The Brothel Boy and Other Parables of the Law.

AuthorFletcher, George P.

As Eric Blair describes his job as District Officer in Moulmein in Southern Burma in the early 1920s, he was "both policeman and magistrate, interrogator and judge, for nearly one hundred thousand Burmese, Indians, and Chinese, and a few hundred Europeans" (p. 286). In The Brothel Boy, Norval Morris(1) writes about the legal adventures of this fictional character with an extraordinary affection for the details of indigenous life as well as a passion to find a new way to present the classic conundrums of the criminal law. The book crosses the local Burmese culture, as seen with English eyes, with the idiom of a first-year University of Chicago law school class. The verisimilitude of native culture and the integrated academic discussion are so convincing that one suspects Morris writes on the basis of his own experience, both in Moulmein and in Chicago. I have some doubts, however, whether the two modes of discourse - spinning tales about Eric Blair and probing the issues of criminal responsibility - make a palatable mix.

Morris' eight stories follow a pattern that rapidly becomes familiar. A crime occurs and Eric Blair must inquire about what to do with the suspect. Should a young boy who has raped a local girl be subject to capital punishment? Should a suspect who has attempted to murder his son, seemingly in response to hearing a divine command, be treated as insane? Should another who has killed, allegedly in a somnambulist state, be treated as exempt from criminal liability? Should a European woman, who has killed her sleeping husband after he battered her, be acquitted on grounds of self-defense? The recurring problem in all of these stories is whether it is just to punish someone who has caused harm in the borderland of criminal responsibility.

The pattern of resolution repeats itself. Blair confronts the problem, he begins a conversation with his Indian medical advisor Dr. Veraswami (no apparent first name) and a local lawyer U Tin Hlang (Lang for short), and the conversation illuminates the problems of culpability, insanity, and various defensive claims. A European woman, Rosemary Brett, adds her opinion, largely on matters concerning female suspects. A few other characters come and go, but the framework of interaction and discourse remains limited. We witness no trials, and no prosecutors, no police officers, and no local political figures or criminals harass our young hero (is this believable?). Morris creates an idyllic world in which his imagined oracle of the law discusses fine points of legal theory with Veraswami and Hlang, flirts with and eventually beds Rosemary, and remains in charge to report on his inner struggles to reach just and pragmatically sound decisions.

The dramatic tension, so far as there is any, arises from the question: What will Blair do? How will he decide the case? These are not detective stories, for there are no serious factual conundrums to be resolved, no clues that require imaginative investigation. He has no problem deciding which witnesses to believe and which to treat as liars. It is almost as though Eric Blair were sitting in Professor Morris' class at Chicago and had to decide how to resolve a prepackaged set of facts. A striking example of Morris' posing hypothetical cases to his star student Blair is the case of the battered wife Jean Seymour, who allegedly attacked her husband while he was asleep. By the time Blair arrives at the scene, Veraswami has cleaned up the blood and disarray, thus eliminating all firsthand evidence, and has devised a story about the events leading up to the killing (pp. 261-63). After hearing the story, Blair concludes: "The facts seemed clear enough . . . . Jean Seymour had...

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