Once again another wonderful book meeting took place on Thurs, 19th December. Six of us were in attendance (Michel, Phoebe, Helen, Maren, Caroline, Cynthia) at a great place found by Caroline: Le Bouillon des Colonies. We were the only table there the entire night, which was a pity, so please encourage your friends to try it out !
The book discussion meandered and stopped and re-started, but overall it was a success. Those of us who read Burmese Days did enjoy it, although Maren was only luke-warm about it. We generally seemed to be strongly in favor of Orwell's other writings, with the notable exception being Helen, who was put off from Orwell by her high school reading assignments which she didn't enjoy. We agreed Burmese Days was less political and didactic than his other writings (indeed it was his first novel) but he still managed to send a bit of a moral message critical of the colonials via the character of Flory.
We all got a strong feeling for life in colonial Burma and felt that the descriptions and metaphors were really well done. The characters, too, were well described and seemed to represent good stereotypes of the people we could imagine living in that place and time. This was particularly true of Elizabeth, whose character provoked yet another lively debate à la Alice Adams: young women with no career, trade, and basically no alternative besides marriage do deserve our sympathy. On this we all agree. But does that feeling of desperation excuse bad behavior, contempt for the poor, etc? It is not easy to determine where the frontier lies, but clearly Elizabeth made Alice look like a Girl Scout.
Besides Flory, there were few really sympathetic characters in the novel. We could not even agree on the doctor, who was too over-the-top in his slavish admiration for the British. Flory even at times seemed to lack the full courage he needed throughout the story. But the single most truly evil character, U Po Kyin, raised the interesting question about whether the very presence of a colonial power will inevitably create people like U Po Kyin, who exploit it and use it as a weapon for their own profit. I don't believe we ever did resolve that debate.
Cynthia
