A review by ed_moore
Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

‘Coming Up For Air’ is a story of the deceptions of nostalgia and follows a down-and-out, red faced and overweight George Bowling who us unhappy in his marriage and his life in the building estate houses of London. In the wake of the Second World War he reminisces on his childhood in Lower Binfield in the Oxfordshire countryside, his life in the greengrocers shop and days alone fishing, and then decides to return to find a village struck by industrialisation and development, everyone he once knew having died or left, and a loss of the childhood he looked back so fondly upon. 

 

Orwell really didn’t play to his strengths here. Bowling was an unlikeable protagonist who had an awful superiority complex and belief all would stay the same for him, where frankly he had lived a very mundane life which in recounting such resulted in quite a mundane story. Orwell’s criticisms of capitalism and the building societies, in addition to his ridicule of fascism as the periodical context of the rise of Hitler and the perception of such from the everyday Londoner was explored, was in Orwellian fashion absolutely brilliant and written so well, but such made up very little of the story. The main plot elements were boring and also Orwell did himself no favours in his reputation with female characters. Bowling’s wife Hilda is entirely dismissed and antagonised just for wanting her husband to stop sleeping around, and depictions of other women in their brief appearances are extremely derogatory. The descriptions of the tide of war were also interesting, but hindsight is a blessing in that the “predictions” made and how obvious the coming state of the country was perhaps wouldn’t have been as obvious to the people of London in 1939 as Orwell made it out to be with hindsight on his side when writing. 

 

Where Orwell was good in his writing, anti-capitalism and anti-fascism, in addition to a wider literary appreciation discussing the role of books in ‘Coming up for Air’, he was brilliant. However, where Orwell faltered in both the engagement of the plot and his presentation of character in this case, he was far from commendable. This one of his works really disappointed me.