Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

(Book Review)

Started: December 15, 2018
Finished: December 17, 2018

I have some time ago decided that George Orwell is my favorite author of all time.
I suppose then it's a little bit odd that I've been so slow to tackle his collected works.  But I figure, there's no great hurry with these things.  And why spoil it by rushing?  Better to savor it by just reading a little bit of Orwell every so often.
At any rate, I've now read almost everything.
1984 and Animal Farm (these two in my youth, before I was blogging, so no review to link to).
Keep the Aspidistra Flying,
Homage to Catalonia,
Collected Essays,
Burmese Days, and
Down and Out in Paris and London.  
There are only a couple of books left actually.

Recently, I found Coming Up for Air at a used book sale, and grabbed it.

The Review
This is a short little book (247 pages).  But there's a lot of themes in here to comment on.  I'll try to divide my comments into sections, although there is some overlap.

Style and Narration
I've always loved Orwell's readable prose, that seems to just effortlessly carry the reader along.  Even when Orwell is writing about something boring, his prose style makes me interested.  This is true right from the beginning of the book, in which the main character is describing himself in the bath.  Orwell can pull it off because he writes so well.
The style is first person narration.
Given how many of Orwell's books and essays are autobiographical (Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out)  I thought for the first page or so that this was actually Orwell narrating.  But although the narration style is 1st person point of view, the narrator is not Orwell himself, but the fictional character George "Fatty" Bowling.  (Although he does share the same first name as Orwell--or at least he would, if George Orwell weren't actually a pseudonym for Eric Blair).
According to Wikipedia:

 A recent biographer, Michael Shelden, praised the "many passages of lyrical beauty, not unbecoming a novelist who once aspired to be a poet. The one serious defect in the novel is Orwell's attempt to be the voice of his narrator-protagonist. He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman, and the book is at its best when Orwell is 'out-of-character', speaking in a voice which is recognisably his rather than an imitation of 'Fatty' Bowling's."

I actually thought it worked.  Mostly.  Certainly Fatty Bowling is more intelligent than our stereotype of suburban insurance salesman, but then, maybe our stereotype is prejudiced.  The book also explains that Fatty Bowling has had a literary background.  (He had always been a reader, and had had a couple of years during the war when he was stationed out in the country with nothing to do, and educated himself by reading the classics.)
The only real problem is the problem with all first-person narration novels--separating Orwell's views from Fatty Bowling's.  Mostly  I assumed that Fatty Bowling's thoughts were also the thoughts of Orwell, but this can be dangerous.
There are a lot of serious and frankly depressing themes in this book (more on that below).  But the narration style is frequently humorous or sarcastic.  There's a lot of great sarcastic one-liners in this book.  I couldn't possibly quote them all, but I'll give one below just to give you a taste:

Funny how we keep thinking about bombs.  Of course there's no question that it's [the war] coming soon.  You can tell how close it is by the cheer-up stuff they're talking about in the newspapers.  I was reading a piece in the News Chronicle the other day where it said the bombing planes can't do any damage nowadays.  The anti-aircraft guns have got so good that the bombers have to stay at twenty thousand feet.  The chap thinks, you notice, that if an aeroplane's high enough the bombs don't reach the ground.  Or more likely what he meant was that they'll miss Woolwich Arsenal and only hit places like Ellesmere Road [the street where the narrator lives]. (p.19)

That's typical of most of the book--Serious stuff, but the point is still made in a humorous way.
You'll also notice from the quote above that the narrator is already anticipating the outbreak of World War II.  That's also another theme throughout the book.

Anticipating World War II
The book was published in 1939, right before World War II, and is an interesting time piece providing a glimpse of what people were thinking right before the war.  According to this book, everyone knew the war was coming.  Fatty Bowling narrates his thoughts while riding on a train and noticing a bomber airplane flying overhead.

One of the commercials cocked his eye at it for just a second. I knew what he was thinking. For that matter it's what everybody else is thinking. You don't have to be a highbrow to think such thoughts nowadays. In two years time, one year's time, what shall we be doing when we see one of those things? Making a dive for the cellar, wetting our bags with fright? (p17)

Passages like this, in which the narrator asserts over and over again that everyone knows the war is coming, are all throughout the book.  Orwell (or Fatty Bowling) usually predicts the war will come in 1941, which struck me as prescient, until I remembered that 1941 was only the American entry.  England actually entered the war in 1939, so it actually came sooner than Orwell thought.

The book also provides an interesting insight into the politics of England on the eve of the war.
Sometimes you read articles complaining that people weren't sufficiently outraged about what was going on in Germany before the war.  But Orwell paints a picture of a society pretty worked up about it.
Orwell's narrator describes a lecture he attended:

...Of course he was pitching into Hitler and the Nazis. I wasn't particularly keen to hear what he was saying--get the same stuff in the News Chronicle ever morning--but his voice came across to me as a kind of burr-burr-burr, with now and again a phrase that stuck out and caught my attention.
"Bestial atrocities.... Hideous outbursts of sadism. ... Rubber truncheons. ... Concentration camps. ... Iniquitous persecution of Jews. ... Back to the Dark Ages. ... European civilisation. ... Act before it is too late. ... Indignation of all decent peoples. ... Alliance of the democratic nations. ... Firm stand. Defence of democracy. ... Democracy. ... Fascism. ... Democracy. ... Fascism. ... Democracy... ."(p.153)

What's interesting though (and this comes through a little bit in the passage I just quoted above) is that instead of being sympathetic to the anti-fascists, Orwell is mocking them.  He views the whole thing as a type of group-think, where people just get together to mindlessly hate.  Orwell even views the title "anti-fascist" as being ridiculous.  To quote from the same page:

What's he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he's stirring up hatred.  Doing his damnedest to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists. It's a queer thing, I thought, to be known  as "Mr. So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist." A queer trade, anti-Fascism.  This fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do before Hitler came along?  ... But the grating voice went on and on, and another thought struck me. He means it.  Not faking at all--feels every word he's saying.  He's trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that's nothing to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan's gospel truth to him.  If you cut him open all you'd find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy (p.153-154)

 If you've read 1984, these themes should be sounding familiar.  (More on that below).  Although I was surprised to find these critiques applied to the anti-fascists instead of to the totalitarian regimes themselves.
The meeting Orwell's narrator is describing is a meeting of the Left Book Club (W), and from reading Orwell's collected essays, I know the Left Book Club was a frequent target of his ire.  Although I believe he was also a member, and they did publish a lot of his works.  So I don't know what his exact relationship with them was.  Maybe familiarity had breed contempt.  Orwell had just grown contemptuous of the kind of mindless groupthink that occurred at these anti-fascist meetings, even if he knew they were on the right side of history.
(That's me being charitable, of course.  The uncharitable explanation is that at this point in time Orwell wasn't taking the fascist threat seriously enough.  But I got the sense from his collected essays--not to mention his own personal history fighting in Spain--that Orwell was always a committed anti-fascist.)

At the same time, however, Orwell's narrator does feel nervous about Hitler and Stalin.
He goes to talk to a classicist friend of his.  (Classicist in the sense of someone obsessed with ancient Rome and Greece.).  Orwell's narrator says that Hitler and Stalin are something that the world has never seen before, and expresses his fear for the future.  The classicist says that nothing is new under the sun, and points out that ancient Greece had tyrants just like Hitler.
Orwell's narrator thinks to himself:

It's funny.  I'm not a fool, but I'm not a highbrow either, and God knows at normal times I don't have many interests that you wouldn't expect a middle-aged seven-pound-a-weeker with two kids to have. And yet I've enough sense to see that the old life we're used to is being sawn off at the roots.  I can feel it happening. 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. (p.166)

Orwell was right enough about the war coming of course.  But what about the other stuff?  Did life ever return to the way it was before the war?  I'm not sure because I have no memory of what life was like before the war.  Nor do most people nowadays.  We certainly have some level of organized propaganda and government surveillance nowadays, but is this a change from before the war, or has it always been like this?

I suppose this gets into a larger debate--the debate people are always having about whether or not 1984 ended up coming true, and how much of it came true.
Which brings me to my next section...

Connections with 1984
Critic John Carey said of this book: "Nineteen-Eighty-Four is here in embryo. So is Animal Farm."   (As quoted on the back cover of my paperback edition).  Certainly a lot of the same ideas that would later pop-up in 1984 are in this book.  Actually I've already referenced most of them.
The two-minutes hate, the empty slogan, and the duck-like men who give speeches in which they rhythmically quack empty slogans can be seen in the sections describing the anti-fascist meeting I described above.  (Although, as I also noted above, it's ironic that all of this is being used to describe the anti-fascists instead of the fascists.)
The fear of a new world in which you're constantly being exposed to propaganda is in this book as well.
The protagonist in this book is middle-aged, just like Winston Smith.   (Fatty Bowling is 45.  Winston Smith was 39.  Although Winston Smith's body was falling apart a lot more than Fatty Bowling who, aside from his false teeth, is relatively healthy for his age.)

The Nostalgia for Pre-War Small Town England
So, I haven't even gotten to it yet, but none of what I've been talking about so far are the main themes of the book.
The main theme is a comparison between the modern world, and the pre-war world that the character grew up in.  (That's pre-war as in pre-World War I.)
A chance newspaper headline causes the narrator to start remembering his childhood, and a large section of the book is an extended flashback to him describing his childhood, and his childhood town.
There is an assertion that before the war, people lived a certain way, and that way of life is now gone forever.  And that it's somewhat of a pity.
There's a lot of stuff in here, and it's probably no good me trying to summarize it.  You really want to read the book to get the whole flavor of it.  Orwell does a beautiful job of describing what it was like to be a boy in a small town before the modern world.  He talks about fishing in the river, finding toads and birds nests, fighting with the other boys, playing tricks at school, et cetera.
It made me feel nostalgic for that life even though I never lived in England before the war.
What's interesting is that Orwell was lamenting the loss of childhood already in 1939--before air conditioning, before television, before ipads, before smart phones, and before Facebook.
I'm not sure what the lesson is.  Perhaps the advancement of technology has now really ruined childhood in a way Orwell only vaguely saw coming.
Or, perhaps the lesson is that every generation is afraid modern technology will ruin childhood, and we should take these fears with a grain of salt.  I don't know.

Orwell's character goes back to his small town to try to escape from modern life and regain some of the peace of his youth.  Only to find that his small town has been destroyed by urban sprawl, the natural areas and fields have turned into suburbs, and there are too many people everywhere.

Here, I was immediately reminded of The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey.  (Thank you again Whisky).
The premise of The Intellectuals and the Masses was that in the early 20th century, there were a lot of English writers complaining about how population explosion and urban expansion was ruining the English countryside.  (Lady Chatterley's Lover , published 10 years earlier, also had a lot of passages talking about how the old town was being transformed by urbanization.)

In fact, I thought large parts of Coming Up for Air were sounding familiar, so I picked up my copy of The Intellectuals and the Masses, and sure enough, John Carey had summarized large sections of the plot in support of his thesis.

John Carey raised some interesting questions in his book about how fears of population explosion can lead (and did lead) to philosophies of population control or extermination.  So there's obviously a dangerous edge here to all this.  And yet, I find myself sympathizing with Orwell's lament about the loss of the small town.
The whole thing is a complex topic.  I won't attempt to get into it all here.

Actually there's a lot of complex conversations that could be had.  How much of the pre-war way of life was lost?  And should it be lamented, or are we better off in the modern world?  How much of this was unique to Orwell's generation, and how much of this sense of loss and childhood nostalgia is common to every generation?  

Other Stuff

There's a lot of stuff in this book:  Orwell's somewhat misogynistic portrayal of women, Orwell's narrator talking about how horrible World War I was, and trying to talk some men out of enlisting for World War II (different than the view you get in Orwell's essays, in which he views fighting against Hitler a necessity).  Orwell's description of aging, and encountering his old girlfriend who is now middle-aged. Et cetera, et cetera.

This is one of those books that if I tried to write about everything in it, I'd be here all day.

And besides, what is the point of me spoiling everything?  You'd be much better off picking up the book and reading it yourself.  So I'll just end things here.

Video Review

Video Review HERE and embedded below

Part 2 HERE

Link of the Day

Noam Chomsky - Moral Depravity Defines US Politics

Coming Up for Air by George Orwell: Book Review (Complete)