The word “vampire” first appears in English in sensational accounts of a revenant panic in Serbia in the early 18th century. One case in 1725 concerned a recently deceased peasant farmer, Peter Blagojević, who rose from the grave, visited his wife to demand his shoes, and then murdered nine people in the night. When his body was disinterred, his mouth was found full of fresh blood. The villagers staked the corpse and then burned it. In 1745, the clergyman John Swinton published an anonymous pamphlet, The Travels of Three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh, in which it is written: “These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves, in the Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living, and thereby destroy them.” And so a modern myth was born.

But it is not so modern, or exclusively European, as this extraordinary survey shows. Instead, the author, a historian and archeologist, argues that belief in the unquiet dead is found in many cultures and periods, where it can lay dormant for centuries before erupting in an “epidemic”, as in Serbia. Where there is no written source, John Blair makes persuasive use of archeological finds in which bodies are found to have been decapitated or nailed down. In 16th-century Poland, a buried woman “had a sickle placed upright across her throat and a padlock on the big toe of her left foot”. Someone, our author infers reasonably, wanted to keep these people in their coffins.

The familiar horror taxonomy of zombies versus vampires and so forth is relatively modern; they are variations on the single ancient theme that dead people can rise from the grave and persecute the living. Blair calls them all “dangerous corpses”, or the “restless dead”, or the “walking dead”. But they still come in different guises, as we learn on this splendidly gruesome journey. Some are “shroud-chewers”, some are “lip-smackers”, some are “suckers”; others are “bloaters”, “damned huntsmen”, “night-stranglers” or “night-mares”, in the original sense of a demon that presses on a person in bed during the dark hours. A 15th-century dead baker in Brittany continued to get up at night to help his family knead dough, but also went around other houses “throwing stones at people”. As late as the 19th century in New England, people who had died of tuberculosis were suspected of killing others from the grave, and so exhumed and incinerated.

Such beliefs can bubble along underground, as it were, for a long time; but bouts of corpse-killing arise, Blair argues, only when an endemic belief system is animated by a particular set of “stresses and anxieties”. In early medieval England, vampire epidemics attended waves of the Black Death; later, in Saxony, the Lutheran Reformation abolished purgatory, and left grieving families with a need for “new answers” about the fate of the dead. The largest known “corpse-killing panic” in history, which ran into the hundreds of bodies, happened in 18th-century Moravia: Blair diagnoses “a sense of unfinished business” over the decades of witch trials that preceded it. Not long afterwards, we find vampires reported for the first time where an innocent might have supposed they were all along: in Transylvania.

In conclusion, Blair argues that killing dead people again is actually “therapeutic”: “Like other extreme rituals, it is distressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards.” And this form of therapy is not yet consigned to history: vampires still harass people in pockets of rural Greece and the Baltics, and a Serbian priest was suspended by his bishop in 2019 for participating in the “exhumation and staking of a woman”.

Alas for Bram Stoker fans, for whom Dracula is the Christmassy terror par excellence, the old count himself gets short shrift here, ticked off for being “very unlike the dangerous corpses in which people have actually believed”. Blair even calls Stoker’s novel “misleading”, which is an odd thing to say about a work of fiction. But he does give the Irishman good marks for coining the excellent word “undead”.

In his 1925 essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” Arturo Schomburg writes, “There is the definite desire and determination to have a history, well documented, widely known at least within race circles, and administered as a stimulating and inspiring tradition for the coming generations.” Award-winning historian and writer Blair LM Kelley is a shining example of Schomburg’s call to action for creating a historical legacy that future generations will invoke for years to come.

Kelley is the current Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Her work focuses primarily on the Black American South and its activist legacies. For example, Kelley’s first book Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010) chronicles the everyday resistance of Black women and men against segregated streetcars and trains in cities across the early Jim Crow South.

Kelley’s newest book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (2023), uses her family history and archival research to expand our understanding of race, gender, and class in the South. Black Folk is a dazzling testament of research, storytelling, and analytical rigor that is accessible to both academic and nonacademic audiences alike. It is the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2024 Phillip Taft Labor History Award, and the 2024 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Nonfiction.

I sat down with Kelley ahead of the paperback release of Black Folk. We had a wide-ranging conversation about Black joy, her careful excavation of the interior lives of working-class Black people, quiet protest and resistance, and the influence of working-class Black women on Black activism.

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Regina N. Bradley (RNB): I have been rereading Black Folk and I want to start with the title, which you address in the introduction and pointedly say is not a reference to W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. What made you feel like you had to distinguish between a Duboisian understanding of race and class, and the one that you present in the book?

 

Blair LM Kelley (BLMK): I called it Black Folk because I just wanted it to be us, and inhabit a Black point of view. Every reader is welcome, but I wanted it to be grounded in community, I wanted it to be home. Home folks who we know. And I wanted it to be discernible by us as a story of us, by us, for us.

 

RNB: For me, the book conjured up Zora. Do you see yourself in conversation with folks like Zora Neale Hurston and Albert Murray? If you were to put yourself in a genealogical conversation, which books do you feel would be with Black Folk?

 

BLMK: Absolutely, the work of Zora Neale Hurston is an inspiration. Particularly for my Athens chapter, the second chapter, “Sarah at Home, Working on Her Own Account,” which is the story of Sarah Hill, a Black washerwoman who lived and worked in Athens, Georgia, where I use historic, New Deal–era Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews. Hurston worked as a WPA interviewer and drew on her profound understanding of the work of Black women. I talk about Hurston’s analysis and scholarship in that chapter and I explicate her story of a washerwoman, the short story called “Sweat,” which is so thoughtful and brilliant and careful.

In “Sweat,” the site of Black women’s work is all encompassing. The main character, Delia, was both fighting for her independence but then also tethered to her household and to a husband who was awful to her. In the end, her independent spirit and willingness to fight back really liberates her. So I love that story and I love the ways in which she is not only there as a storyteller but also as an oral historian, this ethnographer whose work is in the WPA, whose criticism of the work of others in the WPA undergirds my own analysis of the things we are missing in those interviews if we take them on the surface. Hurston’s work and just the brilliance that Sarah exhibits, the woman who is the washerwoman whose story I dig into, is so incredible and so she is really an inspiration for that work of digging deep, that care work that has to go into how we listen to this generation.

Of course, I’m always indebted to historians like Robin D. G. Kelley, Tera Hunter, whose work taught me how to even think in these ways, how to build the infrastructure behind the ways I want to storytell. I want it to read like a story, but I want it to sit in a structure that is historical, that is archival, that is grounded in oral histories and the things that we can know, ways of knowing about the past. And so I’m always indebted to them.

I’m also a huge fan of Toni Morrison and so I always want to invoke the ways in which she wrote about space and household and time and care with such beauty. And I really wanted to bring the beauty back to the ways in which we talked about regular Black people on an everyday basis and invoke that Morrisonian tone if I could.

 

RNB: Traditional historical narratives are so dry and impersonable and sometimes they dehumanize the subject in order to preserve academic integrity. I didn’t get that with this book. I know that this book is nonfiction. It is grounded in fact, but the storytelling is so absorbing. It reminded me of the oral tradition and how significant that is in understanding Southern Black history. You do that so beautifully with this book.

Can you talk a little bit about the significance of storytelling as an engine for history? Why is storytelling important for making the stories and the narratives that you are trying to highlight accessible to nonacademic audiences?

BLMK: What is so important is that people learn through story. We learn our past through the stories that we can tell. When I’m reading regular history, I’m always thinking about my folks and thinking, Well, how does that sound for their experiences? I’m always looking for the sound and the feel, even when I’m reading more traditional history.

I am frustrated with the ways in which people who are not formally trained as historians become the greatest leading historians in the country, because they can write for general audiences and people love history and they want readable history. So I also want trained historians to rise to the occasion of writing for a general audience, so that people can read our work. Folks should benefit from the things that scholars know, but it should be given to them in ways that they can be comfortable, that they can fall through the story on any level. You could read this book and not know any theory at all.

The other thing is that some of the beauty and the synchronicity of the story is bigger than me. It is ancestral. It is, there is no way in hell that I would have been able to find all these pieces that sit together so carefully, to find the stories that I found. Finding Sarah Hill, the washerwoman born in Elbert County, where my maternal ancestors are from, which I didn’t even—I never knew about Elbert County until I started working on my genealogy. Like Minnie Savage that I write about in the fifth chapter, who happened to be born in Accomack, the place where my grandfather was born, migrating probably within the same two- or three-year period as my grandfather to the city of Philadelphia. I have no idea if they knew each other or didn’t know each other, but her story, her oral history, fully narrates a story of migration from Accomack, Virginia, to Philadelphia that I can’t ask my grandfather about because he died before I was born. But just the happenstance of the way that finding Minnie rounds out the story I want to tell, that is just bigger than me. On top of all that, she was such a great storyteller! I mean, she snuck out of church to go run away to migrate, like who does that? And so, all of these things coming together at the same time, that is not just me. Me discovering in Accomack a whole labor organization started by Black workers that ends up in a racial massacre that I never read about in any history book. I’m writing a book about the working class, my grandfather is from this very, very tiny rural place; then, boom, I find a labor movement.

All those little pieces that snap together, they feel like the synchronicity that has been given to me, in order to tell this story. So, over and over and over again, it just felt like my path was laid.

 

RNB: It makes me think about how your book represents what Morrison calls “literary archeology.” You take bits and pieces of known fact and add sustenance and depth to it to make the story more rich and to humanize the subject. Your treatment of people in this book is not just as blips in history who are quickly covered over by whatever other significant and more well-established historical moments show up. For example, you brought up the Accomack protests, I remember saying to myself, “Wow. This is a lot even though the story sounds familiar.” I am familiar with the racial massacres and racial tension of the era but not familiar with Accomack as a place or the people. I am familiar with stories of Black people migrating from the “Deep South” but not the intimate particulars of why. You create an inside story, an interior narrative, that complicates larger historical events.

Black Folks gives an inside look into Black lives that would otherwise be frozen in time and unassuming in archival pictures, not knowing what their names were, what they did, or who they were.

Can you talk a little bit about how you created this interior understanding of not only Black working-class folk, but of the Black South?

 

BLMK: When I write, my goal is to sit on the shoulder of the folks I am writing about. What do they see when they wake up in the morning? What does that space look like? Who is family? Who is community? What is their neighborhood? Who is supporting them? Who is their enemy? Who is their friend?

So I just build out all those little things. I make maps and story charts for everybody that I write about. I use the technology that is available to me. I love a Google map. I will go back to an old neighborhood and if it still exists, I’m going to look at someone’s house. I am going to follow the pathway from the train to their house. What did they pass and what did the buildings really look like, and what did the train station look like?

My goal is to move through that neighborhood and make it feel as evocative and as cared for as an everyday experience as I possibly can. There are a lot of things that I do to research and build out a story that don’t even show up in a really direct way, but they help, they inform me, they enrich those small details.

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RNB: Black women are front and center in this book. For example, your research about washerwomen should win an award on its own. I’m going to read back to you a quote that I highlighted: “All Black women’s laundry work was born both in compliance with and defiance of white authority.” This made me think about my own great-grandmother, Mary Jones, who said, I will wash y’all’s clothes, I am not going to clean y’all’s house. She was very adamant about that. Your book made me think about how domestic workers connected to ideas of respectability and being ladylike, and how to maintain dignity and respect while pushing forward and taking care of their families.

Could you talk about how these women balanced the expectation to be neat and humble with the grind, the hustle, the I’m not going to just sit here and let y’all tell me what I can and can’t do.

 

BLMK: I love looking at the labor numbers around washerwomen and women who are maids inside households, cooks inside households. There was a trend toward women who had children, who had to care for family, who had obligations, wanting to do washer work. So, in fact they are the first stay-at-home generation who is working from home. They want to be there for their children, to raise their children, to be in proximate space, to build a household in ways that they were not allowed to as enslaved women. They set the terms of how the laundry will be taken in, when it will be done, when it will be bought back. They pushed back against all the stigmatization that happens about them.

They are a really formidable group of people, but they are behind so many of the protests against segregation that I studied in my first book, Right to Ride. They are riding streetcars to move that laundry around, so they don’t want to be insulted and degraded in those spaces. So they fight back. They don’t succeed in this first generation, but they are key to it.

When those women organize, they verbalize the need for protection from sexual assault that happens in white households. They verbalized that well before the turn of the 20th century. They are the very first people who I can see as the workers who are seeking out protection from being raped in those households, in labor organizing as early as the 1870s.

There is clarity of purpose that you can find among these brilliant washerwomen. And it just, it overwhelmed me, how powerful they really were.

RNB: This idea of thinking about the subtleties of Black activism, and how that made so many white folks uncomfortable, is one theme that kept coming up for me while reading your work. Especially in the Accomack chapter, where agricultural laborers organized for higher pay. Their resistance wasn’t loud. It seemed like many just said: I’m going to talk to you while we get something to eat, I’m going to talk to you while we working in the field. I’m going to talk to you after church. Usually when we think protest, we think loud and demanding. It really struck me how quiet much of the resistance was that you shared in the book.

Did you find that interesting in your research: Quiet resistance and how that pushes back against this popular narrative that you had to be loud and boisterous to invoke change? Because a lot of the change that you talk about in this book happened very quietly.

 

BLMK: I love that. A good Marxist would say that you can’t find this resistance among this population. It is a rural population; they haven’t developed consciousness enough to do this work; they have to move to an urban space; they have to be working in a factory; they would build their consciousness there.

But that just is not necessary. It wasn’t necessary, so much so because Black people in slavery developed those habits, those quiet habits that we can see in freedom, that is where they come from. You couldn’t do anything out loud as an enslaved person and live, at least not for long.

Black people developed the ability to speak in code, to talk in front of other folks and have them not understand exactly what was meant. They sang songs that sounded like one thing but in reality meant something completely different. They worshiped in secret and developed a brand of Black Christianity grounded in a different viewpoint, drawing on African cosmologies and a Black reading of the Bible. Black folks had been doing many things quietly all along, so they organized quietly too. They knew how to talk to one another without everybody hearing. And so of course as free people, they maintained those habits. They don’t appear to be organizing as a union until white people slowly start to recognize, well, wait a minute, no one is going to wash my clothes over the Christmas holiday, wait, none of y’all will wash my clothes over Christmas? That’s when they began to see that washerwomen had been talking, organizing. No one is going to pick these sweet potatoes because we wouldn’t let Black farmers join the all-white agricultural co-op, what? Huh? All the farmworkers in the county are going to ask for more money for their labor? How did that happen? Black workers used that church space, that grocery store, the field, the family gathering, the juke joint, communal wash pots in the backyards as a space to talk and think and theorize as workers. They were smart people.

I remember when I first went to graduate school, I got in some debate with somebody who said that people who did physical labor didn’t have time to think, and I thought, you’ve never worked with your hands before, have you? My first job was at a supermarket just scanning stuff and I had plenty of time to think. I was thinking the whole time.

So if you are in bondage or you are oppressed, while you are doing the work, you are thinking. You have plenty of time to share a quiet idea. You have time to develop a consciousness about the world and your place in it. They didn’t need labor organizers to tell them how to resist. No, the consciousness, the desire to organize was already there.

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RNB: Black Folk pushes back against the idea that integration is the dream. There is this notion that Black folks assimilate into society and everything will be all hunky-dory. But so many of the firsthand accounts that you included in this book said something like, I didn’t want to mess with no white folks.

What they are saying disrupts an indoctrinated narrative that we have been told about previous generations, that Jim Crow–era Black folks just wanted to be accepted by white people. I didn’t get that with this book, for which I thank you, by the way. Was that intentional? Did you consistently see that in the oral histories that you reviewed? How can you further break down that myth that Black people always have to be in proximity to white folks?

 

BLMK: The very first thing I did in graduate school was participate in a project called Behind the Veil at Duke University, which went out and interviewed Black Southerners about their experiences with Jim Crow. I was in two different Southern sites, my team did perhaps 50 interviews over that summer. And oh boy, people were just trying to get the safe buildings and good textbooks and equipment that white people had for their children, so that is why they wanted to integrate schools. It was not because they really liked white people or trusted them. After all, they knew white people just fine; their jobs had them working with white folks all the time. Especially people who worked in white households, they knew them, their children, their marriages, they probably knew more than the neighbors knew. White employers would forget that Black workers were there, they became invisible to them, so Black employees listened. They understood white people just fine, there was no magic sauce about white people, they were human like everyone else. Black agricultural workers knew that their knowledge of crops and science made white landholders wealthy. Black factory workers saw that the white supervisors sometime didn’t know as much about the work that they were doing. White supremacy meant that white workers didn’t have to know more to receive better jobs.

So Black people didn’t buy into the myths of white supremacy. They had to behave accordingly to live, but at no point are they thinking, Oh, white people, that is it. They got the nice stuff and we have the jacked-up stuff because they are better than us. No, they know it is because they took it. They took it. So they figured out that perhaps the best way for Black children to have better books and decent buildings that don’t fall down around them, would be to just integrate the schools. But the motivation was to get the better books and decent buildings. It wasn’t the idea that children needed to sit together because there is something magic that comes off of a white child that goes to the Black child and makes the Black child elevated. Black people knew that the Black child is just as good as the white child. They were never confused about that.

And so those interviews just hammered that home again and again. It was a strategy, it was an outcome of the planning of the NAACP, saying, I see you building this parallel world, it probably would be easier to get there if you just question segregation, go straight at the question. So that is an NAACP strategy, that is not Black thought.

Black thought really is more complex than that. Black people wanted what was due them. They did not think of their spaces and their institutions and their schools and their teachers and their ministers and their community as inherently less than just because they were Black. That is what white people thought.

 

RNB: That paranoia of quotidian everyday Black experiences angered me. I felt an irritation as I was reading that felt ancestral.

But joy is also a strong presence in this book. I want to hear your theorization of Black joy, especially as it relates to labor and the working class, because that is supposed to be oxymoronic. You are supposed to be working class and just toil day in and day out, and you don’t have any type of release. That is the expectation.

How calculated was it that you included these moments of happiness and community as joy? How do you theorize Black joy as a historian?

 

BLMK: Joy is a uniquely interesting Black experience. We talk about joy a lot, we sing about joy. The world didn’t give it, but the world can’t take it away. And that joy is transcendent; that is, despite the circumstances that are always going to be around, one can think, I have something inside me that isn’t dependent on you and how you treat me. I know who I am, I know the secret of whose I am, I got my folks, I got my ancestors, I got my God, and I’m all right, and I’m going to laugh with my folks. I am going to eat with my folks. We are going to drink, we are going to play, we are going to do fun things.

I never experienced being Black as an unjoyful thing. My grandparents, they could argue like crazy people, but then break into joy: like, what are we going to eat, and where are we going, and who is coming? And then it would just be in the yard, everybody talking and eating and laughing and playing games and jonesing on each other, my grandparents could tease the hot dickens out of anybody at any time, my grandfather was just hilarious, like he was just quick and mean and funny and just, always going back and forth with everything. So I experienced home as joyful and funny and full of music and laughter and dancing and celebrating.

They weren’t wealthy people, they weren’t ubersuccessful in any traditional American capitalistic accounting, but that didn’t make them unhappy. It probably made them a little bit happier than some other people just to have those spaces, where none of that was at play, where none of that was in effect. It was our space, they were hungry for those spaces: My grandfather and his brother sought out land in an all-Black enclave and they lived there and they were comfortable there, they built homes there, from their own hands because they knew that that turn within would help to keep them safe and would give them those spaces that were just free for their children, and grandchildren.

I write about my grandmother holding my hand so tightly when we were in public; on that land, my grandmother let my hand go because she knew she was at home.

RNB: Can we talk about home for a minute? I’m curious to hear your thoughts about an intentional pushback against South as a homeland to folks who aren’t white. When you think about the South as home, folks automatically go to the Confederacy, they go to the lost cause. And I say, Well, how does that include these other groups of people who don’t subscribe to that understanding of southernness?

I wonder how thinking about labor in the South speaks home? How can we tease out a stronger connection between home and labor and land, that is such a distinctively Black Southern thing. You have made it if you own land and if we get this land, you better not sell it.

 

BLMK: You got to keep it.

 

RNB: Yes. So, how do some of those markers indicate thinking about region as home, especially for Black folks?

 

BLMK: I think a lot about my grandmother’s garden. She was so tied to that land. She would wake up before dawn and be out in that field and paying attention to her vegetables and her fruit; she had a grape vine and strawberries and okra and string beans and greens and different lettuces and those big old cornstalks that would get so, so tall that they looked like towers to me as a little girl. She just knew everything about the soil, she would taste the soil a little bit to make sure it was right and did you need to amend it in any way? She would teach me about the green beans and when they were ready and when the strawberries were ripe and the right time of day to pick something. She would just put baskets out on the curb so that other people could take the fruits and vegetables that she had too much of. And she would take some to the church because somebody passed away, she was going to make that her thing on that line that were serving at the repast.

It was so powerful to me how that garden gave her space and peace and communion with her God. It gave her the ability to feed her family. It gave her a future through feeding her babies and grandbabies. It gave her the ability to be in community with other women and to mourn with those who mourn. It gave her preparation and a safety, those cans in that closet if things got bad, you just open a jar and then you have the basis of your dinner, even if things got tight financially. She would share those jars with different women who would come to the door.

That care was just so profound and that land gave that to her. So I can imagine what it was like for her when she first migrated and she couldn’t find an apartment where children were allowed, so her daughter, my mom, had to stay with someone who was not her blood relative. My grandmother lost the opportunity to mother her own child.

So, the migration was really a sacrifice for her. She lost a lot. She lost her relatives to tuberculosis, as they encountered disease environments that they weren’t prepared to live in, they started dying. Generations started dying in her family. So that land—that home she eventually built— represented safety, and allowed her to put her family and community back together.

All of those things told through her story tell you so much about what it means to be home, what it means to work and what it means to labor.

 

RNB: One of the things that I really appreciated was how you deromanticized the idea of the Great Migration.

 

BLMK: All my grandparents were migrants. And when they moved north, they were both stigmatized as country bumpkin Southerners but then they learned to embrace what the South gave them. My paternal grandfather had chickens in the alley in Philadelphia, he had a victory garden, he went to south Jersey to cultivate on land and from a man who was from his home county of Accomack. They must have had a little network and my grandparents met in Philadelphia, both from the Eastern Shore—like how the heck did that happen? They were talking. They are in community. Those communities had meaning over time. They were Southerners, they used the resources that they have in this new place to do new things, they don’t come empty handed.

RNB: Southern Black grandmothers are pillars in the community. I’m speaking as a grandmother’s girl, my grandmama was my world. Everything that I understand about the world I owe to her for giving me some kernel of insight and truth. Black grandmothers play such a pivotal role in your book too: What role do Black grandmothers play in how we understand southernness, class consciousness, and race consciousness?

 

BLMK: I’m in New Jersey, right, I’m not in the South, but I feel in part Southern because of her culture that she shared with me, that my grandfather shared with me. Their household, you could pick it up and put it in Georgia or South Carolina, and it would have made sense. Because of the way they ate, what they believed in, how they worshipped. It is so powerful to be raised by someone who was not ashamed of where she was from. It was a calling card, it was a connection. And for her to be like, baby, you are Geechee like me, because you love that rice. So I’m a preschool-aged girl wondering What is Geechee? because I’m more than 600 miles away from that space, but I am there because I’m in her kitchen, I’m eating her okra, corn, and tomatoes. I’m raised with an ethic passed down to her from her enslaved grandparents. She was born in the place where generations of her family had been held in bondage. And I carried that name. Blair is the last name of her ancestors, her mother’s maiden name, and the name of who held us in bondage, and the name of the plantation where they were held. She always wanted me to understand where she came from.

My nana, my paternal grandmother in Philadelphia, she was from the Eastern Shore. And so, even in the midst of Philadelphia, in a very urban space, she has these Southern habits and it is just so powerful to see: They are Southerners, they are not giving up, they are not ceding that as something that was wrong. They moved because they needed to, they had to support themselves and to find ways forward, to escape violence, but they aren’t saying, That is not who I am.

When I came to the academy a few decades ago, to say that you were a scholar of the South meant that you weren’t working on Black people. I’m trying to complicate that now in this moment, so many scholars have been in the process of complicating that and so I hope the Black Folk does the work of doing that too.

I’m really ready to write another book. This book is about my grandparents’ generation and now I want to write my parent’s generation. Just give me a contract to write it, dang it, and then I will be ready to go. 

Featured image: Blair LM Kelley. Courtesy of Blair LM Kelley

George Orwell’s years as a colonial policeman in Burma in the 1920s preoccupied him for the rest of his life. Straight out of Eton, he was thrown into a world that mirrored the public school with its rivalries and floggings; except that now it was the Burmese people who were being flogged. He wrote about it repeatedly: in his 1934 novel Burmese Days, several essays, and passages devoted to Burma in The Road to Wigan Pier. Even on his deathbed he was writing notes for a novella about Burma entitled A Smoking Room Story. Now, Paul Theroux has taken on this material, with a novel that explores Burma as the place where Eric Blair became George Orwell.

There has been so much written about Orwell recently, from DJ Taylor’s casually magisterial biography, to Anna Funder’s intricately daring book about his first wife, to Sandra Newman’s high-wire feminist retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In her 2005 travel memoir Finding George Orwell in Burma, Emma Larkin discovers that Orwell’s great uncle had a Burmese mother.

This is a risky project for Theroux; there is always the danger in novels about writers that the dialogue becomes an embarrassing parody. He avoids this by focusing on Orwell’s blankness of character at this age. The dialogue is convincing because the inner Orwell remains hidden and the things he says are conventional and terse. Theroux uses this to suggest that all the time a secret self was developing: “his other self, the restless inquisitor, the doubter, the contrarian”.

The secret self is Orwell the writer, and, in the end, Theroux is writing for Orwell connoisseurs. We know very little about what Orwell was reading during these years, but Theroux imagines it all for him, moving from Wells to Lawrence to Forster. Theroux shows how these literary influences might combine with everyday experience to create the writer of Burmese Days. Indeed, phrases from the novel are seen to have their genesis in conversations here.

Beyond its interest for Orwell enthusiasts, I couldn’t decide if this book succeeded as a novel. It is rather fascinating in its portrait of Orwell’s ambivalence towards the empire he reviles and serves. If Burmese Days doesn’t have the reach and depth of Orwell’s best work, it’s because he was dishonest at this point in making his autobiographical hero a convinced rebel – “notoriously a bolshie in his opinions”. In fact, at the time Orwell had been more confused. One ex-Etonian visitor reported Orwell revelling in being a servant of the crown, and in his 1936 essay Shooting an Elephant he wrote, repellently, that “in the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves” (the “yellow faces” are bad enough; “sneering” turns the Burmese into Eton schoolboys).

Theroux takes these admissions and shows Orwell veering between ethical disdain and appalling complicity. We see Orwell presented with a series of moral tests – pulling a dead man’s ring off his finger and finding the whole finger comes with it; ordering the hanging of a man he knows to be innocent. When an elephant goes on the rampage and kills a man, he is faced with the appalling prospect of shooting it, largely to pacify the jeering onlookers because “no one in that crowd … would have respected the Burma sahib for doing nothing”.

Orwell fails as a policeman and he fails morally, with each test becoming more disillusioned with empire, yet more implicated in its methods. Assaulted by schoolboys, he longs for “a dah, to swipe at their skinny arms and slash their faces”. Inspired by Larkin’s research, Theroux invents a half-Burmese first cousin for Orwell, which works as a thought experiment by revealing Orwell’s embarrassed, small-minded racism (“the young half blood calling his mother Aunt Ida”).

Theroux brings the empire and its evils alive as a day-by-day experience. This is what writing the book as a novel enables him to do, in a way that more abstract academic discourses around colonialism can’t. But if it becomes most compellingly a book about empire, then that is also where its perspective is most limited. In that line about “yellow faces” Orwell was luxuriating in his own self-inculpation, and this is what Theroux’s Orwell does throughout. The problem is that at this point in history, the stories about Burma we need to read are not stories about the intricate feelings of the white men who colonised it.

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The novel doesn’t seem especially troubled by this. The Burmese are here merely as supporting characters, with the women as exotic stereotypes, whose slippery delicacy contrasts with the no less stereotypical but more richly Lawrentian memsahib who orders Orwell into bed as an alternative to “frigging” herself.

I was left comparing Burma Sahib to Theroux’s 1981 novel The Mosquito Coast – at its heart a story about an anarchic empire builder with overreaching ambitions. The Mosquito Coast is also about the complex feelings of white men in the jungle, but it has aged well because of its madness and extremity. The portrait of white male angst there ballooned into a tragic portrayal of American fatherhood, and of America itself as doomed by the awful power of frontier fathers. The writing in Burma Sahib is in places just as brilliant, but it is precisely the exquisite rightness page by page that reminds us that Theroux now has less compelling things to say.

Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.