Under the Dragon
Authors: Rory Maclean
Tags: #new travel writing, burma, myanmar, aung san suu kyi, burmese history, political travel writing, slorc, william dalrymple, fact and fiction
A Journey through Burma
Rory MacLean
Preface by William Dalrymple
‘A work of great political commitment, powered above all by the author’s outrage at the injustices, brutalisation and mass violation of human rights that he witnessed in Burma. Yet for all its pain, Under the Dragon is a beautiful book. It remains his masterpiece; and in the light of the continuing tragedy in Burma is now more relevant than ever.’
William Dalrymple
‘I cannot imagine a better book on the beauty and terror of Burma. Rory MacLean is more than a gifted writer. He is a man whose artistry is underpinned by a powerful moral sensibility. Read it. Read it. Read it.’
Fergal Keane
‘Shines with an almost unbearable poignancy … a beautiful insight into this unhappy land … a book which marvellously extends the conventional confines of travel writing.’
Colin Thubron, The Times
‘It will make you cry and it will give you hope. It travels through modern decayed Rangoon, into the hills with warlords of their tribes, to the heart of government at its most sinister, and to the place where the best books go – inside you. It is astonishingly good.’
Jeanette Winterson
‘Exceptional insight and sensitivity, beautifully crafted and poignant…. MacLean is a maverick among travel writers, his talent is multifaceted…. Until the Burmese are free to determine their own lives then the pages of this wonderful book are as close as I will be getting to Burma.’
Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times
‘Easily the travel book of the year.’
Wanderlust
‘A triumphant exploration of a country brutalised by dictatorship.’
Independent
‘I couldn’t put it down. It made me cry.’
Guardian
‘Such an extraordinary book … a stunner.’
Far Eastern Economic Review
‘MacLean takes the reader to the root of the problems of the country. [He] shows rather than tells his reader what it is like to live in Burma. He does it with humour and honesty. He expresses his feelings of a cowed and crushed people who can’t find words to express their sufferings.’
Pascal Khoo-Thwe, The Spectator
‘This is a timely, fluent, passionate book about Burma which ought to be read by all who value the right of a courageous people to their freedom.’
John Pilger
‘MacLean gives an extraordinary sense of individual hopelessness and radical disorientation under a system of organised absurdity mixed with terror that is contemporary Burma.’
John Casey, Evening Standard
‘After reading Under the Dragon, one can never again see Burma’s masses as faceless hordes. MacLean shows Burma to be a country of repression and fear, but also one of great individual kindness and passion.’
Independent on Sunday
‘This is an important book, and an essential book.’
New Internationalist
‘More than a travel book, this is an impassioned plea on behalf of a tragic nation … Beautifully written, with a powerful sense of involvement.’
Sunday Express
‘A sensitive portrayal of a people who must soon be allowed to emerge from the brutal and senseless repression of decades. It should be widely read.’
Michael Tillotson, Country Life
‘Immensely impressive.’
John Boorman, Magill
A Note on Naming
In this book the names of all Burmese who I met were changed – with one courageous exception. Circumstances and places were also altered. At the time of writing this was a tragic necessity if real lives were to be protected. The girl with the sensitive hands, Ma Swe with her radio, even the brothers who leaned forward to whisper to me, ‘And have you met the Lady?’ would have been punished if the authorities could have identified them. These few, altered facts did not changed the essential truth: that the people of Burma wished their horrific circumstances to be known, while their unelected leaders wanted the reality to be hidden.
In contrast, I did not change the name of the country. In 1989, in an attempt to obscure their actions, the governing State Law and Order Restoration Council switched the country’s official English name to Myanmar. Then, in late 1997, the SLORC transformed itself – on the recommendation of its American public relations advisers -- into the State Peace and Development Council. Because the Burmese people, who had scant say in the conduct of their lives, were not consulted about either alteration, I have retained the original names.
Today, more than 15 years after the book’s first publication, Myanmar is making cautious moves toward an open society. Elections have been held, political prisoners released and censorship eased. Yet until democracy becomes truly entrenched, the anonymity of my confidants will be maintained.
It is also necessary to point out that there are no family names in Burma, nor first and second names in the Western sense. Every name is a complete semantic unit. A man called Tin Oo, for example, would never be addressed as Tin or Mr Oo. Forms of address vary depending on the relative social position of the speaker and the listener. Tin Oo would be called
Maung
Tin Oo by his mother
Ko
Tin Oo by his friends and
U
Tin Oo when spoken to formally or by subordinates. The prefix used before a woman’s name is either
Ma
, which means sister and can be used at any age, or the respectful
Daw
, which translates as aunt. Women do not change their names on marriage.
LITERARY TRAVEL WRITING, usually associated with the drumbeat of hooves across some distant steppe, seems at the moment to be echoing instead with the slow tread of the undertaker’s muffled footfall. Within the last few years Patrick Leigh Fermor, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Eric Newby, Norman Lewis and Wilfred Thesiger have followed Bruce Chatwin on their last journey. Others – notably Jan Morris – have put down their pens or busied themselves with a final bout of anthologising. At the same time, many of the most talented of the younger generation have turned their pens in new directions: Philip Marsden and Amitav Ghosh to the novel; Nick Crane and Sara Wheeler to biography; Anthony Sattin and Katie Hickman to social history. There are few new stars coming up to replace the old guard: of those who have written debut travel books within the last decade only Suketu Mehta, Rory Stewart, William Fiennes and Jason Elliott can really be said to be of comparable quality to the departing masters.
British travel writing is now as commercially successful as it has ever been, but the books that are selling are not literary, so much as frivolous mass-market ‘funnies’ – comedians pulling fridges through Estonia and so on. Travel writing is still popular, then, but it is no longer the powerful literary force it once was. Even some travel writers themselves have doubted the status of the travel book as a serious work of literature. Paul Theroux whose Great Railway Bazaar (1975) helped kick-start the travel writing boom of the 1980s, selling over 1.5 million copies in 20 languages, was one of the first to express his dislike of the publishing leviathan he had helped create: ‘Fiction is the only thing that interests me now,’ he told one interviewer. ‘The travel book as autobiography, as the new form of the novel – it’s all bullshit. When people say that now I just laugh.’
All of which makes Rory MacLean an especially important figure. For MacLean is possibly the only major travel writer of his generation who is still exclusively, and self-consciously, a literary writer about travel. He is also, of course, one of the best around. From the opening pages of his 1992 debut, Stalin’s Nose, with its pig falling from a tree and breaking his uncle’s neck, it was clear that here was a deeply unusual new talent: one who, driven by his passionate love of travel, was serious about his journeys and who was also a fine writer – engaging in his interests, observant, sensitive, an amiable and interesting companion; but he was also unpredictable and experimental, brazenly mixing fact and fiction, the darkly humorous and the grimly serious, the real and the surreal, and all with an irrepressible, mischievous glee. MacLean is the contemporary travel writer who has done most to explore the boundaries and demonstrate the continuing possibilities of the genre in an age of globalisation and mass travel. Jonathan Raban once wrote: ‘Old travellers grumpily complain that travel is now dead and that the world is a suburb. They are quite wrong. Lulled by familiar resemblances between all the unimportant things, they miss the brute differences in every - thing of importance.’ This is something MacLean has always known. Like Robert Byron, Redmond O’Hanlon and Colin Thubron, he has shown that the travel book is potentially a vessel into which a wonderfully varied and unexpected cocktail of ingredients can be poured: history, philosophy, archaeology, ornithology, art, magic. In the right hands, an extraordinary range of human enthusiasms and experiences can be explored within the frame of the literary travel narrative.
MacLean has also shown the degree to which you can cross-fertilise the genre with other literary forms: political writing, biography, diaspora history. Perhaps more interesting still he, like Chatwin and Kapuscinski before him, have muddied the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction by crossing the travel book with some of the wilder forms of the novel. Like them, his work is oddly unclassifiable, dwelling in a half-lit area between fact and fiction that Chatwin made uniquely his own. Like them, he uses the techniques of the novel – developing characters, selecting and tailoring his experience into a series of scenes and set pieces, arranging the action so as to give the narrative shape and momentum – yet what was being written about is fundamentally true, and the characters, unlike those in most novels, are closely modelled on living originals, even when their identities have been changed or obscured for their own protection.
Yet while MacLean’s work is in many ways firmly within the canon of British travel writing, he – a Canadian from Vancouver and Toronto – is personally a very un-English figure, something that is immediately apparent from his writing. If the clean purity of the prose of Bruce Chatwin or Colin Thubron’s derives in part from their personas as cool Anglo-Saxon observers, pinning their characters to the page with the detachment of Victorian insect collectors, MacLean’s virtues are very different. For all the surreal touches, MacLean is passionately partisan and always wears his heart – and his strong moral sense – on his sleeve. Consistently in his writing, he gets emotionally involved with his subject matter, and shows far more empathy and compassion with those he encounters than most travel writers writing in the English tradition. Nowhere is this more clear than in Under the Dragon, a work of great political commitment, powered above all by the author’s outrage at the injustices, brutalisation and mass violation of human rights that he witnessed in Burma. In his exploration of the almost Dickensian downward trajectory of Ni Ni into child prostitution, or the arrest, imprisonment, breakdown and heartbreak of Ma Swe, MacLean is more witness for the prosecution of the Generals of SLORC than the impassive and neutral observer. He is aware of the beauty of Burma and its people, but the warmth of Burmese hospitality and the seduction of a Burmese smile never leads him to romanticise what he sees: this is above all a tale of the enslavement of a people, of forced labour, oppression, exile, gang rapes, prostitution, censorship and bloody massacres.
Yet for all its pain, Under the Dragon is a beautiful book. MacLean has a remarkable ability to evoke place, and to bring to life a whole world in a single unexpected image. The visual precision of the writing, combined with its wit and pitch-perfect dialogue, its intriguingly fictionalised human stories, its hatred of injustice, and its fierce passion for its subject, has given the work as much emotional punch as any non-fiction book by a writer of MacLean’s generation. For many of us, it remains his masterpiece; and in the light of Burma's cautious moves toward open society is now an essential and moving record of those tragic years.
William Dalrymple, New Delhi
