Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7382 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there. At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame. George Orwell died in London in January 1950.

Customer Reviews

An exceptionally realistic fictional biography...
...of a life that Orwell as an individual was never really a part of, making it all the more a masterpiece.
This is definately a must-read piece literature for the modern youth who, without the understanding of the past will never learn to overcome the barriers that were faced in the described periods [~1900-1938] (e.g. ignorance to the fallacy of war being fun and beneficial, and the inability of youths to understand that overweight people or those over 30 are actually human too etc., which can be overcome simply by reading Bowling's chillingly sad contrasts of being young and old, thin and fat etc.). The novel also really encapsulates the early-20th century transitions that occured socially and geographically in semi-rural England; the whole rags-and-rich-sole to riches-and-no-sole industrialisational process which seemingly struck, as well as themes which have nothing to do with the setting in particular - aging, social acceptance and the dead-endness of 'modern' married/white collar life in particular. Mature readers will surely be able to relate to Bowling in his disgruntled approach to change, as the change is from something that he loves to something that he hates, but as he describes - the new people of Lower Binfield have no concept of pre-ww1 Lower Binfield and so don't really care about what he has to say, and so he is resigned to accept that he is merely a relic of the past, a 'ghost', as Orwell puts it.
Apart from this exquisite narrative of the transitions in the period, Orwell is also extremely witty with his writing, whilst still being very readable for any lay-man. He uses the title 'Coming Up For Air' to describe Bowling's situation; currently being underwater and suffocating in his current lifestyle and feeling an inner desire to breathe again by 'coming up for air' (by going back to his youth, where he was free to breathe). In the same way he compares the situation to being under a great heap of garbage and trying to come up for air.

Undeservedly neglected - one of Orwell's best
I doubt if 1% or the people who've read "1984" or "Animal Farm" have read this novel. This is sad indeed, as it's a fine novel in its own right, not just a book to be read for Orwell completists. The narrator, George Bowling, is an ordinary, pretty decent middle England sort of character, trapped in a lifeless marriage and nostalgic for days gone past. To try to recapture better days, he revisits his home town - but things don't go as planned... The plot of the book is sparse, with much of the text being George's recollections of old times and people, and his observations about British (or should that be English) life in the 1930s. Orwell's powers of observation were never sharper than here, and in the narrator, he created one of his few memorable fictional characters. And there's humour too. It is interesting to compare this novel with some popular books of the late 50s and early 60s such as "Hurry on Down" and "Saturday Night & Sunday Morning". I found myself wondering whether Orwell was the spiritual father of the Angry Young Men.

The future is all rotten
Orwell captures the spirit of a generation here. His central character sees salvation in returning to the happy environment of his youth, and with it some escape from a wretched existence. Yet, he finds nothing but change and is disillusioned by the experience. It's a novel that explores the theme of the modern world and a changing society. We often feel that in the present fast-moving world we have a monopoly on complaining about the world of the future. Orwell demonstrate's that unease about changing towns, cities, and nations has existed for as long as people have lived in communities.