Everything Is Broken by Emma Larkin

From The Week of June 27, 2010

It does not take long to realize why the author of Everything Is Broken has chosen to publish her book under a nom de plume. After a mere 50 pages spent with the Burmese government, a ruthless junta that has ruled, in various forms, for decades, it's clear that the authorities in that tortured country have grown adept at sniffing out foreign journalists and expelling them, to keep them from speaking truth. The real Emma Larkin visits Burma no doubt under her real name and then returns to her country of origin to publish her accounts of her time there and what shattering accounts they are, of a land tormented by the cruelties of climate and a people forced to bow under the yoke of a government about as enlightened as the crackpots who run North Korea.

Everything Is Broken is an attempt to quantify the damage to Burma from cyclone Nargis which, in 2007, devastated much of the country, driving millions of its people into the kind of chaos and starvation which characterized disasters in nations run by corrupt or despotic regimes. Without a healthy sense of shame, and without a free press to hold it accountable to the dying people it swore to protect, the government is free to make up statistics about people saved, livestock recovered, homes rebuilt, roads re-paved. Meanwhile, millions persist without food even though United Nations planes beg the junta to allow them to land to distribute supplies to the suffering. But so rigid is the control of the junta that they won't even allow aid-workers inside their country. Oh, if the UN wants to leave its supplies anyway, the military will see it distributed, sure, to its own soldiers and to the generals who have been robbing the people blind while putting guns to their heads.

Emma Larkin has used, to devastating effect, cyclone Nargis and the shameful fraud of the junta's response to it as a lens through which to expose us to a tormented nation which has never quite recovered from British, colonial rule. Like many of the Asian colonies of former European empires, Burma flails from strongman to strongman, wanting it to be different, needing it to be different, but knowing, in this world of globalized trade, in an era when juntas can enrich themselves enough to buy guns and bombs and tanks, that there's little hope for better than what they have, which is almost nothing. And yet, such a country, of beauty, of courage, of fortitude in the face of madness. Emma Larkin has lovingly captured a place which most Westerners, as long as they are alive, will never understand. George Orwell, as always, is one of the few exceptions, a man who possessed such an unparalleled grasp of the weaknesses of man that, even 60 years on from the publication of 1984, his vision of authoritarianism, oppression, doublespeak and lies lives on in a nation of 55 million people trying so hard to escape from under the jackboot of their own government. (4/5 Stars)