Coming Up for Air

Rating:
Summary: Overlooked Orwell
Review: "Coming Up For Air" was the first novel of Orwell's mature period. It came out after "Homage to Catalonia" (his memoir of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War and the disintegration of the Republican Left in Barcelona). In this novel, Orwell has finally abandoned the Joyce-inspired experimentation and overtly "literary" feel of his earlier fiction and has begun to find his voice. "Coming Up For Air" manages, in a way that I think only Orwell could do, to be simultaneously progressive and reactionary.

The protagonist, a petit-bourgeois salesman named George Bowling, haunted by visions of the coming war in Europe, laments the loss of the England he grew up in before the First World War. "Is it gone for ever? I'm not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong to it. So do you." Bowling belongs to the Left Book Club and seems to have a deeper awareness of the world than most of his peers, but he prides himself on being a simple sort of man and looks down on everyone, Left and Right, with a sort of genial disdain. Some of his observations are quite amusing, albeit quite cynical: "Nothing matters except slickness and shininess and streamlining. Everything's streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler's keeping for you... I felt in a kind of prophetic mood, the mood in which you foresee the end of the world and get a certain kick out of it." George comes into an unexpected sum of money betting on the horses and decides to use it to revisit his childhood village. Needless to say, nothing of his boyhood remains, his fishing hole has been converted to a trash dump, his first love has become a fat, dumpy hausfrau, and he goes back home to his wife after an RAF bomber accidentally releases live ordnance over the town.

"The bad times are coming, and the stream-lined men are coming too," warns Bowling. "If there's anything you care a curse about, you better say good-bye to it now." Orwell would go on to describe the bad times in his major novels. This one's well worth a look, both for the way we see Orwell learning to deal with the materials that made up the bulk of his major work, and as a not-badly-written entertainment as well.

Rating:
Summary: Overlooked Orwell
Review: "Coming Up For Air" was the first novel of Orwell's mature period. It came out after "Homage to Catalonia" (his memoir of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War and the disintegration of the Republican Left in Barcelona). In this novel, Orwell has finally abandoned the Joyce-inspired experimentation and overtly "literary" feel of his earlier fiction and has begun to find his voice. "Coming Up For Air" manages, in a way that I think only Orwell could do, to be simultaneously progressive and reactionary.

The protagonist, a petit-bourgeois salesman named George Bowling, haunted by visions of the coming war in Europe, laments the loss of the England he grew up in before the First World War. "Is it gone for ever? I'm not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong to it. So do you." Bowling belongs to the Left Book Club and seems to have a deeper awareness of the world than most of his peers, but he prides himself on being a simple sort of man and looks down on everyone, Left and Right, with a sort of genial disdain. Some of his observations are quite amusing, albeit quite cynical: "Nothing matters except slickness and shininess and streamlining. Everything's streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler's keeping for you... I felt in a kind of prophetic mood, the mood in which you foresee the end of the world and get a certain kick out of it." George comes into an unexpected sum of money betting on the horses and decides to use it to revisit his childhood village. Needless to say, nothing of his boyhood remains, his fishing hole has been converted to a trash dump, his first love has become a fat, dumpy hausfrau, and he goes back home to his wife after an RAF bomber accidentally releases live ordnance over the town.

"The bad times are coming, and the stream-lined men are coming too," warns Bowling. "If there's anything you care a curse about, you better say good-bye to it now." Orwell would go on to describe the bad times in his major novels. This one's well worth a look, both for the way we see Orwell learning to deal with the materials that made up the bulk of his major work, and as a not-badly-written entertainment as well.

Rating:
Summary: A frighten book about the inherent soulless nature of societ
Review:

I have read this book twice now, and I am sure that I will again. Whenever I feel that my life is going nowhere, or that I have important career or person decisions to take I think back to the general feeling of the book. Never was a title more accurate, for Orwell frighteningly conveys the stifling nature of middle class life. George Bowling spends all his time answering to his family, his wife, his boss and convention. Whenever I am faced with an important decision I remember Bowling's reflection on how everything worth while in his life he had been done by the age of 6 and try to pick the route that will ensure that I can never make such a statement

Running alongside this theme of social and personal claustrophobia is a few for the general future of society. Coming up for Air is where we see that beginnings of Orwell's uniquely depressing view of the future invasion of the State on the thoughts and actions of society.

It is a moot point which of these themes is more frightening, but the former is an unfortunate reality

Rating:
Summary: Orwell at his best.
Review: Away from philosophical dystopias to which he was intelectually unprepared, Orwell at his best, telling a desillusioned tale about the desperate British middle class of the pre-WWII years.

Rating:
Summary: Mediocrity Prevails
Review: Brilliant novel exposing all the little ironies, hypocrisies and little banalities of Edwardian and post-World War One England. Orwell's mastery of the language combined with his unusual perceptiveness of the ordinary person's ordinary life makes this a swell read. Drop your textbook histories of England from 1900-1939 and read this book. It tells you more about England of that time period than any pulp filled with stats and dates. And it's so much more entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: may be his best, certainly the most underrated
Review: Coming Up for Air begins with one of the most disarming and quintessentially English sentences in all
of literature :

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

The speaker is George "Fatty" Bowling, an insurance salesman, with a wife he does not love and two
children he finds annoying. The idea is to take the seventeen pounds he almost accidentally won on a
horse race and to go visit Lower Binfield, the village in which he grew up and which holds so many
happy memories of youth and of a simpler England. The story is set in 1938, the War approaching,
and George's thoughts continually drift back to the time before WWI :

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.

And so he decides to try and recapture that scene of his youth :

[I]t wasn't that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to get my nerve back before the bad
times begin. Because does anyone who isn't dead from the neck up doubt that there's a bad time
coming ? We don't even know what it'll be, and yet we know it's coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps
a slump--no knowing, except that it'll be something bad. Wherever we're going, we're going
downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool--no knowing. And you can't face that kind of thing
unless you've got the right feeling inside you. There's something that's gone out of us in these
twenty years since the war. It's a kind of vital juice that we've squirted away until there's nothing
left. All this rushing to and fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses,
bombs, radios, telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits, empty places in our bones where the
marrow out to be.

I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. The very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had
done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air!

But of course the village and the life he recalls are long since gone.

Orwell writes beautifully about the world that Lower Binfield represented and with great disdain of
the England that George currently occupies. But his most devastating intuitions concern the world to
come. In the book's signal moment, George has gone to a Left Book Club meeting with his wife to
hear an anti-Fascist speaker. As the speaker drones on :

I'd stopped listening to the actual lecture. But there are more ways than one of listening. I shut my
eyes for a moment. The effect was curious. I seemed to see the fellow much better when I could
only hear his voice.

It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. It's a ghastly thing,
really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same
thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let's all get together and have a good hate. Over and
over. It gives you the feeling that something has got inside your skull and is hammering down on
your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside
his skull. It was a peculiar sensation. For about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I
was him. At any rate, I felt what he was feeling.

I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it wasn't at all the kind of vision that can be talked about.
What he's saying is merely that Hitler's after us and we must all get together and have a good hate.
Doesn't go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what he's seeing is something quite
different. It's a picture of himself smashing people's faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of
course. I know that's what he was seeing. It was what I saw myself for the second or two that I
was inside him. Smash! Right in the middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a
face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That's
what's in his mind, waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it's
all O.K. because the smashed faces belong to Fascists. You could hear all that in the tone of his
voice.

There's much here that foreshadows 1984, from the idea of an organized event called a "hate" to the
image of the future consisting of smashing peoples' faces--recall the chilling line : "If you want a
picture of the future imagine a boot stomping on a human face--forever."

The term "Orwellian" is thrown about fairly freely, to the point where it may have no fixed meaning.
If anything, folks probably consider it to refer to the concept of "Big Brother" or some authoritarian
force spying on us or oppressing us. But the truly Orwellian moments occur not so much when these
external forces are brought to bear, but when we become their accomplices : when Winston Smith
denounces Julia, when the other animals help enforce the pigs rules at Animal Farm, and here, when
the theoretically benign anti-Fascist becomes a figure of terror himself. This is Orwell's great insight,
hard earned in the crucible of the Spanish Civil War, that in the modern political world, where mere
political differences yield to hatred of the other, even those with the best intentions become monstrous,
their hatreds warping them until they are capable of horrific acts.

Without taking anything away from Animal Farm or 1984, Coming Up for Air is perhaps an even
more impressive novel. First of all, it is a realist fiction--with all the restrictions which that
entails--not a fantasy. Second, where the other two books have the advantage of hindsight, Coming Up
for Air is predictive. It correctly forecasts a world where even the Allies, the putative "good guys,"
would find themselves shipping citizens to concentration camps, fire bombing cities and finally
resorting to nuclear weapons. Smash! Smash! Smash! It is a great book.

GRADE : A+

Rating:
Summary: may be his best, certainly the most underrated
Review: Coming Up for Air begins with one of the most disarming and quintessentially English sentences in all
of literature :

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

The speaker is George "Fatty" Bowling, an insurance salesman, with a wife he does not love and two
children he finds annoying. The idea is to take the seventeen pounds he almost accidentally won on a
horse race and to go visit Lower Binfield, the village in which he grew up and which holds so many
happy memories of youth and of a simpler England. The story is set in 1938, the War approaching,
and George's thoughts continually drift back to the time before WWI :

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.

And so he decides to try and recapture that scene of his youth :

[I]t wasn't that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to get my nerve back before the bad
times begin. Because does anyone who isn't dead from the neck up doubt that there's a bad time
coming ? We don't even know what it'll be, and yet we know it's coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps
a slump--no knowing, except that it'll be something bad. Wherever we're going, we're going
downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool--no knowing. And you can't face that kind of thing
unless you've got the right feeling inside you. There's something that's gone out of us in these
twenty years since the war. It's a kind of vital juice that we've squirted away until there's nothing
left. All this rushing to and fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses,
bombs, radios, telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits, empty places in our bones where the
marrow out to be.

I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. The very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had
done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air!

But of course the village and the life he recalls are long since gone.

Orwell writes beautifully about the world that Lower Binfield represented and with great disdain of
the England that George currently occupies. But his most devastating intuitions concern the world to
come. In the book's signal moment, George has gone to a Left Book Club meeting with his wife to
hear an anti-Fascist speaker. As the speaker drones on :

I'd stopped listening to the actual lecture. But there are more ways than one of listening. I shut my
eyes for a moment. The effect was curious. I seemed to see the fellow much better when I could
only hear his voice.

It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. It's a ghastly thing,
really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same
thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let's all get together and have a good hate. Over and
over. It gives you the feeling that something has got inside your skull and is hammering down on
your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside
his skull. It was a peculiar sensation. For about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I
was him. At any rate, I felt what he was feeling.

I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it wasn't at all the kind of vision that can be talked about.
What he's saying is merely that Hitler's after us and we must all get together and have a good hate.
Doesn't go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what he's seeing is something quite
different. It's a picture of himself smashing people's faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of
course. I know that's what he was seeing. It was what I saw myself for the second or two that I
was inside him. Smash! Right in the middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a
face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That's
what's in his mind, waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it's
all O.K. because the smashed faces belong to Fascists. You could hear all that in the tone of his
voice.

There's much here that foreshadows 1984, from the idea of an organized event called a "hate" to the
image of the future consisting of smashing peoples' faces--recall the chilling line : "If you want a
picture of the future imagine a boot stomping on a human face--forever."

The term "Orwellian" is thrown about fairly freely, to the point where it may have no fixed meaning.
If anything, folks probably consider it to refer to the concept of "Big Brother" or some authoritarian
force spying on us or oppressing us. But the truly Orwellian moments occur not so much when these
external forces are brought to bear, but when we become their accomplices : when Winston Smith
denounces Julia, when the other animals help enforce the pigs rules at Animal Farm, and here, when
the theoretically benign anti-Fascist becomes a figure of terror himself. This is Orwell's great insight,
hard earned in the crucible of the Spanish Civil War, that in the modern political world, where mere
political differences yield to hatred of the other, even those with the best intentions become monstrous,
their hatreds warping them until they are capable of horrific acts.

Without taking anything away from Animal Farm or 1984, Coming Up for Air is perhaps an even
more impressive novel. First of all, it is a realist fiction--with all the restrictions which that
entails--not a fantasy. Second, where the other two books have the advantage of hindsight, Coming Up
for Air is predictive. It correctly forecasts a world where even the Allies, the putative "good guys,"
would find themselves shipping citizens to concentration camps, fire bombing cities and finally
resorting to nuclear weapons. Smash! Smash! Smash! It is a great book.

GRADE : A+

Rating:
Summary: Orwell's ordinary man
Review: Coming up for Air is a refreshing look at life through the eyes of an ordinary, overweight middle-aged man. I wanted to comment on how the book made me think about how we should cherish those little things in life that we take for granted, it is an old message but this book made me realize it again. The plot is plain, no suspense or excitement whatsover, what the book does however is take you back to your own childhood and helps you think about those things that were important to you then.

There are many other issues that the book touches on, the escapism of some, the inevitability of change, the prison that is marriage etc...

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read something light and sentimental.

Rating:
Summary: Just shy of being great!
Review: Coming Up for Air was a really good book, but the first part made me think that this was just a stepping stone book for Orwell. One theme of the story was rather mediocre; unlike 1984 where Orwell had a make-believe world and told how the world had gone wrong, this book was set in the time period inbetween the wars in England, and Orwell told what was going to happen. In that way, it was rather outdated. But the book then took a shift, and it began to take a deeper meaning. These themes held the book together and made a really good book that is more than worthy of anyone's time to read it. But, nevertheless, the fact that the book seemed to foretell World War II, and everyone should be prepared made it rather old. But I do not know when Orwell wrote this book. He could have intended for it to be a warning, or he could have written in this way not realizing that the book was doomed to fail the test of time. Still, this book is really good!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: George Bowling can see the future (i.e. ww II) and it scares him. He worries about the "streamlined men" who will revolutionize the world after the war. All George wants is a little peace before the world changes forever. Can he get it ? Go and read !