Coming Up for Air (Harvest Book)
by George Orwell
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Book Summary Information
Author: George OrwellEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1969-10-22
ISBN: 0156196255
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Harvest Books
Book Reviews of Coming Up for Air (Harvest Book)
Book Review: Just Breathe
Summary: 4 Stars
Most people know George Orwell by two of his later works - 1984 and ANIMAL FARM. What they don't necessarily know is that, in addition to the thousands of pages of reportage, journalism and essays he also produced in his all-too-brief career, he also penned six other books, including four novels and an autobiographical study of poverty (DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON) which reads better than 90% of the novels ever written. Nevertheless, Orwell is not really thought of as a novelist, but rather as a fiery political thinker who occasionally used fiction to make his points.
COMING UP FOR AIR is as good an argument for Orwell as a novelist as can be made without referencing his masterwork, 1984. Written during the "gathering storm" period of the mid-late 1930s, it reflects not only Orwell's anxiety, dread and disgust in regards to where the world was heading, but captures as well a keen sense of nostalgia for the world as it was during his own childhood - a world without secret police, bombing planes or political fanaticism. A world where it was still possible to believe that everything turned out all right in the end.
COMING UP FOR AIR is the self-told story of George "Fatty" Bowling, a wholly ordinary, lower middle-class salesman who lives in the "inner-outer" suburbs of London. Bowling is "full figured" (meaning fat), wears false teeth, has a nagging wife and two annoying kids, and lives in a generic rowhouse he'll never pay off. He's vulgar, cynical and tactless, but just perceptive enough to be capable of epiphany. One day, wandering down a London street, he's reminded of something from his childhood at the beginning of the 20th century, which he spent in a little farming town called Lower Binfield. Suddenly overcome with nostalgia, a feeling that the world around him is soon going to be smashed to pieces by war and political upheaval, and finally by the fact that his family is suffocating him, George decides to fake a business trip and spend a week in the placid countryside where he grew up - in essence, to crawl back into the womb. But what will the womb look like after the passage of twenty-odd years? Will it still provide comfort, or just reinforce his feelings that the world is not only changing out of recognition, but for the worse?
Like all Orwell's novels, COMING UP FOR AIR is at heart a political book, at once an attack on modern society and a warning that nostalgia for the past won't bring it back.
Masquerading as a "you can't go home again" sermon, the novel is actually about the brutal contrast between the modern world in which Bailey lives (which he hates), and the more pastoral, innocent time of his youth. Although Bailey repeatedly points out the harshness of life in rural England in those sleepy years before WWI, the feeling he himself returns to over and over again is a kind of clear-eyed sentimentality, an understanding that while conditions were physically tougher, people were actually much more secure mentally and emotionally, because the world they lived in was stable and not haunted by fear - of governmental tyranny, and of a greed-crazed corporate Kultur that would systematically disenfranchise and ruin independent business owners. Orwell shows impressive, perhaps even masterly skill at recreating the atmosphere of rural England in 1905, which in Bailey's mind is always summer - insects humming, a golden haze hanging over the fields, fish jumping in the farmer's ponds. The distinction between it and modern London, where everything is cold, chromed-over and streamlined, "even the bullet Hitler's keeping for you" is startling, and shows that Orwell, so often viewed as a mean-spirited misanthrope in public-spirited clothing, was capable of a very human longing for simpler times.
Summary of Coming Up for Air (Harvest Book)
George Bowling, the hero of this comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.
Insurance salesman George "Fatty" Bowling lives with his humorless wife and their two irritating children in a dull house in a tract development in the historyless London suburb of West Bletchley. The year is 1938; doomsayers are declaring that England will be at war again by 1941.
When George bets on an unlikely horse and wins, he finds himself with a little extra cash on his hands. What should he spend it on? "The alternatives, it seemed to me, were either a week-end with a woman or dribbling it quietly away on odds and ends such as cigars and double whiskeys." But a chance encounter with a poster in Charing Cross sets him off on a tremendous journey into his own memories--memories, especially, of a boyhood spent in Lower Binfield, the country village where he grew up. His recollections are pungent and detailed. Touch by touch, he paints for us a whole world that is already nearly lost: a world not yet ruled by the fear of war and not yet blighted by war's aftermath:
1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir! It'll never come again. I don't mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling you've either had and don't need to be told about, or haven't had and won't ever have the chance to learn.Alas, George finds that even Lower Binfield has been darkened by the bomber's shadow.
Readers of 1984 will recognize Orwell's desperate insistence on the importance of the individual, of memory, of history, and of language; and they will find in Fatty Bowling one of Orwell's most engaging creations--a warm, witty, thinking, remembering Everyman in a world that is fast learning not to think and not to remember, and thus swiftly losing its mind. --Daniel Hintzsche
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