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? Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. He was a prolific polemical journalist, article writer, literary critic, reviewer, poet, and writer of fiction, and, considered perhaps the twentieth century's best chronicler of English culture. Suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” Orwell sen ne muhteşem bir yazarsın! Kitabın daha ilk sayfalarında bu cümleyi kurduyor Orwell, en ünlü eserleri 1984 ve Hayvan Çiftliği olsa da (ki onları çok severim), geri planda kalan eserleri de onlar kadar iyiymiş bu kitapla bunu daha iyi anladım. Kitabı okudukça sevdim, sevdikçe okudum.

The Lion and the Unicorn expresses frustration with the political apathy of the English yet part of Orwell is seduced by the sleep-walker aspect of his countrymen. In that pamphlet Orwell talks about the country’s “emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis.” The line that stands out for me is the following: “The nation is bound together by an invisible chain.” Bound together. There’s no escaping that chain. Bowling certainly can’t. Yet that bond, however much it chafes, might also, paradoxically, act as a guarantor of national liberty. That which cannot be escaped holds forth the possible means, in other words, of escaping the greater peril. When we survey the work, we see a pattern of individuals attempting to get away from forces that threaten to overwhelm them – and which, to a greater or lesser degree, finally do so. The word ‘escape’, and the desire for escape, crop up repeatedly. When we survey the life, it’s possible to see Eric Blair himself as something of an escape-artist – he adopted a pseudonym, altered his accent, trying to pass himself off as belonging to a lower social class, and embedded himself in a wide range of character-altering experiences. He was famously “down and out”, frequently off and about. He started life in India, grew up in Oxfordshire, spent formative years in Burma, slummed it in Paris, fought in Spain and ended up on that Hebridean island. Before turning to Coming Up For Air, let me briefly trace that pattern through the preceding works of fiction. I can see the war that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.” Açıkçası bu kitap kütüphanemde aylardır bekliyordu. Bir iki defa elimde gezdirdim ama tam anlamıyla canım istemediği için bıraktım. Neden sonra bir iştahla bu kitabı aradım rafların arasında ve elime almam ile bitirmem bir oldu demek isterdim ama araya hastalık girdiği için birkaç gün ertelendi kitabın bitişi ve bu inceleme yazısı.Duecentonovanta pagine a fianco di George (omonimo dell’autore) Bowling, un quarantacinquenne pingue, tristemente sposato, che inizia a ricordare il giorno in cui si reca a Londra per ritirare la propria dentiera. Ricorda i primi anni del secolo, quando era un adolescente a Lower Binfield e arriva alla conclusione che niente come la pesca è stato importante nella sua vita. La pesca identifica la sua giovinezza, quello stagno pieno di sogni enormi dove sarebbe bastato far calare un amo, avere una canna e una lenza per tirarli su. Joe Bowling is George's elder brother. He was not intellectual, and, according to George 'therefore he had a slight proficiency in mechanics'. He never did any sizeable amount of work and worked for his dad as an 'errand boy'. One day when George was younger, Joe stole all the money from the shop till. He was said to have always wanted to emigrate to America, and was never mentioned again. Somehow the reality never lives up to the memory. Places from childhood are always smaller and shabbier than imagined. You wonder just why you got on with those folks so well, as you are now all stumbling to find something to say. The holiday destination you dreamed of years ago looks nothing like the pictures in your mind. Yet you still feel a strange kind of ownership over somewhere that used to mean a lot to you, and a sense of loss. Something has drifted away without you noticing.

He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself – to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being underground. He liked to think about the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning… It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself for ever.” George Orwell's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, Coming Up for Air is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture childhood innocence as war looms on the horizon.In outline, what he has done is stand at the graveside of the rural England he knew and loved, to bid it farewell and turn to face a future that threatens to bury him – and his kind. Like the fish-filled pool into which George Bowling peers as a boy in rural Oxfordshire, maybe it has hidden depths. 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”. 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' George Bowling is a fat, married, middle-aged (45 years old) insurance salesman, with 'two kids and a house in the suburbs'.

Let’s break down Bowling’s humble break-out plans into bullet-points. He wants to escape from a number of things that would make sense to the man in the street: 1) He wants to escape from his wife and family commitments 2) He wants to get away from the rat-race and the anxious financial concerns of the Thirties that afflict all working-men, not only married ones. 3) He wants to flee suburbia and what it represents, a kind of “mental squalor”, as he puts it and 4) He wants to get away from thoughts of Hitler and the world war he knows is just around the corner. 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. The book also contains some hints at what was to come with ' Nineteen Eighty-Four' which Orwell would write a few years later - specifically musings on an "after-war" dystopian future characterised by hate, slogans, secret cells etc. Remarkably prescient and demonstrating he was already thinking about some of the themes that were later developed so memorably in ' Nineteen Eighty-Four'. The female characters are not well drawn and are feminine stereotypes, although Orwell does capture the monotony of suburban life. Usually Orwell’s female characters are more rounded (Julia in 1984), but the focus here is firmly on George Bowling and he certainly perceives the women around him in two-dimensional ways.

PART II

War! I started thinking about it again. It's coming soon, that's certain. But who's afraid of war? That's to say, who's afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? 'You are,' you say. Yes, I am, and so's anybody who's ever seen them. But it isn't the war that matters, it's the after-war. The world we're going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It's all going to happen. Gosh! Did I even understand myself? The whole thing seemed to be fading out of my mind. Why had I gone to Lower Binfield? HAD I gone there?” Coming Up for Air is an extraordinary novel. I would not say it is extraordinarily good, although some part do excel, and George Orwell’s writing is as lucid, witty and entertaining as ever. The present day sections pre-war are peppered with hilariously ridiculous rumours, which are funny in a ghastly way. Nevertheless they have the flavour of authenticity, such as recommending sitting in the bath until it’s all over, or saying that if you hide under the table you will be safe. There are also satisfying literary devices, such as whenever there is a big change in George Bowling’s life, the bombers have flown overhead, as a sort of portent.

Uncle Ezekiel is a shop owner with quite liberal beliefs, being a ' little Englander'. He kept an assortment of caged birds inside his shop as decoration. It’s 1938, and George Bowling is a middle-aged insurance salesman. The son of a struggling seed merchant, he has risen to life in a London suburb, where he lives with his wife and kids on a typical middle-class street. This book is another great slice of pre-WW2 English literature. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It evokes the era perfectly. The book is split into four parts. The second part is full of childhood reminiscences from the early twentieth century. The protagonist recalls his childhood from the perspective of the late 1930s. This section reminded me very much of ' Cider with Rosie' (one of my favourite books), with the key difference that this is fiction. It made me wonder how Orwell managed to so credibly know, and be able to relate, a childhood in a small rural community. Either way it's a stunning section, and also very cleverly manages to highlight some of the seismic changes that took place for the average person in the UK throughout the twentieth century. As a child, Orwell lived at Shiplake and Henley in the Thames Valley. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was a civil servant in British India, and he lived a genteel life with his mother and two sisters, though spending much of the year at boarding school at Eastbourne and later at Eton in Britain. He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family. [1]

Part 2, Chapter 1

This first section is very reminiscent of H.G Wells, in his social novels such as “Kipps” or “The History of Mr. Polly”. We know that as a boy, Eric Blair did admire H.G. Wells, to the point of him being a favourite author. He enjoyed those novels, because they evoked particular aspects of life in England before the First World War, which made George Orwell recall comparable experiences of his own. Perhaps George Orwell had those novels in mind as a template. Their protagonists are very similar, although George Bowling tells his own story. Ultimately this is a story about running away, or at least the desire to run away, and it includes some of Orwell's best comic writing. There's a particularly inspired moment when George, in the process of trying to escape for the weekend without letting anyone know, glances at the road behind him and imagines everyone in his life in hot pursuit, including Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle: "There's the chap who's trying to get away! After him!" A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. He’d think it was a wonderful thing that a son of his should own a motor-car and live in a house with a bathroom.” George Bowling is an unhappily married, middle-aged insurance salesman and social conformist. One day, after an unexpected windfall of cash, he embarks on a sabbatical journey to his childhood home hoping to find a respite from his miserable existence and to re-discover the mythical ’Walden Pond’ of his youth. But, much to his dismay, George discovers that every touchstone of his upbringing has been obliterated by urban sprawl and development.