Customer Reviews

Secret Histories

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This British edition is the same as the Penguin hardcover from 2005.

Larkin, writing under a psuedonym as an American born in Asia, educated in London, and resident in Bangkok, brings the right balance of an insider--being able to speak the language and get into the feel of Burma--and outsider--marked obviously by her presence. I wondered how the Burmese reacted to her as she suddenly must have entered many situations and places in which the local people probably never expected that a Westerner would be able to converse, interview, and delve into their own relatively unknown (to outsiders) language. Humbling too to note how many of the people she met had mastered English and were better read than many to whom Dickens is an author in a native language and not one learned with considerable effort so far away from much contact with the West.

However, Larkin diminishes her own role to highlight the conditions endured in a police state. I never knew that on 8--8-88 3,000 people were killed while demonstrating; the fate of "The Lady" is about all many of us have heard about "Myanmar", unfortunately for that nation and for human rights. This is why her linking today's experiences to previous conditions at first perpetrated and then rebelled against by Orwell himself makes for a well-chosen structural foundation for her book. Written calmly and even detached from her surroundings somewhat, Larkin lets the people she talks to tell the stories. I do sense that much of Burma was left out--I would have liked, seeing the map, to know more about the peninsular strip adjoining Thailand, the border areas with Bangladesh, India, and China, and the Himalayan frontiers, but her travels seem to have been more limited to the center of the nation. This may be, however, due to surveillance. I was amazed she was able to get away with as much as she did given her "not blending in."

She conveys information calmly and clearly, and her own quest to retrace Orwell's steps results in a lot of sensibly established parallels that I doubt any previous reader of Orwell or traveler to Burma had been able to make--quite an accomplishment for this modest book. I hope too that it reaches a wider audience and that more of us learn about the regime strangling this nation. Larkin's lack of self-importance makes her book a quiet but effective voice against tyranny, and Orwell would be proud of her.