Coming Up for Air by George Orwell (EPUB)

Description

An insurance salesman desperately tries to recapture his youth in this “charming” comic novel by the iconic British author (The New York Times). George Bowling is having a crisis. Not a loud, unsightly one, but a small, desperate one. His days are occupied by an unfulfilling insurance job; his nights spent worrying about his mortgage, marriage, expanding waistline, and what seems to be a certain prospect of World War II looming on the horizon. So when George unexpectedly hits it big on a lucky horse, he spends the windfall on the only thing he ever knew to make him happy: his childhood. George travels back to his boyhood home of Lower Binfield, swimming in vivid memories of worry-free bliss, sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of a pre-war world. But while the idyllic village in George’s head may not have seen battle, the reality may be more sobering than he is prepared to deal with. Penned with Orwell’s trademark insight and passion, Coming Up for Air is an elegiac look at memory and desire at a desperate moment in England’s history.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐George Orwell wrote Coming Up For Air (1939) while recuperating from a wound from the Spanish Civil War in Marrakesh, Morocco. It is the story of a middle aged insurance salesman, George Bowling, who discovers the foolishness of trying to recapture the past when he decides to sneak away for a visit to his old home town Lower Binfield. Orwell spends a long section where Bowling recounts his youth in a nostalgic fashion, before he actually undertakes the trip. This section allows Orwell to make observations about British society in a sweeping manner, as Bowling is set up as a sort of everyman-thus the basic experience of the average Englishman. It allows Orwell to satirize certain aspects of British society with Bowling and his wife, Hilda. Bowling is disappointed to find the town completely transformed, finding little that he remembers and no one even recognizes him. Furthermore, the town has become a factory town making munitions for the war as well as a training camp for British pilots. One of whom accidentally drops a bomb on the city during a training mission. This causes him to end his vacation early and return home to scorn of his beleaguered wife and ungrateful children. Bowling is conscious of the prospects of the oncoming war, but does nothing to prepare or prevent this from happening, in reality there is very little he could do to prevent it, but it reflect s a sort of passivity to life that he has achieved by submitting to the expectations and routines of his ordinary life that is very close to soul crushing. It is easy to see how this novel follows two others that also satirize society (A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying), while giving no indication that his two greatest novels (Animal Farm and 1984), which were stylistically so different, would soon follow.

⭐Coming Up For Air is narrated by the 45-year-old British character George ‘Fatty’ Bowling, pessimistic about life and the impending Second World War. George is an insurance salesman, living in an ordinary suburb in England with 39-year-old wife Hilda and two children. He takes a day off work to visit his dentist to get a new set of false teeth. He wins some money, but never tells Hilda. In a nostalgic mood, he decides to revisit his childhood town. He just wants peace and quiet – a week without Hilda and the children.From Bowling’s memories, readers learn of his youth, the First World War, meeting Hilda, and the influences in his life as he grew into a man. About Hilda he says, ‘Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop.’ She lacked the joy in life. It is a pessimistic view of progress, rapid change, and the feeling that you can never re-create the past: ‘What’s the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don’t exist. Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air.’Coming Up For Air was described by George Orwell biographer, Thomas E. Ricks, as ‘close to unreadable.’ That is a bit harsh. Nevertheless, it is not Orwell’s greatest work, by a wide margin. It is barely passable, but the last chapter is interesting.

⭐People describe this as a satirical novel. It is not—satire requires a fair amount of authorial distance from the subject being satirized. This has little or none of that distance. At best, and for many, many pages, it is a rather sweet remembrance of how things were before WW I. The latter part, predictably, demonstrates how that world has disappeared, so the book turns sour and cruel. There is some prophetic (fatalistically passive) writing about the coming of totalitarianism and war (WW II), so that dark clouds appear and some resonance results. It’s not a bad book, but certainly not a keeper.

⭐I think pretty much everything Orwell wrote is worth reading, but in terms of his ouevre, this one is probably just in the middle of the pack at best. It shows off a lot of his limitations as a novelist – the first person narrator’s voice is often indistinguishable from Orwell’s own, and often mouths ideas and observations about British life, culture and society that will be familiar to readers of Orwell’s non-fiction essays and journalism. To make the character sound less like George Orwell, one of the leading intellectuals of the era, and more like the lower middle class insurance agent he is supposed to be, Orwell sometimes resorts to fairly unconvincing Bertie Wooster-esque slang. And for all the shortcomings of the first-person narrator, the other characters are even more two-dimensional (or one-dimensional). His depictions of women here are particularly thin and sour (they all seem to be hags, nags, sluts, or some combination thereof). Yet Orwell’s sharp and wide-ranging intellect kept me reading, and I enjoyed his keen observations on British society and class structure in the 1930’s, the minutiae of that era’s now all but forgotten popular culture, and his heartfelt and non-romanticized depiction of the pleasures of a pastoral boyhood. Also interesting are his foreshadowings of militarism, totalitarianism, and nationalism that infuse the work with almost apocalyptic gloom and show Orwell already well on the way to writing 1984. An additional comment I must make is that this is an appallingly sloppy Kindle edition of the book by Harcourt Publishers that is riddled with typographical errors, I would guess as the result of some kind of electronic scanning sans proof reading. For example, the word “the” frequently appears as “die.” Harcourt (and the Orwell estate) should be embarrassed.

⭐This is one of Orwell’s best unsung 1930’s based novels, full of insight, truth and subtle humour. Written in his ‘conversational style’ with never a wasted word. Very readable, as a relatively slim volume the only possible downside is you might wish it was longer?

⭐Although a little slow to get going, Coming up for Air is worth perservering with. It’s a book in which very little actually happens, therefore relies heavily on the descriptive text (which is very good), but George Bowling’s cynicism is strangely endearing despite him being quite rough around the edges as a protagonist.It’s an interesting and poignant reflection upon his life and how the world changes around him without him really realising it (as is often the case). It’s a very thought-provoking read at times but has a good dose of dry humour here and there as well.I don’t think it would be to everyone’s taste but for anyone wanting to explore Orwell’s earlier works it’s a worthwhile read.

⭐Fantastic book – Orwell at his best – so poignant, sad, very funny, wry wicked humour that touches the memories and feelings inside everyone – dreams, fears, hopes, love, all wrapped up inside a real world where life takes over and you forget who you really are and who you once wanted to be. I first read this when I was 20 and am re- reading now 30 years on – still wonderful.

⭐Compared to Orwell’s more celebrated works, such as Animal Farm and 1984, Coming Up for Air receives comparatively little attention or critical acclaim. That’s a pity, because this is unquestionably one of his finest works. All the usual Orwellian themes are here – the constraints of social class and the inability to change personal circumstance for the better, the alienation of the individual in an increasingly insensible world, the loss of the ‘old ways’ and a yearning for a return to more compassionate values, physical decay and death mirroring social disintergration. Orwell is like a latter-day Thomas Hardy. Unlike Keep the Aspidistra Flying or 1984, where the protagonist feels strongly autobiographical in every sense, in Coming Up for Air, the story is carried by plump, middle-aged, travelling salesman George Bowling. While his characterization may not be as wholly convincing as Orwell’s more autobiographical characters, his concerns are very much the usual stamping ground. And like 1984, Orwell casts a prescient eye over the near future where democracy is threatened by totalitarianism, this time in the rising threat of Stalin and Hitler and the onset of WWII. Coming Up for Air is less polemical than other Orwell works, and perhaps easier to read for that. The narrative, with the occasional dabs of wry humour – George’s self-deprecation at his growing unattractiveness to the opposite sex, for example, and the slightly comical obsession with carp fishing, mixed with quite profound social comment, is classic Orwell through and through. Orwell is up there with the very finest British writers and the only regrettable fact of Orwell’s career is he spent much of writing journalism, political tracts and essays and left us with comparatively few novels.

⭐This isn’t one of Orwell’s very best works, but it is an enjoyable read, which paints a fascinating picture of the time it was written, just before World War 2. Like every generation the main protagonist George Bowling, laments the passing of the world he grew up in, and dreams of returning to a simpler time. He is haunted by the coming war and sees clearly the destruction which is to come, as well as a vision of dystopian post war future.Nothing much happens in this novel, but I learned a great deal about what life was like in pre war England, and in enjoyed the account of Bowlings struggles with his lot in life

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