Rating: 
Summary: The lighter side of social commentary.
Review: George Bowling is your typical post WWI English middleclass man just trying to get by. But how George Orwell portrays him shows the quiet desperation (for lack of a better term) that Europeans lived under the threat of war. It is an experience that Americans can't quite understand, for all the horror's of war have happened elsewhere, thus making this book a must, especially for the American Orwell enthusiast. It goes without saying that Orwell is among the most powerful writers of this century, but his prose also shines around his social commentary. While reminiscing about his 'glorious' and long gone fishing days, when he catches the fish that his older brother and friends couldn't, he recalls that in fish stories, the fish usually gets bigger and bigger the more it's told, but this one got smaller and smaller, that when you finished hearing about it one would think it was a minnow. Recommended reading in this same vein: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Compelling, yet exhaustive portrayal of the hypocrisy that can appear when trying to make a statement) and Clergyman's Daughter (A female take on the British lower middleclass quandry). Philippe Seabra New York city
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Summary: Before 1984 - and even better than it.
Review: Imagine Winston Smith in 1938. 1984 is a long way off yet. But he can see it coming, can taste it in the putrid plastic sausages and flavourless, fetid factory beer. The people with the jackboots - in Germany, in Russia, in England, everywhere - will soon have their hammers out, smashing faces, smashing ideas, smashing a way of life. But it's not Winston Smith, it's George Bowling. And before the world comes crashing down around his ears, he tries to find back that part of his life when it was always summer, when there wasn't a care in the world, when there was just bright hope, and fishing, and endless lazy days. Of course, it wasn't there anymore. The men with the jackboots and hammers had been preceded by the men with bulldozers and pre-packaged, pre-digested pork pies. And maybe that world had never existed in the first place. But the journey we take with George Bowlings, back and forth between his childhood and the 1984 that waits round the corner, between his suburban family prison and his childhood home, is perhaps the most involving, unsettling and mesmerising Orwell has ever taken us on. I love Animal Farm and 1984. Coming Up For Air is better.
Rating: 
Summary: Prescient musings as the world comes apart
Review: It's a mark of great skill when an author - like George Orwell, as you may have guessed - can fit so much meaning into a story about so very little. Such is the case with Coming Up For Air. On the surface, there's not much here. In fact more than half of the book is taken up by a portly middle-aged insurance worker's reminiscences about his childhood. And it wasn't any sort of exciting childhood either, full of glory or high hopes or wretched poverty or any of the things that make life colorful for better or worse. It was a British, turn of the Century, solid lower middle class provincial childhood in a town somewhere. The narrator does this essentially on the eve of the Second World War as he goes through perhaps some sort of mid-life crisis, though that term is never used. Basically, the story can be summed up as a man trying to figure out what his life means and where it's going.
In that sense, Coming Up For Air probably has the least actual plot of any Orwell novel. But in his endless musings the reader becomes this man (George Bowling is his name, but since it's a first person narrative, it's hard to attach a name tag to the man even as we experience the world through his eyes). Orwell is, as far as the mechanics of writing goes, well into maturity here.
But beyond this sense of realism in musings and reminiscences, Orwell hits on a few themes. The more dominant one is, I suppose, the idea that you can never go home again. After extensively guiding us through his childhood, our hero decides the thing for him to do is to visit his childhood hometown, the place he hasn't been in twenty-five or so years. Naturally, everything has changed. Absolutely everything. Not for the better, or necessarily for the worse, but changed nonetheless. There is, written on top of this, a vague plot about how he's trying to keep the trip from his shrewish wife, lest she think he's cheating on her, but that is strictly secondary. Since so much of the tale is bound up in our narrator's emotional state and thoughts, there's little point in relating them here. Suffice it to say that he goes home with a clearer idea of who he is.
The other point, dwelt upon at some length, is his (and really Orwell's) thoughts on the coming war. The book was written and published just before World War Two, in 1938. If an author had written something like this in 1948, I would be tempted to knock off points for suggesting that someone could have correctly judged the scale of the coming conflict in such a way. But perhaps I would be wrong, because here is evidence that people really were expecting something big to come. This is not to say that Orwell correctly foresaw particular chronologies. He did, in fact, seem to think that Britain and the western world would have to become barbaric to defeat barbarism (hints of 1984). In this he turned out to be wrong. But as a reader born long after the conflict ended, I was amazed that something written beforehand could capture what I think of as the mood of hindsight, but in foresight. I suppose this is why Orwell is so respected as a writer and thinker.
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Summary: Orwell's best novel
Review: It's a shame that George Orwell's two best-known novels, "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty Four" are neither one his best novel. The peak of Orwell's fiction is this almost forgotten novel, "Coming Up for Air." Set in the last few years before a World War II that was obviously looming on the horizon, this elegant book memorably chronicles the life of George Bowling and his attempt to escape domesticity and the horrors to come for a few days by visiting his old home town. Every time I reread "Coming Up for Air," I wonder what Orwell might have achieved if he had lived longer and had not been as ill as he was in the ten years that remained to him. If all you've read of Orwell is his two "famous" novels, you owe it to yourself to read this.
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Summary: Orwell's best novel
Review: It's a shame that George Orwell's two best-known novels, "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty Four" are neither one his best novel. The peak of Orwell's fiction is this almost forgotten novel, "Coming Up for Air." Set in the last few years before a World War II that was obviously looming on the horizon, this elegant book memorably chronicles the life of George Bowling and his attempt to escape domesticity and the horrors to come for a few days by visiting his old home town. Every time I reread "Coming Up for Air," I wonder what Orwell might have achieved if he had lived longer and had not been as ill as he was in the ten years that remained to him. If all you've read of Orwell is his two "famous" novels, you owe it to yourself to read this.
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Summary: "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English Way"
Review: Orwell describes the "modern" England of three generations ago, yet his strikes a resonant chord within the heart of America's post-modern generation. It is remarkably easy to identify with the protagonist, George Bowling, who is a nihilist in the midst of apocalyptic fervor. His humorous take on childhood, love and vocation will remain in your memory for quite some time. For anyone who senses a distinct detachment from everyone else.
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Summary: The Ultimate Fraud?
Review: Orwell may be perpetuating the ultimate fraud here. His gift as a reporter may just be the talent he needed to...pawn off his own life as fiction.This fabulous novel documents the mid-life crisis of an aging and bloated insurance salesman who vaguely remembers a time when people weren't scared of war and believed that most of life's more visible elements would endure without end. This isn't a comming of age story, its more of a passing of an age story. The miracle here is the incredible emotion the reader feels as "Tubby" recalls his youth and the passing of his parents...events he barely aknowledged as they happened...and while they don't quite haunt him now, he wonders how he lost them. Set in pre-war (WWII) England, the spectre of Hitler and Stalin always loom large in the background as our hero decides to go after the fishing hole he never got back to 20 years ago. It probably doesn't matter whether or not the fishing hole is still there, only that we realized that it needed to be found again. Like all Orwell, as touching and emotional as this effort is, it is never dire or heavy. This is a quick and rewarding read, and, I am guessing, more autobiographical than the author would have us believe. It is a shame that Orwell is known these days only for the monumental works high-school students are forced to read. As unlikely as it seems, the man who penned the brutal "1984" has also written a wonderful collection of light reflections that should not go unread. Consider "Burmese Days" and "A Clergy Man's Daughter" as well.
Rating:
Summary: The Ultimate Fraud?
Review: Orwell may be perpetuating the ultimate fraud here. His gift as a reporter may just be the talent he needed to...pawn off his own life as fiction. This fabulous novel documents the mid-life crisis of an aging and bloated insurance salesman who vaguely remembers a time when people weren't scared of war and believed that most of life's more visible elements would endure without end. This isn't a comming of age story, its more of a passing of an age story. The miracle here is the incredible emotion the reader feels as "Tubby" recalls his youth and the passing of his parents...events he barely aknowledged as they happened...and while they don't quite haunt him now, he wonders how he lost them. Set in pre-war (WWII) England, the spectre of Hitler and Stalin always loom large in the background as our hero decides to go after the fishing hole he never got back to 20 years ago. It probably doesn't matter whether or not the fishing hole is still there, only that we realized that it needed to be found again. Like all Orwell, as touching and emotional as this effort is, it is never dire or heavy. This is a quick and rewarding read, and, I am guessing, more autobiographical than the author would have us believe. It is a shame that Orwell is known these days only for the monumental works high-school students are forced to read. As unlikely as it seems, the man who penned the brutal "1984" has also written a wonderful collection of light reflections that should not go unread. Consider "Burmese Days" and "A Clergy Man's Daughter" as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring
Review: There is a reason 1984 and Animal Farm are the famous ones this book is dull. It is the story of a man who first recounts his life before the war and then decides to take some sick leave and visit his old home. Most of the book seems to be devoted to fishing. It is sufficiently cynical but sometimes a plot is nice. Orwell should never use the Hemingway's style. Its not him. I looked all through the book and couldn't find a plot.
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Summary: My favourite work by my favourite writer
Review: This is one of the only books for which it can be said that it changed my outlook of the world around me. While it is very similar to 1984, the message here is that technological advancement cannot make a man happy in his life. The motor cars, airplanes, fake beer, steel counters and housing projects surrounding the main character, George Bowling, drive him to the point of insanity. And when he tries to escape these modern horrors he finally realises there is no escape possible. Many people can easily relate to this situation and thats what makes it so moving. And toss in the talents of one of the greatest writers to ever walk the earth, with his sense of black humor and youve got one of the best pieces of 20th century literature on your hands. this novel is certainly a must-read.
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