Coming Up for Air by George Orwell - Penguin Modern Classics Edition | Classic Literature for Book Clubs & Personal Reading

People describe this as a satirical novel. It is not---satire requires a fair amount of authorial distance from the subject being satirized. This has little or none of that distance. At best, and for many, many pages, it is a rather sweet remembrance of how things were before WW I. The latter part, predictably, demonstrates how that world has disappeared, so the book turns sour and cruel. There is some prophetic (fatalistically passive) writing about the coming of totalitarianism and war (WW II), so that dark clouds appear and some resonance results. It's not a bad book, but certainly not a keeper.What a sad outlook Coming Up presents. It doesn't end either with George's suicide or with the commencement of the Second World War, as I thought it might. Instead it ends with the closing off of the third element in George's existence: his present.The structure of the book becomes apparent when you've finished it. It begins with his dreary present: a dead-end job; a wife who to him is no more than a nagging negativity, and children he describes as unnatural bastards.When he reflects on his early life, he realizes that all he ever really cared about was fishing. When the war takes him away, he finds little to nourish him: a harmless injury that removes him from danger and one of those jobs, most common in large institutions where you can be lost to those above and beneath you. The one ray of hope that emerges is the habit of reading better and better literature. But ultimately Sloth conquers literature. When he leaves the army, he realizes that, as boring as it was, his military life was as good as things were likely to get.Discouraged with his future, he searches for his past--the place he was born and grew up in as a child. It's gone. Where he once found excitement in fishing, he now finds row-houses and endless humanity. The one human who he can recall with something approaching romance, is now a shapeless drudge. The human he recalls as an old man, the vicar, strangely to George seems younger, likely because George is now older.All the while, the Second World War looms before him; and yet, he imagines--fears almost--that it won't change anything; that his wife will still nag him, and the dominant feeling will be boredom. But the war does not come. In its place, a war of a different kind emerges: His wife discovers that he has lied to her about his whereabouts. She thinks he has been with another woman, which he has not-he's been visiting his childhood haunts. At the book's conclusion, George realizes that he has no hope of convincing her that he has been involving in nothing shameful; rather, the course of least resistance for him is to accept her misconception of his unfaithfulness.And so George has no past--his home is gone; no present-he lives a lie; and no future--his job and war will take care of that.Worst of all is that George is not a personality entirely foreign to me. He is not a dolt and he quests in vain:"At any rate that year of novels was the only real education, in the sense of book-learning, that I've ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn't have had if I'd gone through life in a normal sensible way."Hmmmm.George Orwell is a didactic, ideological writer. He always has a point to get across, and when essays aren't enough, he'll write an essay in the form of a novel. It doesn't sound charming, but it really is. Half of Orwell's complaints and worries are hopelessly dated, while half are still very much alive. "Coming Up for Air" is a good representative of that dichotomy, with complaints about "vegetarianism, simple life, poetry, nature-worship, roll in the dew before breakfast" interleaved with fantasies of air raids and totalitarianism.On the other hand, he doesn't have a very good feeling for people's inner lives -- but that doesn't bother me very much. I don't either, you know. It actually seems appropriate for an avowed socialist: George Bowling admits that he's scarcely an individual, that he's just a representative of the social class that Orwell wants to write about: '"Five to ten quid a week,' you'd say as soon as you saw me." His wife is an Anglo-Indian, and if you've read Burmese Days, you already know what Orwell thinks about *that*. There are no other characters; everything else is social forces, thinly disguised as people. The plot is a little bit thin too -- it surely won't surprise you to learn that when George Bowling travels to his childhood home, he finds it has changed into everything George Orwell hates.I'm afraid this is all sounding very sour. "Coming Up for Air" is an excellent book, one of the better entries in the middle-aged-man-reflecting-on-his-lost-youth-and-the-rut-that-society-has-pushed-him-into genre. Orwell explicitly mentions "The History of Mr. Polly" by H. G. Wells, and its influences are obvious, but it's surprising how much better a writer Orwell is than Wells, and how much more vividly he conveys the dispiriting nature of capitalist society. Of course Orwell covers this theme perfectly well in his essays, but like a math teacher, he knows that you can't give your students problems in mathematical notation only -- sometimes they need a word problem too.This is one of Orwell’s best unsung 1930’s based novels, full of insight, truth and subtle humour. Written in his ‘conversational style’ with never a wasted word. Very readable, as a relatively slim volume the only possible downside is you might wish it was longer?Although a little slow to get going, Coming up for Air is worth perservering with. It's a book in which very little actually happens, therefore relies heavily on the descriptive text (which is very good), but George Bowling's cynicism is strangely endearing despite him being quite rough around the edges as a protagonist.It's an interesting and poignant reflection upon his life and how the world changes around him without him really realising it (as is often the case). It's a very thought-provoking read at times but has a good dose of dry humour here and there as well.I don't think it would be to everyone's taste but for anyone wanting to explore Orwell's earlier works it's a worthwhile read.Fantastic book - Orwell at his best - so poignant, sad, very funny, wry wicked humour that touches the memories and feelings inside everyone - dreams, fears, hopes, love, all wrapped up inside a real world where life takes over and you forget who you really are and who you once wanted to be. I first read this when I was 20 and am re- reading now 30 years on - still wonderful.Compared to Orwell's more celebrated works, such as Animal Farm and 1984, Coming Up for Air receives comparatively little attention or critical acclaim. That's a pity, because this is unquestionably one of his finest works. All the usual Orwellian themes are here - the constraints of social class and the inability to change personal circumstance for the better, the alienation of the individual in an increasingly insensible world, the loss of the 'old ways' and a yearning for a return to more compassionate values, physical decay and death mirroring social disintergration. Orwell is like a latter-day Thomas Hardy. Unlike Keep the Aspidistra Flying or 1984, where the protagonist feels strongly autobiographical in every sense, in Coming Up for Air, the story is carried by plump, middle-aged, travelling salesman George Bowling. While his characterization may not be as wholly convincing as Orwell's more autobiographical characters, his concerns are very much the usual stamping ground. And like 1984, Orwell casts a prescient eye over the near future where democracy is threatened by totalitarianism, this time in the rising threat of Stalin and Hitler and the onset of WWII. Coming Up for Air is less polemical than other Orwell works, and perhaps easier to read for that. The narrative, with the occasional dabs of wry humour - George's self-deprecation at his growing unattractiveness to the opposite sex, for example, and the slightly comical obsession with carp fishing, mixed with quite profound social comment, is classic Orwell through and through. Orwell is up there with the very finest British writers and the only regrettable fact of Orwell's career is he spent much of writing journalism, political tracts and essays and left us with comparatively few novels.This isn't one of Orwell's very best works, but it is an enjoyable read, which paints a fascinating picture of the time it was written, just before World War 2. Like every generation the main protagonist George Bowling, laments the passing of the world he grew up in, and dreams of returning to a simpler time. He is haunted by the coming war and sees clearly the destruction which is to come, as well as a vision of dystopian post war future.Nothing much happens in this novel, but I learned a great deal about what life was like in pre war England, and in enjoyed the account of Bowlings struggles with his lot in life