Style
Orwell biographer D.J. Taylor notes that, "the most striking thing about the novel is the extravagance of its language: a riot of rococo imagery that gets dangerously out of hand"
Another of Orwell's biographers, Michael Shelden, notes that Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham and E. M. Forster have been suggested as possible influences, but believes also that "the ghost of Housman hangs heavily over the book." The writers Stansky and Abrahams, while noting that the character Flory probably had his roots in Captain Robinson, a cashiered ex-officer whom Orwell had met in Mandalay, 'with his opium-smoking and native women', affirmed that Flory's "deepest roots are traceable to fiction, from Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim through all those Englishmen gone to seed in the East which are one of Maugham's better-known specialities."
Jeffrey Meyers, in a 1975 guide to Orwell's work, wrote of the E. M. Forster connection that, " Burmese Days was strongly influenced by A Passage to India, which was published in 1924 when Orwell was serving in Burma. Both novels concern an Englishman's friendship with an Indian doctor, and a girl who goes out to the colonies, gets engaged and then breaks it off. Both use the Club scenes to reveal a cross-section of colonial society, and both measure the personality and value of the characters by their racial attitudes. But Burmese Days is a far more pessimistic book than A Passage to India, because official failures are not redeemed by successful personal relations."
Orwell himself was to note in Why I Write (1946) that "I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which my words were used partly for the sake of their sound. And in fact my first complete novel, Burmese Days.... is rather that kind of book."
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Famous quotes containing the word style:
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style cest lhomme, what is likely to happen if lhomme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (18581944)
“There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.”
—Gustave Flaubert (18211880)
“In comedy, the witty style wins out over every mishap of the plot.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)