost among them. His views are both reinforced and challenged as he performs the duties of a police superintendent. Blair has a grandmother and a few other relatives near Mandalay, but he is distressed to learn that his uncle Frank married a Burmese woman who gave birth to Kathleen, Frank’s “half caste” daughter. Blair is afraid that his superiors will learn about the relationship and will make disparaging comments about him behind his back. His disgust with people of mixed races eventually causes him to feel disgusted with himself for not judging people on their merits rather than their parentage.

Blair is pleased to encounter a friend from Eton in Burma and is equally distressed when he learns that the man is engaged to a Burmese woman. His concerns are defined less by his own prejudices against Asians than by his fear that he will be judged for having friends and relatives who are willing to mix with natives. At the same time, Blair enjoys the sexual company of Asian women. Sometimes he has to pay for it, but a couple of his postings come with a young Burmese woman who is expected to keep him happy at night.

Blair eventually agrees to sponsor an Indian — one of his few friends in Burma — as a member of his social club, knowing that he will be criticized and even ostracized for daring to bring a nonwhite through the club doors. Placing friendship above social position is a transformative decision, similar to Huck Finn’s moral decision to risk God’s wrath by helping Jim gain his freedom.

Theroux pays close attention to the minor characters in Burma Sahib, including Blair’s police colleagues and his relatives. He gives each of Blair’s lovers a distinct personality, but none of them (apart from the white woman with whom he has an affair) are happy with Blair’s unwillingness to make their relationship permanent. One of those women contributes to Blair’s undoing. The married white woman who occasionally shares his bed has a dirty mouth (by the standards of her time) and Blair finds it exciting to encounter naughty words and ideas that he never seen in books.

Blair's fullness as a character is impressive. Theroux paints Blair as an isolated man who prefers his own company to that of others. He holds his secrets dear, even when the secrets are not worth holding. He gives the impression of being a blank slate and avoids spreading clues about who he might really be. He hates the assumptions that the British make about him when they learn he attended Eton. Blair despises most people, whether they are white Europeans or Indians and Burmese who have darker skin. He only seems content when he is reading or struggling to write poetry. Jack London, Kipling, and Somerset Maugham have the most impact on his literary sensibility, while E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India fails to speak to his own experience.

Theroux is a masterful storyteller. His descriptions of 1920s Burma make the reader scratch mosquito bites, gag at the odor of open sewage, and feel disgust at white colonists who feel privileged to treat everyone with dark skin as a servant. If Theroux occasionally makes points a bit redundantly, those points are always important to the story. The primary point he makes in Burma Sahib relates to Blair’s ability to change his thinking (to become "woke" in current parlance) after observing the unfairness both of British colonialism and of racial or ethnic prejudice in all parts of the world. Blair’s formative experiences have a liberalizing (and thus humanizing) impact on Blair, turning him into the author who will later question authoritarian rule in 1984 and Animal Farm. Burma Sahib is a fascinating portrait of Blair’s intellectual and empathic development. At the same time, it is a fascinating story of a young man who comes of age in an unfamiliar and challenging world.

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Harlequin Butterfly by Toh EnJoe

First published in Japan in 2012; published in translation by Pushkin Press on March 5, 2024

Harlequin Butterfly seems more like a series of thought experiments than a novel. It might best be viewed as a meditation on language. Make of it what you will. Most of the Japanese fiction I’ve read has been accessible to my western sensibility, but Harlequin Butterfly is a bit of a puzzle. I don’t know if that’s because of a difference in culture or if my mind is simply too dull to appreciate Toh EnJoe’s story.

A. A. Abrams is a frequent flyer. In fact, flying is about all he does. When the plane is in the air, Abrams removes a small net made of silver thread that he uses to capture fresh ideas. In no other location are ideas as plentiful as those that come loose in the cabin of a jumbo jet. The net is later said to catch luck or opportunity, but in the beginning the net captures ideas that only exist mid-journey, ideas that are left behind as the body moves forward.

A passenger sitting next to Abrams (in coach, where all the best ideas are found) apparently narrates the first chapter. The narrator can’t read on a plane (or any other form of transportation), perhaps because her thoughts can’t keep up with the speed of the vehicle. Thoughts flitting out of heads moving at a high speed may explain why ideas are most easily captured on an airplane. Speaking to the passenger, Abrams conceives the idea of a book that can only be understood when the reader is flying. Abrams writes To Be Read Only on an Airplane, a book that oddly gains traction among readers who are traveling by sea on luxury liners.

Abrams reappears later in the novel, sometimes in a different gender, once at an earlier time. At some points Abrams is alive and at others is remembered in death. And then we learn that someone else (probably) wrote To Be Read Only on an Airplane — unless the alternate author is actually Abrams in a different guise.

In the second chapter, the focus shifts to Tomoyuki Tomoyuki, an author who has written books that are meant to be read only under specific circumstances, including (you guessed it) while traveling. Most have gone unpublished. They are written in multiple languages including a simplified version of Latin — invented by a mathematician — that nobody speaks. To Be Read Only Under a Cat achieved some success after reading it became the trendy thing to so.

In this chapter, it seems that Abrams is a fictional character who appears in To Be Read Only Under a Cat. Yet there seems to be an Abrams Institute that is tracking down and collecting (and maybe stealing) Tomoyuki’s work. Whether Abrams is real or imagined, whether Abrams or Tomoyuki writes the books (or each writes them independently), doesn’t seem to matter as Tomoyuki understands reality to be relative and fluid.

One of Tomoyuki’s works seems to be a meditation on writing. He explains that he writes because he likes the sound of certain words linked together, a sound “that makes me write things I wasn’t even thinking.” Harlequin Butterfly often comes across as a stream of strangely connected thoughts. Perhaps Toh Enjoe didn’t realize he was having those thoughts as he composed the novel.

Another chapter analogizes kitchens to dictionaries. Both are full of ingredients. When you don’t have the right ingredient, you can make do with another. Ingredients can be combined in various ways and some combinations are preferable to others. The sound of an ingredient (coriander) sparks memories of many things all at once: smells and colors and people and the “bustle of life.”

Language is also analogized to needlework, stitches creating something new, expanding like a conversation, “twisting and turning until the day is over.” Stitching with an old woman helps the narrator learn the woman’s language. Like needlepoint or any craft, writing is an act of creation that might be finished or unfinished, its form “constantly changing, cycling through the stages of transformation, setting new life in motion.” The narrator wonders whether a story written in one language might be incoherent but make perfect sense when translated into another.

These are interesting ideas. I’m not sure they add up to a coherent story but the ideas themselves call the notion of coherence into question. Each chapter of Harlequin Butterfly seems to have a different narrator, although it also seems that they are different forms of the same narrator. At some points, it seems that the story’s narrator is searching for Tomoyuki. At some points (sometimes the same points), it seems the narrator might be Tomoyuki. The final chapter suggests that the narrator is someone (more precisely, something) entirely unexpected.

I’m recommending Harlequin Butterly for its strangeness. Readers who expect stories to have straightforward narratives that are easily understood will want to steer clear of the novel. Readers who appreciate the power of language might be entertained by the EnJoe’s invitation to perceive that power in new ways. Readers with time on their hands might want to read it twice, as I suspect a second reading would contribute to the reader’s understanding or appreciation of the novel’s narrative structure.

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Galway Confidential by Ken Bruen

Published by Mysterious Press on March 5, 2024

Jack Taylor wakes up from a coma after 18 months and, within minutes, has his first taste of Jameson. It makes him feel much better.

Jack entered the coma after being stabbed multiple times at the end of A Galway Epiphany. Upon awakening, Jack learns that his life was saved by a man named Rafferty. Rafferty has been visiting Jack after convincing the hospital nurses that he is Jack’s brother. Rafferty has taken an interest in Jack’s life — he explains that he produces a true crime podcast that often features Jack’s cases — and, after Jack's discharge, Rafferty tries to partner with him on a couple of investigations. This will prove to be bad both for Jack and Rafferty, although series fans know that having any sort of friendship with Jack is likely to invite danger.

The plot of Galway Confidential is fairly typical for a Jack Taylor novel, although it might be less shockingly violent than most. A former nun, Shiela Winston, wants to hire Jack to find the rogue who has been killing nuns in Galway. The Guards are doing little to solve the crime spree, as they are overwhelmed with protestors against lockdowns and vaccination policies.

In addition to investigating attacks on nuns, Jack searches out a couple of affluent youngsters who are setting fire to the homeless. Jack also meets up with Quinlan, an associate of Rafferty whose violent approach to problem solving is not as compatible with Jack’s as Quinlan believes.

During his investigations, Jack is contacted by an alcoholic priest. Jack forces the priest to dry out — perhaps an act of hypocrisy for someone who drinks as much as Jack — but again, any association with Jack isn’t likely to end well. The plot threads weave together in ways that readers have come to expect from Ken Bruen.

Bruen has a history of referencing books, television shows, and movies in the Jack Taylor novels. A character in Green Hell explains that the references ground the novels in “stuff” that the reader knows. Bruen makes fewer cultural references than usual in Galway Confidential (perhaps because Taylor has been in a coma and thus unable to consume culture), but he grounds the novel in current events, as well as events Jack missed while he was sleeping: the Brexit disaster, Boris Johnson’s resignation, the Queen’s death, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the influx of refugees into Ireland, inflation and other consequences of the pandemic. The implication is that Jack has good reason to drink.

Jack Taylor novels are quick reads. Bruen’s minimalist writing style tells the story in short paragraphs that surround dramatic moments with quirkiness. Bruen’s notion of a long sentence is: “He had the kind of face that you know has never really been walloped properly but I could amend that.” Dialog is crisp, in part because Taylor rarely speaks unless he can’t prevent himself from responding to idiocy with sarcasm. Galway Confidential is an unremarkable entry in a remarkable series but since every Jack Taylor novel is darkly entertaining, my recommendation is nearly automatic.

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Doorway to the Stars by Jack McDevitt

Published by Subterranean Press on February 1, 2024

Jack McDevitt has a long history of writing entertaining space opera, often focusing on the exploration of alien races that have become extinct. His new novella sets aside the space travel that dominates most of his stories and imagines an easier means of interstellar travel.

About 12,000 years ago, a transportation grid was installed in North Dakota. Nobody noticed it until members of a Sioux tribe found it, started pressing buttons, and realized that it would transport them to other worlds. All the worlds they have visited are Earth-like in atmosphere and gravity. The journeys often seem like visiting the nicer parts of New Jersey.

The destination that departs from the norm is a space station at the edge of the galaxy. The station has no atmosphere, which led to an early explorer’s unfortunate death. Explorers now wear space suits when they visit the station.

A few of the worlds are inhabited. The aliens are generally humanoid, although the residents of one world are simian in appearance. They look like apes who wear pants and read books. Why these particular worlds are linked by the grid is answered (sort of) by the story's end.

Visitors to a ruined world catch a glimpse of an alien who resembles the devil. They decide to call the planet Brimstone. On the space station, visitors find a screen (perhaps an alien version of Facetime) that shows a devil speaking in a tongue they don’t understand.

The transportation system is Sioux property by virtue of being on their reservation. However, when a tribal leader dismantles it and tries to hide the pieces — on the reasonable theory that nothing good will come of giving white people access to such powerful technology — the government steps in and asserts its questionable authority. In the real world, I would expect the government to ignore tribal autonomy as it always does when treaties become inconvenient and to surround the grid with soldiers in the paranoid anticipation of an alien invasion. McDevitt tells a more optimistic story.

The novella’s ending illustrates the lesson that we shouldn’t judge others by their appearances. That includes aliens who look like devils.

There isn’t much to this story. Portals that allow quick transportation to other worlds are familiar in science fiction and McDevitt makes little effort to build the worlds his characters visit. The story’s point is its twist ending, but I'm not sure the relatively obvious tiwst merits the buildup.

The story is published as a deluxe first edition and is fairly pricey for a novella, but it is a signed limited edition meant for collectors. I ignore price when I review books because value is for the consumer to determine (and the text might eventually be available in a more affordable format). I might recommend the novella as a pleasant story by a long-time practitioner of the science fiction genre, but if Doorway to the Stars were packaged in a volume with McDevitt's best stories, it probably wouldn't be anyone's favorite.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Green Dot by Madeleine Gray

First published in Australia in 2023; published by Henry Holt and Co. on February 27, 2024

The green dot in the title of this novel is the indicator on Instagram that your lover is online. The dot is “staring at you like an eye you can’t see yourself reflected in” and is thus less satisfying than your lover’s actual eyes.

In its early pages, Green Dot is very funny. The humor slowly transitions to drama that is foreshadowed by the narrator’s warning that her audience will ask how she could have been such a fool.

Hera Stephen lives in Sydney. She has no STEM ability but she’s bright, so she views her options as lawyer, journalist, or academic. She loves to learn but has no passion for working. School has taught her that she should be concerned about her formation and development, but spending her days working in a job seems to have little relationship to those goals.

Hera buys her freedom by taking out student loans and earning degrees. The strategy works until she has earned all the degrees that lenders will fund. Hera is living with her father and needs to find work so she can make loan payments.

At the age of 24, Hera finds a position as an online community moderator. The job allows Madeleine Gray to poke fun at internet trolls, content moderation, and office work. While content moderators are rigidly separated from the journalists in her office, Hera finds that a content moderator can get invited to office drinks after work with the journalists by being “young, smart-mouthed, female, reasonably big-titted, with no avowed journalist aspirations of your own.”

Hera befriends fellow content moderator Mei Ling, who is her ally against a universally disliked supervisor. Their snarky message exchanges using the office intranet add to the novel’s humor. Hera also has friends from her student days. Soph, the most amusing of them, “is smart and mostly motivated by vendettas.” She likes to gossip and is encouraging Hera to try having sex with a man (Hera having mostly confined her sex life to women).

When Hera starts to flirt with Arthur, a British journalist who works in her office, Soph encourages her to shag him. Hera accepts the challenge and begins an affair. This is the point at which the story moves from humor to drama. I was disappointed that the humor nearly disappears at that point because the humor is sharp and more enjoyable than Hera’s love life.

The domestic drama of Hera’s affair runs a predictable course. Hera tells the reader at an early point that her story would be predictable and at the end says, “You were right. You predicted it. Everyone was right but me.” Notwithstanding the absence of surprise, the story is emotionally affecting, as Arthur makes promises about leaving his wife but repeatedly explains why the time isn’t right (his wife’s pregnancy is one such excuse). Hera ends it and moves to England, continues to interact with Arthur via Instagram, moves back to Sydney during COVID, and suffers mightily as the story moves to its inevitable end.

Hera’s fantasies about becoming Arthur’s wife and raising his baby as a stepmom might make the reader question Hera’s intelligence, but she is clearly a bright woman who simply has no control over her feelings — or, more importantly, over her response to her feelings. I often feel frustrated with stories about characters who allow their lives to become soap opera plots, but the novel’s initial humor drew me into Hera’s personality and made me sympathize with her when her life falls apart. In the end, Hera manages to learn something about herself and about life — she develops as a person, as she was told she should do in school — and that development suggests a possibility of growth that makes the predictable story worthwhile.

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