A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma
DAVID EIMER
(BLOOMSBURY, 384 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

I have travelled to Burma and its ­borderlands over 50 times, been deported twice and written three books about the country. Burma and the plight of its peoples has been my major focus for almost 20 years, but it has also been a key part of my personal, spiritual journey too. I became a Catholic in Burma, received into the Church on Palm Sunday 2013 by Burma’s cardinal, Charles Maung Bo. So it was with great interest that I read this excellent new book about the ­country.

David Eimer vividly captures Burma’s contrasts – its charms and its challenges, its beauty and its benightedness – in a book that illustrates comprehensively the diversity of the country. He is unusual among writers on Burma in that he travelled throughout the country, not just to Yangon or the tourist beat. He is one of only a handful of foreigners who has, like me, visited Chin State in the west of the country, Putao in the far north at the foot of the Himalayas, and Loi Tai Leng, the headquarters of the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS), one of the country’s many ethnic armed groups. And having been to so many of the places he visited, his descriptions are evocative. “Loi Tai Leng”, he writes, “lies along the twisted spine of the ridge, which dips and rises as it traverses the top of the mountain … The road through town is compacted earth overlaid with yellow dust, which coats everything and everybody. Bamboo poles flying the Shan flag stood every 10 metres or so.”