Coming Up For Air by George Orwell

[Janet]

 

Coming Up For Air by George Orwell

 

The

[Kate]

I'm ashamed to say that this is an Orwell book I haven't heard of, but that is a great review Janet and I'm thinking I might add it to my reservation list at the library

[Janet]

It's definitely one of his lesser-known ones. It is almost bleak (I'm sure there's a more Orwellian word for it) but I love the way he talks about - and sees - people.

[Kylie]

Great review Janet! I'm hoping to read all of Orwell's works eventually, but first I want to re-read 1984.

[Janet]

I'd like to read them all too. So far his non-fiction Down and Out in Paris and London has been my favourite.

[Larry]

I really liked Coming Up for Air. I read it about six years ago and still remember it well.

 

As you stated Janet, it isn't a happy novel. I personally prefer pessimistic works to optimistic or overtly propagandist novels. However, I'm not sure I would've relished reading this had I been alive at the time it was published. Orwell wrote it in Morocco during the winter of 1938-39, while recuperating from a serious illness. Meanwhile, war clouds gathered in Europe and the threat of impending war hangs over the novel. Indeed, it was published in June 1939, three months before the outbreak of hostilities.

 

By and large, I would say that Orwell was a more accomplished journalist and essayist than a novelist. However, Coming Up for Air holds up very well. Better than his earlier novels, A Clergyman's Daughter, Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and (in spite it's own gloominess) easier to take than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Animal Farm is probably his most accessible work but is a novella rather than a novel and was intended as a polemic rather than a straightforward piece of satire.

[Janet]

Orwell wrote it in Morocco during the winter of 1938-39, while recuperating from a serious illness. Meanwhile, war clouds gathered in Europe and the threat of impending war hangs over the novel. Indeed, it was published in June 1939, three months before the outbreak of hostilities.

Yes, it's interesting that George (Bowling) predicts on at least one occasion (and possibly twice) in the novel that war will be upon them by 1942 - I wonder if that's what Orwell believed too when he was writing?

[Larry]

If he did, it was unusually optimistic by Orwell's standards.

 

By his own admission, Nineteen Eighty-Four was as gloomy as it was largely because of the illness he was suffering at the time.