"Coming Up for Air,” George
Orwell, 1939
This book, one of Orwell’s
least known, shows that obscurity can’t fade Orwell’s writing and ideas. Even in a ‘lesser’ work, the man shines
through. George, also the name of the lead character, is an ordinary
‘everyman’ that perhaps thinks a bit too much.
He’s an overweight salesman that used to be young, and then work and
marriage happened. Oh, and that first
big war, which he mostly and thankfully spent in Cornwall as a guard.
He’s all for little boys killing frogs and fishing and all that, yet afraid
to holiday without his wife. He’ll talk
anyone into anything, as he’s in traveling sales. But sometimes he thinks another war is
coming. And he’s right. Machine guns in the windows and cruel men.
Written in the period
between “Homage to Catalonia” and ‘Animal Farm,’ this book captures the period
in Britain between the two wars, when the small, rural England of Tolkien and
Orwell was being dozed over into suburban clots of housing and hurry. War, industry and the Depression changed all
that. The formally quiet banks of the Thames now throng with ice cream salesman, garbage and
screaming children. The fish pools are
filled with rusted cans. The old house
is unrecognizable. Nothing to do but
drink in fake drawing rooms.
George lectures on the real
estate scams run by the building societies that put everyone in deep debt. Yes, he’s got his 5 square meters of green
surrounded by a wall. He cringes while
nasty bosses yell at shop girls. He
recalls how his father’s small business was destroyed by a large chain
store. He makes fun of the Marxists who
harangue over Hitler, but then perhaps thinks them right, as he’s no smarty-pants and proud of
it. Yet George even got into a period of
reading – and covered all the good tales.
Orwell fills the books with boyish stereotypes, which either reflect
Orwell or George, as George is
also a bit Orwell. The man hates his
wife, but can’t think of leaving her, as she’s become part of the
woodwork. So he takes her verbal
punishments. George is also probably the
first person in literature that I can remember to discuss how red-faced fat
people are abused.
‘Coming up for air’ is the
phrase that George thinks of when he decides to play hooky from his job and
wife, and revisit the old hometown that he hasn’t seen in 20 years. Lower Binfield, somewhere near the upper Thames. A 'bin' in England is a garbage can, so this town is slyly called a field of garbage cans. He talks
to his old pastor, but doesn’t identify himself. He talks to his first girlfriend in the guise
of buying a pipe, and she doesn’t recognize him. She is so ugly he is astonished. He enters his dad’s old seed shop, which is
now a tea & cake parlor. He tries to
fish – the only thing he ever really enjoyed – and finally scoffs at himself
for such childish pursuits.
Thomas Wolfe said of Asheville, North
Carolina that ‘you can’t go home again’ and indeed you can’t. George discovers the same. A quiet, human
book, with a strong touch of nostalgia for a lost world. He’s the ‘new’ man of Britain, a
white collar bloke with a broken-down car.
And inside him, a quiet critique of British capitalism.
(Review of "All Art is Propaganda" also by Orwell, below.)
And I bought it in Mayday
Books excellent used/marked down section
Red Frog / March 25, 2014
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