An informative, philosophical and comic Orwell not to be missed
By Conrad Landin / Spinebreakers Crew
Last week saw two anniversaries of publications of novels by the great novelist, essayist, and overall-thinker George Orwell. There have been countless articles in the national press on Nineteen Eighty-Four, the work considered to be his greatest, and what it means to us today, sixty years after publication in 1949. The other, which occurred on Friday, is that of a lesser-known publication, Coming Up for Air.
I first heard of Coming Up for Air only a few short months ago, when it was announced a stage adaptation would appear at Trafalgar Studios this month. I was intrigued, particularly because this was a writer who I probably admired above all others; I had read so much about him, and yet there was so much of his work I had not read. I therefore took the decision that if I was to start to explore Orwell’s wider work than this book was the place to start.
George Bowling, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, a typical and relatively boring suburban insurance salesman has great reminiscences of England pre-WW1, a world where people accepted the natural course of life; and his own boyhood, particularly in his desire to go fishing once again. We are told of his detestable wife dismissing such a suggestion as completely barbaric on a recent trip to the seaside, especially on hearing the fishing rod could cost ten shillings. Bowling does, however, have seventeen pounds from a one-off bet ‘which nobody else had heard about’. After much pondering about what to do with this, he decides to quite literally take a trip down memory lane, for him, ‘Lower Binfield’, his childhood home, to revisit the scenery of his past.
This may appear to be a fair plot, but this is no tale of action; at least not in the sense one finds on scanning most modern-day literature. Whilst Coming Up for Air uses this storyline to comment on the great differences between life before and after the First World War, novel is almost written almost like an inner monologue: whilst there are several interjections of speech, the primary focus is on the thoughts and feelings of Bowling. Orwell does not, however, simply depict the personal views of one man; he uses the character of Bowling to express his own thoughts and meditations on the way society was developing on the eve of the Second World War. Orwell paints a vivid picture of Bowling’s wife, who is constantly worrying about expense, to the extent of trying to do everything in the cheapest way possible and never enjoying oneself if there is a cost; it is in these descriptions where the author’s humour takes hold. Orwell clearly expresses through these his views his distaste for this variety of consumerism and a simple need for enjoyment in life, to prevent all meaning being lost forever.
Additionally, he comments on how society is becoming more and more indifferently greedy: Bowling’s wife jumps at every opportunity of getting something for nothing: she and two similarly-minded pals are said to have once considered joining a scheme to take tours round factories and the like, but dropped the idea after realising the subscription did not quite equal the value of the free teas.
Bowling also has another resentment with regard to the development of society. Reading of the inevitability of war daily, he can already feel the onset of the world of banner-waving fanatics, surveillance and tyranny that has already taken hold of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany - these too are depicted to be great threats to the meaning of life. Orwell detested such ideology above all else, which is apparent in almost all of his works. Particularly striking, however, is the great similarity between Coming Up for Air and Nineteen Eighty-Four, both in this focus and many others; Bowling is even presented as being the only one around to realise the implications pointing to this direction, in a similar vein to how Orwell presents Winston Smith as being ‘the last man in Europe’, which was almost the name of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world of which is more or less what Bowling lives in fear of. In effect, we see in front of us man’s soul, and the meaning of both life and society, being torn apart by the two opposing factors of indifferent materialism and greed, and totalitarian, with the threat of this being destroyed completely always present.
First published in 1939, Coming Up for Air proved excellent for developing an understanding of how the world, and indeed England, made huge changes and developments in the space of only several decades, and reminds us that, at that point in time, it would not take much notable development for us to have ended up a totalitarian nation. As ever with Orwell, its deepest commentary is on the subject of human nature and man’s soul, and how necessary it is that we do not let these be destroyed completely by the newly developing ideologies; ideologies that despite being conflicting to the naked eye, can work together in this respect. It also serves as a reminder that the grass always seems greener in the past, whilst being one of the few novels I have come across that is both humorous and deeply philosophical.