Orwell can write — he proved it in Down and Out in Paris and London. He has an all-seeing eye, and is not fooled by glamorous whitewashing. And in Burmese Days he has written a malodorous, realistic novel of the white man in the east, as he really is. Granted all that, but after all what has he told that has not been told before, many times since Kipling painted a different picture. And the story itself is not particularly worth telling.