Dave's Book Blog: "Coming Up for Air" by George Orwell

A novel full of pre-echoes of 1984.

George Bowling is a very ordinary man. He's fat, married with two kids, living a joyless existence in suburbia, earning just enough to keep his head above water. “I'd been a good husband and father for fifteen years and I was beginning to get fed up with it.” (1.1) A chance word prompts a nostalgic reverie as he remembers his childhood in a rural village in Oxfordshire. He decides to take a holiday and revisit this place. Of course it has changed.

There's very little plot. The only character explored in death is that of the narrator-protagonist. And yet the book kept me interested because of its incisive observations. Orwell was at his best in journalism. Not only did he describe the world around him but he also understood the subtext. Bowling describes the street on which he lives thus: “What is a road like Ellesmere Road? Just a prison with the cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and the wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches.” (1.2) It's a bleak vision. But even bleaker is his predictions of the future. He knows that another war is on the way (he's writing in 1938 and he predicts the next war will start in 1941 so it came even earlier than he thought). But what terrifies him is what will come after the war: “It isn't the war that matters, it's the after-war. The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him ... the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.” (3.1) 1984.

Twice, he mentions the title. The first time he is going back to Lower Binfield to revisit his past and he is full of hope: “The very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air! ... We're all stifling at the bottom of a dustbin, but I'd found the way to the top.” (3.2) The second time is after his dreams have encountered reality: “Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.” (4.5)

On his return to Lower Binfield, he has a “gloomy, Ichabod kind of feeling.” (4.1) Presumably this is a reference to Ichabod Crane, a character in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a short story by Washington Irving, whose more famous character is Rip van Winkle, who went to sleep for twenty years and woke up to a very different world, just like George Bowling.

Trigger warnings: Occasional use of the N-word and stereotypical comments about Jews.

Selected quotes:

“False teeth are a landmark. When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you can kid yourself that you're a Hollywood sheik is definitely at an end.” (1.1)
“Sometimes I've stood over their cots ... and watched them sleeping ... and it's given me that feeling you read about in the Bible when it says your bowels yearn. At such times I feel that I'm just a kind of dried-up seed-pod that doesn't matter twopence and that my sole importance has been to bring these creatures into the world and feed them while they're growing. But that's only at moments. Most of my time my separate existence looks pretty important to me.” (1.1)
“We're all bought, and what's more we're bought with our own money.” (1.2)
“Do you notice how often they have undersized men for these bullying jobs?” (1.2)
“Fear! We swim in it. It's our element. Everyone that isn't scared stiff of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something.” (1.2)
“What's interesting, I think, is that merely because you happen to be a little bit fat, almost anyone, even a total stranger, will take it for granted to give you a nickname that's an insulting comment on your personal appearance.” (1.3)
“The frankfurter ... burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. ... It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of.” (1.4)
“You know the smell churches have, a peculiar, dank, dusty, decaying, sweetish sort of smell. There's a touch of candle-grease in it, and perhaps a whiff of incense and a suspicion of mice ... Predominantly it's that sweet, dusty, musty smell that's like the smell of death and life mixed up together. It's powdered corpses really.” (1.4)
During the Boer war “They were all true-blue Englishmen and swore that Vicky was the best queen ever lived and foreigners were dirt, but at the same time nobody ever thought of paying a tax, not even a dog-licence, if there was any way of dodging it.” (2.1) I love that definition of patriotism!
“In those days the heroine had to look like an egg-timer and now she has to look like a cylinder.” (2.2)
“Gravitt’s backyard smelt like a battlefield. Butchers didn't have refrigerators in those days.” (2.4)
“Killing things - that's about as near to poetry as a boy gets.” (2.4)
“Joe never read ... The sight of print made him feel sick. I've seen him ... read a paragraph or two and then turn away with just the same movement of disgust as a horse when it smells stale hay.” (2.6)
“People then had something that we haven't got now ... they didn't think of the future as something to be terrified of. It isn't that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole worked harder, lived less comfortably, and died more painfully. ... What was it that people had those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren't secure. More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they'd got to die, and I suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn't know was that the order of things could change.” (2.7)
He remembers his time at Eastbourne: “Those beastly icy Downs ... where the wind seems to blow its you from all directions at once.” (2.8)
“People who in a normal way would have gone through life with about as much tendency to think for themselves as a suet pudding were turned into Bolshies just by the war.” (2.8)
“I'm about as likely to end up in the workhouse as to end up in the House of Lords.” (2.9)
“Old Vincent had retired in 1910, and since then he and his wife had shown about as much activity, mental or physical, as a couple of shellfish.” (2.10)
“When a woman's bumped off, her husband is always the first suspect - which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people really think about marriage.” (2.10)
“For hours, sometimes ... I've lain on my bed with all my clothes on except my shoes, wondering about women. Why they’re like that, how they get like that, whether they’re doing it on purpose.” (2.10)
“She's a great one for public meetings of any kind, always provided that it's indoors and admission free.” (2.10)
“The classy Oxford feeling of nothing mattering except books and poetry and Greek statues, and nothing worth mentioning having happened since the Goths sacked Rome.” (3.1)
“We say a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. ... Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.” (3.1)
“Who’d bother about a chap like me? I'm too fat to be a political suspect. No one would bump me off or cosh me with a rubber truncheon. I'm the ordinary middling kind that moves on when the policeman tells him.” (3.2)
“A rose still smells the same to me now as it did when I was twenty. Ah, but do I smell the same to the rose?” (4.2)
“I don't mind towns growing, so long as they do grow and don't really spread like gravy over a tablecloth.” (4.5)
“At first sight it looked as if the sky had been raining bricks and vegetables. There were cabbage leaves everywhere. The bomb had blown a greengrocer's shop out of existence.” (4.6)

Literary references:
Bowling has periods in his life when he reads avidly. Authors he mentions include Kipling, Galsworthy, Barry Pain, W W Jacobs, Pett Ridge, Oliver Onions, H Seton Merriman, Maurice Baring, Stephen McKenna, May Sinclair, Arnold Bennett, Elinor Glyn, O Henry, Stephen Leacock, Silas Hocking, Jean Stratton Porter, Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, Anthony Hope, Marcel Proust and Henry James. Translations of Maupassant and Paul de Kock which are described by the other boys at school as ‘hot’ I've never even heard of most of these writers.

Books he mentions, with links to their reviews in this blog where appropriate, are: