At the centre of the novel is John Flory, "the lone and lacking individual trapped within a bigger system that is undermining the better side of human nature.

[2] Burmese Days was first published "further afield," in the United States, because of concerns that it might be potentially libelous; that the real provincial town of Katha had been described too realistically; and that some of its fictional characters were based too closely on identifiable people.

[5] The image which Britons were meant to uphold in these communities was a huge burden and the majority of them carried expectations all the way from Britain with the intention of maintaining their customs and rule.

By December 1933 he had typed the final version,[7] and in 1934 delivered it to his agent, Leonard Moore, who submitted it to Victor Gollancz, the publisher of Orwell's previous book.

[9] Burmese Days is set in 1920s British Burma, in the fictional district of Kyauktada, based on Katha (formerly spelled Kathar), a town where Orwell served.

John Flory, a jaded 35-year-old teak merchant with a birthmark on his face in the shape of a ragged crescent, spends three weeks of every month acquiring jungle timber.

Lost in romantic fantasy, Flory imagines Elizabeth to be the sensitive object of his desire, the European woman who will "understand him and give him the companionship he needed".

Worse still is Flory's interest in high art and literature, which reminds Elizabeth of her pretentious mother who died in disgrace in Paris of ptomaine poisoning as a result of living in squalid conditions while masquerading as a Bohemian artist.

This creates tension between the Burmese and the Europeans which is exacerbated by a vicious attack on native children by the spiteful and racist timber merchant, Ellis.

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.

"[11] 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.

"[12] 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.

According to University of Singapore scholar Steven L. Keck, the novel's depiction of colonialism led it to become "a part of the mythology of imperial experience not only for Burma, but for the British Empire as a whole".

Keck speculated that the fact that the Saya San peasant rebellion was ongoing during the period influenced Orwell's pessimistic attitude towards colonialism.

Flory charges that the British are only interested in Burma due to the economic opportunities the colony provides, and are living a "lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers rather than to rob them".

Burmese scholar Maung Htin Aung, in an article written about Burmese Days, claimed that the novel served as a "valuable historical document" due to the fact that it "recorded vividly the tensions that prevailed in Burma, and the mutual suspicion, despair and disgust that crept into Anglo-Burmese relations as the direct result of the Government of India Act leaving out Burma from the course of its reforms".

[18][16] The character of Flory, a Pukka sahib, serves as an emblematic depiction of the isolation faced by the European community in colonial-era Burma, a topic Orwell also explored in his short story Shooting an Elephant.

He also defends the Burmese and sympathises with various issues they face in the argument with Dr Veraswami, confirming his disillusion with colonialism which isolates him from the European community.

Racism remains a strong theme throughout the novel, with the European community in Burma frequently expressing racist attitudes towards the Indians and Burmese they interact with.

In the view of Keck, the depiction of racism in Burmese Days has been cited by numerous historians "as a means to explore some of the more important features of modern history".

The only American review that Orwell himself saw, in the New York Herald Tribune, by Margaret Carson Hubbard, was unfavourable: "The ghastly vulgarity of the third-rate characters who endure the heat and talk ad nausea of the glorious days of the British Raj, when fifteen lashes settled any native insolence, is such that they kill all interest in their doings."

A positive review however came from an anonymous writer in the Boston Evening Transcript, for whom the central figure was, "analyzed with rare insight and unprejudiced if inexorable justice", and the book itself praised as full of "realities faithfully and unflinchingly realised.

I liked it and recommend it to anyone who enjoys a spate of efficient indignation, graphic description, excellent narrative, excitement, and irony tempered with vitriol.Orwell received a letter from the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer as follows[22] Will you allow me to tell you how very much indeed I admire your novel Burmese Days: it seems to me an absolutely admirable statement of fact told as vividly and with as little bitterness as possible.It was as a result of these responses that Orwell renewed his friendship with Connolly, which was to give him useful literary connections, a positive evaluation in Enemies of Promise and an outlet on Horizon.

Twelve years after its publication, Edmund Wilson mentioned the book favourably in a review of Animal Farm in The New Yorker: "There is a novel of [Orwell's] called "Burmese Days," a title deceptively suggestive of reminiscences by a retired official, which is certainly one of the few first-hand and really excellent pieces of fiction that have been written about India since Kipling....