Book Review

BOOK REVIEW

COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell

Oxford University Press, 2021, Oxford, Britain

Review by Stephen Wilson

 

'War! I started thinking about it again. It's coming soon, that's certain. But who's afraid of war? That's to say, who is afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns ? 'You are', you say. yes, I am, and so's anybody who's ever seen them. But it isn't the war that matters, it's the after-war. The World we are going into , the kind of hate-world ,slogan world. The colored 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 and enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the leader till they deafen themselves into thinking they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.' {page 124 }laments the main character George Bowling of George Orwell's 'Coming Up For Air' , a novel set in pre-war England. The novel is a dark comedy where the disaffected , anguished and bored insurance agent George Bowling, decides to embark on a secret odyssey back into the England where he grew up in so as to relive some of the joy he once experienced as a child before the onslaught of the First World War. He hopes to forget about the imminent outbreak of war which seems so certain. But his hometown has  radically changed so much that he even gets lost.

 

This novel is highly underrated. It is worth ignoring literary critics who claim that while Orwell was a great essayist he was not such a good novelist. That is just bunk! This is difficult to square with the compelling images, scenes and convincing characters you find in 1984, Animal farm as well as 'Coming Up For Air'. The novel 'Coming Up for Air' bluntly captures the tense atmosphere being experienced just before the Second War World where people were genuinely afraid of air-raids and falling under Fascism. The pathetic attempts to escape this harsh reality by drinking, flirting or in Bowling's case  trying to take up fishing again seem understandable. I enjoyed the amusing dialogue between Bowling and his uptight wife Hilda who is permanently worried and anxious about the future, and the strange academic Porteous. Porteous is completely complacent concerning the threat of Hitler. He feels Hitler is irrelevant. He does not think of him at all. He is more interested in the siege of Troy than the impending war. He just goes on reciting old Latin and Greek poetry with a beautiful voice. Bowling thinks 'Funny those public school chaps. Schoolboys all their days. Whole life revolving round the old school and their bits of Latin and Greek and poetry. And suddenly I remembered that almost the first time I was here with Porteous he'd read me the very same poem. Read it in just the same way, and his voice quivered when he got to the same bit- the bit about magic casements, or something. And a curious thought struck me . He 's dead. He 's a ghost. All people like that are dead.'{pages 131-132} Bowling concludes that there are many people in England who are stuck in a mindset where they imagine England will never change and England is the World.  

 

Bowling is utterly bored with his job. He is frustrated with his dull domestic situation and yearns for a new adventure. But he now realizes that he is not the same man but has lost all his teeth and put on weight. In deed the novel begins with the first line -'The idea came to me the day I got my new false teeth.' Bowling wins some money on horse-racing which allows him to take a holiday back to his Lower Binfield in Oxfordshire. But he soon becomes disillusioned by what he finds. All the fields where mushrooms used to grow have been swallowed up by new houses and old pubs have had their old decor destroyed by new renovations.

 

One wonders why Bowling keeps his holiday secret. It is as if he is ashamed and embarrassed to admit to his wife his feelings of nostalgia. He even feels that the hobby of fishing might be frowned upon as a  childish hobby fit only for children and not middle-aged men. It reminds me of how some people in Britain still make fun of adults who keep model railways at their homes.  

It turns out that keeping the aim of his holiday a secret backfires on Bowling. His wife suspects he is having an affair when in reality he has been seeing no woman and has even had his advances rebuffed by a woman in a humiliating way.

 

Orwell makes some sharp comments on the state of England where everyone seems afraid of losing their jobs, poverty,  the threat of war, Communism and  Fascism. It is worth noting that the authoritarian trends which Orwell notices in Britain such as censorship, declining diversity and growing intolerance are what convinced him that Britain could one day turn into a dictatorship. Reading this book ought to help you better understand 1984. For the novel 1984 is not just based on the historical experience of Germany and Russia but also Britain. And if you look at the situation in Britain at present then it turns out Orwell has been spot on. Britain has the largest amount of surveillance cameras in the whole world. Everywhere you go a camera follows you. There is even more surveillance in Britain than Russia. Journalists are being persecuted in Britain for revealing the truth and even British citizens are being illegally deported because they can't find their documents on time to prove they are British. We are living in a 'hostile environment' not just for illegal migrants but practically anyone who expresses disagreeable views. What is disquieting is how timely Orwell's novel is. It is easy to forget this was written in 1939. It could have been written now. The current conflict in Ukraine has made people anxious about the threat of a Third World War. The demagogues which frightened Orwell have not faded away but over the past decade appeared to have mushroomed.

 

Bowling returns home with the sad words - 'One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill, I am finished with this notion of getting back into the past. What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist. Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin we are in reaches up to the stratosphere. All the same I didn't particularly care. After all, I thought, I 've still got three days left. I'd have a bit of peace and quiet, and stop bothering about what they had done to Lower Binfield.{pages 149} Even the name Binfield suggests a bin of rubbish in a field!

 

Perhaps this novel appeals to me because I once tried to do what Bowling did. I returned to some of my childhood haunts in Scotland and also kept this secret. When I told my sister that I had returned to Scotland in order to write poetry she answered "Is that why you are staying for some time? To write poetry? You have gone mad! " Like Bowling I found my favorite pubs had been destroyed by new renovations and some churches had been transformed into pubs. The old fields we had once played football in had been replaced by huge supermarkets. Even the old bookshop has now closed down...

 

But I think that Bowling should not be ashamed of going fishing ! Reliving old pursuits from childhood isn't childish. On the contrary it might help you connect better with your own children. And we need to come up for some fresh air in those trying times !