Myanmar is riddled with ethnic conflicts and still crippled by the legacies of imperialism and 50 years of military rule
Bloomsbury; 384 pages; £20. To be published in America in September; $34.mercurial name, which shifts between one imposed by British colonisers and another by its generals, Burma, or Myanmar, is a country that defies easy categorisation. About the size of Germany and Poland combined, it is bigger and more diverse than its status on most maps suggests. It is also far more complex than it may seem.
He goes to places where tourists, and many journalists, fear to tread—such as Shan state, where he encounters rival armies and is probed by a lieutenant-colonel on the battle-readiness of the enemy.
Mr Eimer backs his reporting with historical research, mostly focused on colonialism and its aftermath. He charts the litany of errors made by the British, the effects of which endure. They appeared to promise autonomy to minority groups if they fought on the British side against the Japanese and the Bamar in the second world war. Many of the repressive laws they introduced remain on the statute books. They employed Indians to do many jobs instead of locals, stirring anti-immigrant sentiment.
The character who appears most frequently is George Orwell, who was based in Burma as a reluctant “colonial enforcer”; his grandmother was born in the country. Mr Eimer reverentially visits the family home. He cites Orwell’s work on Burma and sketches its background. This homage inadvertently highlights the contrast between Orwell’s lean prose and “A Savage Dreamland”, which, for all its gripping vignettes, can be baggy and repetitive. Sometimes Mr Eimer relies too heavily on anecdote and supposition. Perhaps this is a risk of charting such a wildly varied country.
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