Orwell’s Unfinished Novel of the East

I’ve been reading, and hugely enjoying, DJ Taylor’s The Prose Factory: Literary Life in Britain Since 1918. Among the nuggets to be picked out is one about George Orwell’s last planned novel, of which only ‘fragments’ remain. Orwell of course served in the British Colonial Police in Burma, an experience that resulted in an outpouring of work (Burmese Days obviously as well as several short stories and a number of non-fiction articles critical of the British Empire in the Far East). Orwell was also a fan, as a boy, of Arnold Bennett, HG Wells and Somerset Maugham and planned a novel in their style. Shortly before his death in 1950, he was working on a new novel….’a rather old-fashioned piece about a young man coming back from the East in the 1920s: a trajectory that exactly parallels Orwell’s own return from Burma in 1927.’ Sadly it was never completed.

Orwell’s passport photo from his Burma Days – sporting a moustache style that would soon go decidedly out of fashion