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Review [published January 2005]
Emma Larkin: Secret Histories
Chris Mitchell
This could well be my book of the year. Ostensibly
an attempt to retrace the physical origins of George
Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, Secret Histories: Finding
George Orwell In A Burmese Tea Shop is actually
a superbly concise and deeply scary history lesson in
the fate of pre- and post-colonial Myanmar. (It’s been
published in the USA under the less lyrical title Finding
George Orwell In Burma)
Governed by one’s of the world’s longest serving
military dictatorships, which has managed to wholly
destroy the infrastructure and prosperity of arguably
Asia’s most naturally wealthy country, Secret
Histories provides a ground-level view of the perils
of living in modern-day Myanmar. Emma Larkin, a
British woman who speaks fluent Burmese (sadly her
biographical sketch is, indeed, too sketchy to ascertain
much else), follows the geographical path of Orwell’s
five-year residency within Burma, revisiting the cities
and outposts of one of the former British Empire’s
most far-flung territories.
Along the way she exposes quite how much Myanmar
has become the living embodiment of Orwell’s Nine-
BUY Emma Larkin books online from and
teen Eighty Four. All politics, teaching and literature
are ruthlessly policed and scrutinised, with imprisonment
for the smallest misdemeanours regularly meted
out. Torture and disappearance are the norm. Corruption
and unemployment are rife, and Myanmar’s one
sole beacon of hope, the activist Aung San Suu Kyi, is
still under house arrest. (Larkin explains the reverence
surrounding Suu Kyi is due to her being the daughter
of Aung San, who is widely considered the hero-father
of the nation who led Burma’s independence from
the British; her continued refusal to be intimidated by
the murderous tactics of the regime have led them to
repeatedly smear her as a “foreign devil” thanks to her
marriage to Englishman Michael Aris).
Secret Histories, like Anna Funder’s Stasiland
which describes life in the totalitarian communist state
of East Germany, provides a personal perspective of
a truly appalling regime that lets the reader begin to
understand what it is like to live day to day under such
an oppressive government. One thing that endeared me
to the Burmans straight away was their love of reading,
as described by Larkin: unsurprising due to the lack of
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