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: 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: 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: 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.
Rating:
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.
Rating:
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.
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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