Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

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As I opened the door, little Billy — my youngest, aged seven — shot past me, dodging the smack which I aimed at his head. The end of the book is pretty downbeat and this tone characterises the whole book and therefore might not be to everyone's taste. Coming Up For Air' was my first George Orwell since ' Homage to Catalonia' a few years back (whilst preoccupied with books about the Spanish Civil War). He is undoubtedly fearful of the future as he gets the sense that war is approaching, foreseeing food queues, soldiers, tyranny and despotism.

Sometimes I've stood over their cots, on summer evenings when it's light, and watched them sleeping, with their round faces and their tow-coloured hair, several shades lighter than mine, and it's given me that feeling you read about in the Bible when it says your bowels yearn.From George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, Coming Up for Air is the classic, comic novel about the everyday struggles of the common man and a satiric look at the trappings of middle-class suburbia. When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you can kid yourself that you're a Hollywood sheik is definitely at an end.

George "Tubby" Bowling is a middle-aged insurance salesman, a job at which he grimly excels, dutifully paying the mortgage on an average English suburban row house, and supporting an ungrateful family.Miller sees what is happening, but is Inside the Whale, he " feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. No woman, I thought as I worked the soap round my belly, will ever look twice at me again, unless she's paid to. Coming up for Air is narrated by George Bowling; a man living in the suburbs with a wife and two children, in his late 40s and in an unexciting but stable white collar job.

When I got to the breakfast table they were having an argument which went to the tune of "Yes, you did! George Bowling has won a modest sum of money in a horse race, which he has not told his family about. At perhaps one house in fifty some anti-social type who'll probably end in the workhouse has painted his front door blue instead of green. Running alongside George’s inner disbelief, but eventual resigned acceptance, is writing which captures the very real pre-war anxiety.The old car, in which I "cover" my district (I ought to tell you that I'm in the insurance business. She gets what I've finally decided is a definite pleasure out of rocking herself to and fro with her arms across her breast, and glooming at me, "But, George, it's very serious! Later the organization that he had joined when he joined the Republican cause, The Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), was painted by the pro-Soviet Communists as a Trotskyist organization (Trotsky was Joseph Stalin's enemy) and disbanded. It seems to take all the bounce out of you, like when you suddenly discover in a public place that the sole of one of your shoes is coming off.