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With the trilogy, his first published venture into the art of fiction, Burgess staked a claim to have written the definitive Malayan novel (i.e. novel of expatriate colonial experience of Malaya) to set alongside George Orwell 's Burma ('' Burmese Days ''), E.M. Forster 's India ('' A Passage To India '') and Graham Greene 's Viet Nam ('' The Quiet American ''), and continuing in the tradition established by Rudyard Kipling for India and, for Southeast Asia in general, Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham .

Unlike Conrad, Maugham and Greene, who made no effort to learn local languages, but like Orwell (who had a good command of Urdu and Burmese , necessary for his work as a police officer) and Kipling (who spoke Hindi , having learnt it as a child), Burgess had excellent spoken and written Malay , and this is reflected in the verisimilitude and interest in indigenous concerns that marks the trilogy.