Orwellian reading

I recently finished George Orwell's Coming Up For Air, which I bought on the street in Syria for about €0.70. Good to get back to some Orwell. He's one of my favourite writers, to the extent that I can say that he has had a formative effect on my thinking. I would recommend anyone to check out some of his essays, such as 'Politics and the English Language', which are available online. I love his simple, clear writing style. He seems to really hold to the belief that you shouldn't use a big word where a smaller word will do, and that sentences should be short. A big problem with a lot of writing - and particularly academic writing, I'd hazard - is that people like to use very complicated sentence structures. Clarity suffers as a result.

Eric Blair aka George McOrwell

Coming Up For Air is the story of 45-year-old George Bowling, a man who is pissed off with his lot. It is set in the run-up to World War II. Bowling has a wife and family and a job that is unexciting, and he goes back to his village of origin to try to capture something about himself. However, the trip is entirely disillusioning and deflating because his village has been swallowed up by the march of the urban.

The book has been referenced as a forerunner to 1984, and I can see the similarity, although the society depicted in Coming Up For Air is less extreme and the story less intense. Politics are to the forefront however, and the novel deals with a newly emerged middle class of sorts in inter-war England, evoking the misery and defeat of the capitulation to wage slavery. This is my take on it, at least. There isn't really much hopeful coming out of the narrative that I can recall. But maybe there's some hope in the protagonist's vague realisation (which is far from epiphany) that the human experience contains the potential for a more meaningful existence. So there is hope but not redemption methinks.

World War II looms large over the plot, and Bowling's memories of his service in World War I colour his pessimism and apathy.


Listening to Charles Mingus Fables of Faubus in my favourite cafe... Beautiful.