Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

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In an article written during the war in 1944, entitled The English People, Orwell wrote: “The English are great lovers of flowers, gardening and ‘nature’ but this is merely a part of their vague aspiration towards an agricultural life. In the main they see no objection to ‘ribbon development’ or to the filth and chaos of the industrial towns. They see nothing wrong in scattering the woods with paper bags and filling every pool and stream with tin cans and bicycle frames.” Orwell is here reflecting on the tendency of the English to turn their green and pleasant land into a pig-sty exactly as Bowling does in Coming Up For Air. Is that a betrayal of their country – though – or in a perverse way an expression of an enduring spirit? In 1937 Orwell spent some months fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was wounded in the throat in May 1937, by a Nationalist sniper at Huesca. [2] What I want to explore, though, is the fact that the novel does takes him and us on a journey – from England as a series of details and impressions to a cluster of ideas. Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language, and a belief in democratic socialism.

In Orwell’s next two novels – there is a far greater sense of an inner mission; the protagonists are actively striving to get away from it all. And have an idea where they’re headed.Orwell is also satirising suburbia, he describes the road on which Bowling lives as a “line of semi-detached torture chambers”. Although Bowling dislikes his lot, he accepts it reluctantly, despite his brief foray into his past.

George Bowling, the middle-aged, middle-income protagonist is a great vehicle for Orwell's musings on pre-WW2 England. Bowling is an insightful, straight talking Everyman character who conveys his thoughts with great honesty and self-deprecating humour.

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George Bowling feels trapped in his marriage and in his job as a traveling insurance salesman. He's humorous, middle-aged, overweight, and fearful of an impending war with Hitler. As the title suggests, he feels like he is drowning in his life in present day England.

George Bowling is a fat, married, middle-aged (45 years old) insurance salesman, with 'two kids and a house in the suburbs'. George Orwell’s political affiliations varied throughout his life and his views were complex. However in Coming Up for Air he shows a paradoxically conservative strain. He uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man, to examine the decency of a past England and to express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. This book is imbued with George Orwell’s deep love of British traditions, much as we find in his essays “A Nice Cup of Tea” or “In Defence of English Cooking”. It also has some beautiful lyrical and evocative passages. His abiding love of nature and the English countryside is as apparent here as it is in “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”. There should be no disbelieving the rapture that Bowling feels in the presence of nature – rapture recalled as a child, and rapture re-experienced as an adult. It’s a rapture we know Orwell experienced in his own childhood, and the book is imbued with the writer’s fondness for flora and fauna – and fishing. Yet Bowling guards against sentimentalising it. He remembers how he used to feel about it – and how he used to feel about it is described in terms that emphasise its unreality. Broadly speaking that is what he is running away from, and what he’s aiming at. The bleak comedy of the novel, as bleak as Keep the Aspidistra Flying, is that the over-run nature of what greets him crushes even his most modest hopes. He knew that what he was escaping “From” could only be evaded for a short while – but whether it’s the bombing planes flying overhead, the cold glares of women, or the premature summons home on account of a misunderstood wireless announcement – the holiday from those grim modern realities is cut short. Furthermore what he has reached out for recedes from him the closer he gets: the countryside has been paved over, his beloved fish-pond is a rubbish-tip, the past – as O’Brien will later tell Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four– doesn’t exist and his state of mind becomes more restive. The noise infuriates him, the blank indifference to him upsets him, and he comes to regard himself as unreal – a ghost haunting the old places. Upon his return to West Bletchley, he wonders why he has made the trip, whether he has even made it at all.

THE END

In this final section George Bowling remembers the slow decline of his father’s seed business, mainly because a large attractive store belonging to a successful chain had opened nearby. George’s father had no idea why his business was failing, when he had always managed to break even before, but he died before he was made bankrupt. This painful memory has made George particularly sensitive and resistant to what he sees as the marching ravages of so-called “progress”. Very funny, as well as invigoratingly realistic ... Nineteen Eighty-Four is here in embryo. So is Animal Farm ... not many novels carry the seeds of two classics as well as being richly readable themselves'

So this story had a reassuring effect on me. To think, George Orwell went through this--the feeling that everything that meant being alive to you was taken away. Then my father went through it, and now me. The universality of the feeling takes the sting away. If the future they feared became the past I loved, chances are, this will keep happening, as the world continues tumbling along. It is said that nostalgia is felt more by the old. But even a four-year old will talk about when they were young, chat with a sense of maturity about when they were “a baby”; have memories of how things used to be. Sometimes they are happy memories, sometimes regretful, sometimes highly coloured in their imagination, just as ours are. The only difference seems to be that for tiny tots, their sense of time seems to stretch out more than for older people: And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up, and the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for ever.” Some readers might find it surprising that Orwell had a bit of sympathy for the chap trying to get away. Orwell was a man, after all, who in his late 30s volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War when he didn't have to, who seemingly couldn't conceive of an individual life without a certain responsibility to civilization as whole- a man I find morally admirable but for the same reason intimidating. But there's nevertheless some additional evidence of this sympathy in "Inside the Whale", Orwell's critical but not unsympathetic essay about Henry Miller- ostensibly a review of Tropic of Cancer, it turns into a reflection on Miller's worldview: I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense of obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human — a prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit throughout his work.The desire to get inside the whale- or to admit that you are already inside it, as Orwell refuses to condemn Miller for admitting- was understandable then, and it's understandable now. Who wants to think about this effing Coronavirus? Who wants to think about the warming of the planet, the concentration camps in China, and all the things that we don't seem to have any control over as individuals? Orwell is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and the satirical novella Animal Farm (1945) — they have together sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author. His 1938 book Homage to Catalonia, an account of his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, together with numerous essays on politics, literature, language, and culture, have been widely acclaimed.There is plenty of Orwellian social commentary here, but as a nostalgic person myself who has experienced a drastic change in civilization’s priorities along with the complete transformations of the places I once called home, I was caught up in the personal side of the story, and commiserated with George Bowling’s experiences. George Bowling begins to remind himself of how good things used to be as a child. There is a overwhelming sense of longing; a grasp for something out of reach; a straining to recapture some of that lost idyllic time. And we find now that we are reading a completely different sort of book from that first hilarious section. Before turning to Coming Up For Air, let me briefly trace that pattern through the preceding works of fiction. Some people have found George Bowling endearing; he isn’t. Orwell draws his caricature sharply. He is human, not a grotesque. But consider the point where George is laid on his bed and considering how women let themselves go after marriage; conning men to get to the altar and then suddenly rushing into middle age and dowdiness. This is from a man who is 45, fat, has false teeth and bad skin and wears vulgar clothes. Orwell is laying on the irony with a trowel. Late in the book George sees an old girlfriend from nearly 30 years previously. She has changed greatly and he barely recognises her (he inwardly reflects that she has aged badly without making the jump that she has not recognised him). George does have moments of clarity when he almost grasps how ridiculous he is, but not quite. In another chapter that I remember somewhat vividly from this novel, George reminisces about getting to spend a few months alone on an island, at some strange care-taking job, just sitting alone, reading and thinking. Coming up for air, you might say. Life might offer a peaceful interregnum here or there, Orwell suggests, but there's also an awareness throughout his work that the world will not simply allow us to go into hiding and read books. Not for long, anyway.