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'This novel strips back those layers of experience to give you a sense of the unformed Orwell – off into the jungle rather than to Oxford, following in the footsteps of his father (“Don’t let us down, Eric”), who had been a middling official in Britain’s opium trade. Theroux’s contention, the theme of his keenly felt and vividly researched book, is: “There’s a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed for ever” – and that these years represented that period in the life of Orwell the writer.'
