This was a strange mixture of a book. The narrator, George Bowling, starts off by describing his life as a 45 year old insurance salesman with a wife and two children. On the day in question, he is going into town from the London suburb he lives in to collect new false teeth. A chance occurrence starts him off reflecting on his life and the changes in society before and after the First World War. I liked the way the book started. Bowling describes his ordinary life matter of factly and there is no romanticisation or sentimentality. It is honest and funny, albeit in a somewhat dark way. He also delivers a good criticism of suburban, lower middle class life; enslaved to a life of drudgery and mortgage payments. After this the book got a bit worse as Bowling embarked on a long, pretty boring recollection of his childhood. He is the son of a small town seed merchant and loves fishing. Somewhat inexplicably, and it is certainly never satisfactorily explained in the book, he finds an amazing hidden fish pond but never gets round to fishing in it despite fishing being almost his entire life. The book improved a bit after this lull and Bowling goes on to talk about his life in the war, finding a job after it and getting married. The section on marriage was especially enjoyable as it shows Orwell’s exceptional command of the British class system. There are a huge number of subtle calibrations in the book: different types of travelling salesmen, the sub-genre of Anglo-Indian families, numerous categories of shopkeepers and so on and so forth. In this sense the book is probably a bit of a British classic! After completing his life story, Bowling cooks up a scheme of going back to the village he grew up in. He keeps this secret from his wife and finances it with winnings from clandestine gambling. He goes back to find everything changed and remains in a funk about how everything in the modern world is terrible and ugly compared to his nostalgia for life before the war. This is one of the obvious themes of the book. The other is that there is going to be another war soon as Hitler menaces continental Europe. Bowling is considerably upset about this even though he reasons that he shouldn’t be as he can’t do anything about it and that it won’t affect him that much. Written in 1938-9, it seems prescient about the impending Second World War although I imagine speculation on this topic would’ve been fairly widespread at the time. I liked the fact that not much happens in the book and it’s not dramatic or histrionic. The domestic scenes at the beginning and end of the book are both good. Much of the material in between is mixed - childhood is boring, the war is a bit better, the process of getting married is amusing because of its obsession with class and the trip back to his childhood town is pretty bad. All told, the book felt like a bit of a pastiche of odds and ends that Orwell has connected by means of the life of George Bowling. The result is ragtag and not at all exceptional. The only unifying themes I could identify were dissatisfaction with the modern world and prophecy about the coming war. Both have their moments where they are powerfully expressed but, ultimately, both are overdone and become tiresome. The theme of the ugliness of the modern world was better handled than the prophecy about war. The latter only really amounts to numerous depressing predictions about its inevitability. Tone of the prose is lower middle class man who has bettered himself and I’m not sure how successful it is. Overall, this is not one of Orwell’s better novels and I would only rank it above ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’ in terms of his fiction. He does a better job of connecting the disparate themes and scenes in ‘Coming Up For Air’ but it still feels like a bit of a dog’s dinner. There are some really good sections and it doesn’t suffer from being overly dramatic but, in the end, it’s not a great book. |
