Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46459 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-25
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Synopsis
Years in insurance and marriage to the joyless Hilda have been no more than death in life to George Bowling. This and fear of another war take his mind back to the peace of his childhood in a small country town. But his return journey to Lower Binfield brings complete disillusionment.

Customer Reviews

a Middle class dude of the 1930s goes back to his old neighboorhood.
a funny story about a mans reminiscences of his home town where he grew up.

England your England
Nobody has ever claimed that this is George Orwell's greatest novel. Nobody except me - it is. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm will always have more intellectual respect, but from an emotional standpoint, Coming Up For Air is in a class of its own. It is possibly Orwell's `softest' novel, as his concerns about poverty and politics feature less here than in any of his other books, fiction or non-fiction. But even today, nearly seventy years after it was written, the themes of Coming Up For Air apply to our ever-changing world more than ever. The England of George Bowling's childhood, a fading memory in 1939, is now gone, lost for ever after a hundred years of `progress'. Read this book and cry for England - its still dying, one day at a time.

Coming up for air- what air?
George Bowling,middle-aged, pot- bellied and unhappily married with two children, goes through a mid-life crisis which takes him back to Lower Binfield where he grew up. He discovers that the place had been modernised beyond recognition;there was no point in returning to his boyhood past and the futility of Coming Up For Air- when there isn't any air!

Although there is little to the story-line,Orwell compensates with a well-written novel with an ability to engage a readers interest through the clarity and wicked humour in his writing.