Norval Morris, George Orwell, and Parables of the Law

, Norval Morris’s The Brothel Boy and Other Parables of the Law is a collection of fictional stories ostensibly narrated by Eric Blair, a young policeman in colonial Burma in the 1920s, who would later become the political writer George Orwell. They are intended as parables, to illustrate moral and ethical issues in legal practice, by the “case method”. This essay examines Morris’s use of fictional stories, featuring an actual historical person and a real colonial setting, for this purpose. It also shows how the protocols and traditions of fiction may be interestingly at odds with the stories’ parabolic purpose.