Barrington Gates reviewed Golden Earth in the TLS of October 10, 1952

Norman Lewis
GOLDEN EARTH
Cape. 18s.

After Indo-China, Burma. In this book Mr. Lewis records another entertaining sortie into a Far Eastern centre of political disturbance, while he may still get a permit to do so. When he declared his dashing intention he met with some indignation from Europeans who after 30 years in Burma had found nothing to say about it. Three months is short indeed to render an account of this erupting scene, but it is not too short for Mr. Lewis, who observes neatly and quickly and brings a wealth of historical reading to sort out what he sees. It is difficult to isolate the peculiar dryness of his writing, its success in making a scene of natural beauty shine coldly on the page, its failure to bring real warmth and depth to any of the human figures who decorate his journey.

As a traveller he may perhaps be classed as quizzical, poker-faced, non-committal. Whether his engagement is with ageing and decayed scions of a deposed dynasty, or with rats, scorpions and cockroaches in a Lashio bedroom, or with a brief shooting match on the Irrawaddy, or with the convulsive progress of a worn-out army lorry, or with a pariah dog, his smile rarely breaks through, the answers to his submerged questions are seldom given. “That, gentle reader,” he seems to say, “is how it happened; the commentary is for you” :

"On my way to the Excelsior a pariah dog turned back and followed me. Remembering the Englishman who was nearly lynched for killing one of these creatures I increased my pace, and the dog did the same. When close at my heels it reached forward and without any particular animosity, in a rather detached and experimental manner, it took my calf between its teeth, and bit. Having done so, it turned back and strolled away, while I was still wondering what the onlookers would do if I kicked it high into the air."

This is a good way of telling, and of learning, a lot about Burma, but the instruction fails to convey, except by ironic implication, its present convulsions. Mr. Lewis’s golden earth is now bloodstained. The map of his journey from Mergui to Myitkyina is neatly parcelled with territory held by various brands of insurgents, though when he comes to sort their political labels and the ferment for power beneath them, he, like many others, abandons the attempt. Shrug it off as he may, Mr. Lewis was making a dangerous journey armed only with an uncommon knack of arriving just before or just after an incident. And when the exception arrives, it seems that insurgent warfare in Burma must have its own rules. By any other, his steamboat on the Irrawaddy must have been badly mauled. The grim farce he makes of the Burmese effort to keep the Mandalay railway running against wreckers of its track and bridges rather overdoes the load which his ironic manner will carry. No reader is likely to forget his brilliant sketch of Mr. Pereira, the pagoda-building railway magnate, who dominated the comic hazards of this part of his journey; none, on the other hand, is likely to seize the sober truth of the situation.

Yet Mr. Lewis is right in turning his back as often as may be on the gunman’s regime in Burma, for violence is not in the nature of this people. Their history is bloodstained only in the gyrations of their dynasties, they have slipped the shackles of colonialism without ill-will, and if that has led not to freedom but to civil war their life flows richly between the thrusts of the dacoit and the execrations of political factions. Whatever happens to those who aspire to govern him, or to himself in the process, the Burmese in the mass will continue to enjoy himself. He will have his festas and his religious celebrations, and Mr. Lewis shows convincingly with what happiness and sunny skill he arranges these things, and the social and spiritual sources from which his gaiety and his piety draw their inspiration. The Iron Curtain may in the end fall here, but the whole trend of these impressions suggests that Burma may escape it. Buddhism on the one hand, and on the other the Burmese addiction to half-baked ideas and incongruous goods imported from the West, both suffer the light lash of Mr. Lewis’s irony. But his conclusion is that if the Burmese will hold to the first and abjure the second he may yet inherit his land.

These are but guesses. What is certain is the beauty of the land and its frequent reflection in Mr. Lewis’s close-packed prose, as in this picture of dawn from a river boat:

"A little red had seeped into the leaden landscape, and presently where sky and water met without division, the sun raised itself on a long, clean-cut shaft of reflection. It was a polar spectacle, an arctic night in midsummer. Soon the ship quickened with the engine’s subdued convulsion. Nosing out into the stream, it dragged in its wake ropes of unearthly blue through water the colour of tin. Wherever the water was stirred up, it leaped to life as if brilliant lamps had suddenly been lit below the surface. The sun, which had now broken away from its shaft of reflection, climbed swiftly into the sky, and as it did so the mists passed up out of the jungle, like the plumes of smoke from a railway station where many expresses are about to depart."

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