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squid_vicious 's review for:
Coming Up for Air
by George Orwell
I didn’t really know what to expect when I picked up “Coming Up for Air”. I knew it wouldn’t be the scathing allegory that is “Animal Farm” and I knew it wouldn’t be the terrifying dystopia of “1984”. I wasn’t sure what Orwell would do with the story of a middle-aged man who is frustrated with his empty suburban life, as the world moves inexorably towards World War II. I think I had forgotten how beautiful his prose was, and how he had this uncanny inability to capture feelings and thoughts and put them on the page. The depths of nostalgia, regrets and longing the unpleasant and vulgar George Bowling goes through in those 250 pages makes you forget his paunch, his receding hairline and his insufferable wife. Under the skin, we are not that different, no matter what we might think.
George lives in a mediocre little house in one of the London suburbs. His marriage is unhappy, his children are insufferable (unless they are sleeping), his job is a dead-end and he feels like his body is starting to fall apart. In other words, he’s got a major case of mid-life crisis. As he wanders around the City, he begins to dwell on his childhood in a tiny market town, the simple joys of fishing and reading that he never managed to recapture past the age of sixteen, and frets about the fact that very soon, the world will be at war and that all he knows will vanish.
The world changes constantly, as do people. But some events are like a shift in tectonic plates: the change is sudden and abrupt. The Great War changed something fundamental in the English lifestyle and George is just the right age to have watched the old world die and the new one take over. As such, he is disillusioned and feels disconnected from the world in which he lives because it is not the one he grew up in. He feels like an expat in his own country.
At some point, he reflects that his father would have thought of his cheap house as a great luxury, what with the bathroom indoors and everything! Life in the Edwardian and Victorian era was often short, brutal, dirty – and people had a very different benchmark with which to judge whether or not they had a good life. Those standards all went right out of the window when the country towns died and the suburbia began sprawling. Soldiers back from the war did not go back to the family business, they began looking for work in the city and a home not too far from work. And as George sees another war creep up over the horizon, he knows the world is in for another abrupt change, and yearns for a time when things were simple and steady, and fear was not always at the back of his mind. He tries to reconnect with his past, but what he finds is not at all what he remembered...
A bittersweet, sad, funny, gorgeously written novel that made me admire Mr. Orwell even more than I did. In this book, he captures nostalgia and resignation with more finesse and skill than anyone else I have ever read.
George lives in a mediocre little house in one of the London suburbs. His marriage is unhappy, his children are insufferable (unless they are sleeping), his job is a dead-end and he feels like his body is starting to fall apart. In other words, he’s got a major case of mid-life crisis. As he wanders around the City, he begins to dwell on his childhood in a tiny market town, the simple joys of fishing and reading that he never managed to recapture past the age of sixteen, and frets about the fact that very soon, the world will be at war and that all he knows will vanish.
The world changes constantly, as do people. But some events are like a shift in tectonic plates: the change is sudden and abrupt. The Great War changed something fundamental in the English lifestyle and George is just the right age to have watched the old world die and the new one take over. As such, he is disillusioned and feels disconnected from the world in which he lives because it is not the one he grew up in. He feels like an expat in his own country.
At some point, he reflects that his father would have thought of his cheap house as a great luxury, what with the bathroom indoors and everything! Life in the Edwardian and Victorian era was often short, brutal, dirty – and people had a very different benchmark with which to judge whether or not they had a good life. Those standards all went right out of the window when the country towns died and the suburbia began sprawling. Soldiers back from the war did not go back to the family business, they began looking for work in the city and a home not too far from work. And as George sees another war creep up over the horizon, he knows the world is in for another abrupt change, and yearns for a time when things were simple and steady, and fear was not always at the back of his mind. He tries to reconnect with his past, but what he finds is not at all what he remembered...
A bittersweet, sad, funny, gorgeously written novel that made me admire Mr. Orwell even more than I did. In this book, he captures nostalgia and resignation with more finesse and skill than anyone else I have ever read.