“Foreign writers and journalists are denied entrance to Burma,” the pseudonymous Emma Larkin writes on page three of her travelogue, and that is about all she has to say on the extraordinary matter of her presence there. In “Finding George Orwell in Burma,” Ms. Larkin has penetrated one of the most closed regimes on the planet, a military dictatorship held in place through censorship, repression, and a network of informants. She could have put herself at the center of this finely wrought account. Instead, to her credit, she gets on with the story she set off in search of: George Orwell’s five-year posting as an officer in Burma and the dark despotism that emerged after his death.

George Orwell came to Burma in 1922 as an officer for the Burmese Imperial Police, an experience that yielded his sprawling anti-colonialist novel “Burmese Days.” Today, bookish Burmese insist “Burmese Days” doesn’t describe their plight so well as a later Orwell novel: “1984.” To the Burmese, he is both chronicler and prophet. Tattered copies of “Burmese Days” are a common sight in Rangoon. “1984” and “Animal Farm,” tellingly, are banned.

Literary, bibliophilic Burma may love its Orwell, but Orwell hated his time there. He spent five years loathing both the colonial powers he was serving and the Burmese criminals he was chasing, returned to England and started writing. A short time after his death, colonial rule ended, and the Burmese had 14 years of breathing room before a socialist revolution plunged the nation back into a state of oppression. The censorship and supervision introduced under British colonialism were reintroduced and intensified.

Ms. Larkin builds a case that in the Burma of British colonialism Orwell foresaw the deeper oppression that would take its place. Rife with government informants, contemporary Burma is a nation of storytellers who cannot tell their stories. The author never mentions the fact, but as a Burmese-speaking American, she is the perfect repository for these bottled memories. Confident that the xenophobic junta would never trust a foreigner to act as an informant, the Burmese readily open to Ms. Larkin.

Stories spill forth with only the gentlest prodding. We hear from cynical intelligentsia, battle-hardened dissidents, and a small boy taken from his parents to work in a tea shop. Some Burmese tell their stories in their native language; others in the stilted, patrician English taught in British schools. One young man startles Ms. Larkin with a vocabulary that seems to have been lifted entirely from dated Hollywood scripts. “Tell me something about yourself, Lady,” he implores her, “Go on, shoot.”

Interspersed with such anecdotes, in a way that is sometimes seamless but too often forced, are passages from Orwell’s novels. Dissident Nay Rein Kyaw describes being tortured in Burma’s most famous prison, and we shift to Winston Smith from “1984” being interrogated and tortured in the Ministry of Love. The Burmese describe the network of military intelligence, and Ms. Larkin pulls out Big Brother.

These comparisons lend a misplaced air of sophistication to a regime that rules by banal acts of terror. The casually subversive conversations she has with ordinary Burmese, in open-air tea shops in the light of day, would never have been possible in Orwell’s Oceania.

Ms. Larkin finds firmer ground when she shies away from ruminations on the nature of totalitarianism and instead focuses on tragic scenes playing themselves out before her. An aging Anglo-Burmese woman, wistful for the days of British occupation, frets over obsessively preserved English porcelain; her pathetic gentility is palpable as she recalls “Sunday dances” and piano lessons. Echoes of Burma’s colonial past are everywhere; the capital looks as if “as if London had been transplanted into a tropical landscape and left to moulder for a century or two.”

As Ms. Larkin notes, Burma is a nation in “a permanent state of anticipation,” waiting for its generals to loosen their grip on power or have it wrested from them. When the regime finally falls, countless buried stories will no doubt surface. A worthy prologue to each of those, “Finding George Orwell in Burma” is one of the most moving portrayals of the Burmese tragedy to emerge in four decades of dictatorship.

Ms. Howley is an assistant editor at Reason magazine and former features editor of the Rangoon-based Myanmar Times.