George Bowling középkorú, boldogtalan, az angol alsó középosztály halálunalmas életét élõ, tipikus pohos biztosítási ügynök kicsinyes feleséggel, két gyerekkel. George-unk egy ideje azon agyal, hogy szürke életét a dugi pénzecskéje révén hogyan is dobja fel idõre-órára, ám a véletlen folyamán meglát egy plakátot, ami majd 40 évet repíti õt vissza az idõben abba a kisvárosba, ahol született és felcseperedett. Jön a nagy ötlet: a pénzét nem nõkre és italra költi, hanem felkeresi a régen nem látott városkát... ( )

When I first had a look at this, I wondered if it was really by the same George Orwell. It certainly didn't seem to be anything like 1984 or Animal Farm. But it was indeed he. I spent most of the book wondering if anything was actually going to happen in this story. And nothing really did. I hated it at first, but for some reason I kept coming back to it. It grew on me.

The protagonist, a fat and rather unlikeable father of two named George Bowling, leads a rather boring middle-class existence in the mid-1930s. He sells insurance. He lives in a suburban house. He doesn't love his wife anymore and he doesn't really like his children. The impetus for the plot is that George won seventeen pounds in a horse race and decides to keep it a secret from his family and go on a secret trip back to Lower Binfield, the village where he grew up. Another good title for the book might have been You Can't Go Home Again, but Thomas Wolfe had already taken it. When George returns to Lower Binfield, he doesn't even recognize it.

The true beauty of the book is its description of the settings. A large chunk of the story is taken by George describing his youth and young adulthood in a time lost to us forever: before the War to End All Wars, then the world seemed a much safer place. As George puts it, it's a time you either know already and don't need to be told about, or a time you don't know and could never understand. Also important is Orwell's prescience for the future: war is looming, and George is well aware that it might change the world forever once again.

I would recommend this books to scholars of modern English literature and also turn-of-the-century England. ( )

An absolutely wonderful evocative novel, full of witty and poignant observations about lower middle class life between the wars, the fear of war (this was published in 1939), the securities and horrors of cosy family life and the power of nostalgia and the "golden age" myth of one's youth. Orwell's fear of war is that of the triumph of totalitarianism in Britain, and his descriptions of what he fears this will be like clearly presage his descriptions of Aistrip One in 1984. Despite this horror, there are many laugh out loud moments. This should be better known and more widely read than it is. ( )

(Published first in blog at http://www.sea-of-flowers.ca/weblog/s...)

After The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell's next book was Homage to Catalonia, which was about the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, he published the novel Coming Up for Air, a first person narrative covering a few days in the life, and many years in the memories of George Bowling. Bowling is a 45 year old insurance representative, living in a London suburb. He lives on commission, he travels, he tries to enjoy life. The story is about Bowling's decision to play hooky - from work and from his family - for about a week to visit the once-rural, once-small village where he grew up before the first World War. The story is the story of his life.

Bowling is reasonably, or perhaps unreasonably happy with his life. He is fat, he has lost his teeth, he has become stuck in lower management, his wife is horrid, his kids are no joy. He sees himself as surviving. The term he uses is "getting on" which meant doing ok. He takes satisfaction from small pleasures. He seems to represent Orwell's vision of the lower middle-class English white collar worker of the 1930's. In telling his story, Orwell creates a social history of the middle class. Bowling's father was an independent feed and seed merchant in a small village, and Bowling has fond memories of his mother's work in the kitchen at the end of the Victorian age. Bowling had a free childhood, wandering the lanes and meadows, fishing in small ponds and canals. His memories are not wholly idyllic. His father is run out of business when a national firm sets up business. George provides an acid assessment of life for the small merchants of the age - if they were lucky they died before they went bankrupt and had to go to the workhouse (poorhouse). George left school at 16 and went to work for a grocer. He enlisted in the Army in World War I, and after service in France, was posted to a Coastal Watch function. After the war, he tried to make it as a travelling salesman on commission, eventually joining the insurance company. He marries a woman whose family were in the colonial service in India. It seemed like a good idea, but she is daughter of the real middle class, domineering, insecure, snobbish, and selfish. She nags him constantly, and he hides from her neediness in the petty evasions of the middle class man - a little gambling, some drinking, the odd bit on the side. Bowling did not enjoy a particularly good education and his main intellectual inspirations are from popular, rather than literary fiction, H.G. Wells rather than G.B. Shaw. His philosophy owes more to common sense than the classics.

He thinks he is realistic about his childhood, but there is a nostalgia for the freedom he enjoyed as a child. His thought are occupied with the war, which he expects by 1941. He has a sense of being carried by forces out of his control. He has a sense of the falseness of official language - a concern that foreshadows his later work. He knows he is too old and unfit to fight. He seems almost indifferent to the outcome - he expects society to be much the same whoever wins. In passages that look forward to Nineteen Eight-Four, he dread what will happen after the war - the rise of a numbing totalitarian state, the loss of freedom and privacy.

His visit to his old village is demoralizing. Some new factories have opened - the town is booming, but this means that no one remembers his family, and that old fields have become suburbs. The village is near an airbase, and he constantly notices bombers on training missions. He tries to fish in the old canal, and finds the place full of motor boats for day-tripping tourists.

The story has obvious political and cultural dimensions. Orwell explores the source of the appeal of nature and nostalgia in British culture, and the loyalty of the middle class to fragments of individuality and freedom. Bowling is well aware of the consumer traps of middle-class life - who is making money off his efforts to maintain a middle-class status in life, but he is content to be getting on. The middle classes come off unexpectedly well. Orwell writes with an understanding of the cultural forces that conspire to make the middle class insecure and loyal to the class that signs the pay cheque. He writes with a deep respect for the Bowling's attachments to the places and people that inhabit his memory, his appetite for life, and his tenacious spirit.

Orwell's fiction, apart from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, has been compared unfavorably to his essays, which is unfortunate. The narrative structure is a controlled, coherent stream of consciousness - a hearty common sense version of modernism. His concern with memory, freedom and experience is almost existentialist, but he does not affect the same sense of decadence and boredom that infects the post-war French existentialist writers. ( )

I've read this in a couple of days after expensively ordering it from Waterstones. I wanted to read it before seeing a play based upon the book at the Edinburgh Fringe. I've read 1984 and Animal Farm but not read any other Orwell. This I loved. I put aside the joys of Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea" which I've only just begun, forty pages or so in and read this with pleasure and ease. Iris Murdoch is a wonderful writer but makes much greater demands on the reader than Orwell. He wants to put across his philosophy; you can tell that it is his primary objective in writing the book. So he keeps it clear and simple. Iris Murdoch is deep and luxurious like rich, damp fruit cake. Orwell is more a rock cake, lumpier and to the point.

I appreciated the fatalism of Bowling in "Coming Up for Air". He already knew his journey back to nostalgia was doomed before he set out on it. He knew he was hopelessly tied into the under the thumb fat middle-aged insurance salesman that he was. He was checking his exit route in order to see that it wasn't clear so that he had no need to chastise himself for his abject surrender to his fate as a nobody.

Yet within that Orwell conjures an intoxicatingly attractive and sentimental vision of pre-WW1 England. George Bowling was not worthy of it as a child let alone now as a failing adult but it was there and it recieved him in a way that the modern pre-WW2 world didn't. He is caught up in the angst of the fast arriving war and is equally powerless to affect it as he is his own life. So disillusioned he can mock everything around him even as he recognises himself within it.

A very much under-rated Orwell novel, I think. ( )