Coming Up for Air
Encyclopedia
Coming Up for Air is a novel
by George Orwell
, first published in June 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II
. It combines premonitions of the impending war with images of an idyllic Thames
-side Edwardian era childhood. The novel is pessimistic—commercialism
and capitalism are killing the best of rural England, "everything cemented over", and there are great new external threats.
and Henley
in the Thames Valley. He was the son of an Indian Civil Servant who was still in India, and he lived a genteel life with his mother and two sisters, though spending much of the year at boarding school at Eastbourne
and later at Eton
. He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family.
In 1937 Orwell spent some months fighting in the Spanish Civil War
. He was wounded
in the throat in May 1937, by a Fascist sniper at Huesca
.
Orwell was severely ill in 1938 and was advised to spend the winter in a warm climate. The novelist L.H.Myers
anonymously gave £300 to enable this and Orwell went with his wife to North Africa where he stayed, in French Morocco
, mainly in Marrakesh, from September 1938 to March 1939. (Orwell never learned the source of the money and he accepted it only on condition that it be considered a loan. He repaid the loan, eight years later, when he began making money from the success of Animal Farm
.) Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air while he was in North Africa and left the manuscript at his agent's office within a few hours of arriving back in England on 30 March 1939. It was submitted to Victor Gollancz
, who had an option on Orwell's next three novels, in spite of the 'cold treatment which [Orwell] had been given when Homage to Catalonia
was rejected.' In fact Orwell heard in April 1939 that Gollancz had reservations about the book, and was delaying a decision to accept it. The descriptions in the novel of a character who lectures at a meeting of Gollancz's Left Book Club
, and of the meeting itself, were such that Gollancz 'could not have helped being offended by them.' Nevertheless, the publisher did bring out the novel without demanding major changes and it was published on 12 June 1939. It was the last Orwell novel to bear the Gollancz imprint.
, marriage
and getting old. It is written in the first person, with George Bowling, the forty-five-year-old protagonist
, who reveals his life and experiences while undertaking a trip back to his boyhood home as an adult.
At the opening of the book, Bowling has a day off work to go to London to collect a new set of false teeth. A news-poster about the contemporary King Zog
of Albania sets off thoughts of a biblical character Og, King of Bashan
that he recalls from Sunday church as a child. Along with 'some sound in the traffic or the smell of horse dung or something' these thoughts trigger Bowling's memory of his childhood as the son of an unambitious seed merchant in "Lower Binfield" near the River Thames. Bowling relates his life history, dwelling on how a lucky break during the First World War landed him in a comfortable job away from any action and provided contacts that helped him become a successful salesman.
Bowling is wondering what to do with a small sum of money that he has won on a horserace and which he has concealed from his wife and family. He and his wife attend a Left Book Club
meeting where he is horrified by the hate shown by the anti-fascist speaker, and bemused by the Marxist ramblings of the communists who have attended the meeting. Fed up with this, he seeks his friend Old Porteous, the retired schoolmaster. He usually finds Porteous entertaining, but on this occasion his dry dead classics
makes Bowling even more depressed.
Bowling decides to use the money on a 'trip down memory lane', to revisit the places of his childhood. He recalls a particular pond with huge fish in it which he had missed the chance to try and catch thirty years previously. He therefore plans to return to Lower Binfield but when he arrives, he finds the place unrecognisable. Eventually he locates the old pub where he is to stay, finding it much changed. His home has become a tea shop. Only the church and vicar appear the same but he has a shock when he discovers an old girlfriend, for in his eyes she has been so ravaged by time that she is almost unrecognizable and is utterly devoid of the qualities he once adored. She fails to recognize him at all. Bowling remembers the slow and painful decline of his father's seed business—resulting from the nearby establishment of corporate competition. This painful memory seems to have sensitized him to - and given him a repugnance for - what he sees as the marching ravages of "Progress". The final disappointment is to find that the estate where he used to fish has been built over, and the secluded and once hidden pond that contained the huge Carp he always intended to take on with his fishing rod, but never got around to, has become a rubbish dump. The social and material changes experienced by Bowling since childhood make his past seem distant. The concept of "you can't go home again" hangs heavily over Bowling's journey, as he realizes that many of his old haunts are gone or considerably changed from his younger years.
Throughout the adventure he receives reminders of impending war, and the threat of bombs becomes real when one lands accidentally on the town.
, Wodehouse, Swift
, Shaw
, Thackeray - his loyalty, "was virtually unwavering. What he valued in Wells was not the later polemicist, but the novelist whose evocation of certain aspects of life in England before the First World War recalled to Orwell comparable experiences of his own. He and Connolly
would leave the school grounds and set out across the Downs
to Beachy Head
, or far along the plunging leafy roads that led deep into the Sussex
countryside, to villages that might have figured in a Wells novel: Eastdean and Westdean and Jevington. They would pause in each, and buy penny sweets and various fizzy drinks. This was the plain, decent, bread-and-sunlit world that Orwell recalled so nostalgically the further it retreated from him; eventually he would write [a] Wellsian [novel of this kind], in Coming Up For Air. "
The writer Michael Levenson remarked upon the influence at this period in Orwell's life, of Henry Miller
, and Miller's attitude to what was happening in the world. Miller sees what is happening, but is inside the whale
, he " feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah
act of allowing imself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting - even when this means accepting "concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin
, bombs, aeroplanes." "George Bowling is Orwell's Jonah, and Coming Up For Air is in significant respects a contribution to the 'school of Miller'. Hemmed in on every side -by job, home, history - Bowling neither comprehends the political world nor tries to change it. He merely wants to rediscover the grounds of happiness. In its central movement, Coming Up For Air is an unembarrassedly affirmative recovery of early-century innocence:boyhood, family life and country rambling in the town of Lower Binfield. Fishing in Coming Up For air is what sex was in Tropic of Cancer
. 'Fishing', as Bowling puts it, 'is the opposite of war'.
, in Time and Tide
, wrote that her only regret, "is that the story was written in the first person. This device, although it has the important virtue of making the narrative clear and easy to read, tends to falsify the character slightly since [Bowling's] uncanny perception where his own feelings are concerned makes him a little less of the ordinary mortal which his behaviour would show him to be." A recent biographer, Michael Shelden, praised the "many passages of lyrical beauty, not unbecoming a novelist who once aspired to be a poet. The one serious defect in the novel is Orwell's attempt to be the voice of his narrator-protagonist. He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman, and the book is at its best when Orwell is 'out-of-character', speaking in a voice which is recognisably his rather than an imitation of 'Fatty' Bowling's. "
The writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, in their 1972 The Unknown Orwell, noted :" Eric Blair looked back unforgivingly on the world before 1914 - it was that world that had sent him to his prep school - while George Orwell could believe it was superior to what came after it, and looked back to it nostalgically in Coming Up for Air." The writer John Wain
thought the book " not a success in novelistic terms", but saw, "vitality in its hinterland." He considered the novel - " a bleaker work than Keep the Aspidistra Flying
; in Aspidistra everybody fears the sack, hankers for more money and security, cringes to the boss. But only to the boss at work, the economic boss. When Bowling thinks of the future, he fears not only the ever-present financial insecurity, the endless work, work, work with the gutter only a few steps away; he fears also the new breed of tyrants, the leader and his strong-arm boys." And Wain noted the third region of Bowling's nightmare - " what we have since learnt to call 'the environment'." He places Coming Up For Air alongside Orwell's 1946 essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
where he had written that, "retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and - toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable". "What makes Coming Up For Air so peculiarly bitter to the taste is that, in addition to calling up the twin spectres of totalitarianism
and workless poverty, it also declares the impossibility of 'retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies' - because it postulates a world in which these things are simply not there any more."
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
, first published in June 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. It combines premonitions of the impending war with images of an idyllic Thames
River Thames
The River Thames flows through southern England. It is the longest river entirely in England and the second longest in the United Kingdom. While it is best known because its lower reaches flow through central London, the river flows alongside several other towns and cities, including Oxford,...
-side Edwardian era childhood. The novel is pessimistic—commercialism
Commercialism
Commercialism, in its original meaning, is the practices, methods, aims, and spirit of commerce or business. Today, however, it primarily refers to the tendency within open-market capitalism to turn everything into objects, images, and services sold for the purpose of generating profit...
and capitalism are killing the best of rural England, "everything cemented over", and there are great new external threats.
Background
As a child, Orwell lived at ShiplakeShiplake
Shiplake is a village and civil parish about south of Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, England on the River Thames.-History:The Church of England parish church of St. Peter and St. Paul dates from at least the 13th century, but in 1869 the Gothic Revival architect G.E. Street rebuilt the chancel,...
and Henley
Henley-on-Thames
Henley-on-Thames is a town and civil parish on the River Thames in South Oxfordshire, England, about 10 miles downstream and north-east from Reading, 10 miles upstream and west from Maidenhead...
in the Thames Valley. He was the son of an Indian Civil Servant who was still in India, and he lived a genteel life with his mother and two sisters, though spending much of the year at boarding school at Eastbourne
Eastbourne
Eastbourne is a large town and borough in East Sussex, on the south coast of England between Brighton and Hastings. The town is situated at the eastern end of the chalk South Downs alongside the high cliff at Beachy Head...
and later at Eton
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
. He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family.
In 1937 Orwell spent some months fighting in the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
. He was wounded
Wounded in action
Wounded in action describes soldiers who have been wounded while fighting in a combat zone during war time, but have not been killed. Typically it implies that they are temporarily or permanently incapable of bearing arms or continuing to fight....
in the throat in May 1937, by a Fascist sniper at Huesca
Huesca
Huesca is a city in north-eastern Spain, within the autonomous community of Aragon. It is also the capital of the Spanish province of the same name and the comarca of Hoya de Huesca....
.
Orwell was severely ill in 1938 and was advised to spend the winter in a warm climate. The novelist L.H.Myers
Leo Myers
-Life:He was born in Cambridge into a cultured family; his father was the writer Frederic William Henry Myers and his mother the photographer Eveleen Tennant. He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge...
anonymously gave £300 to enable this and Orwell went with his wife to North Africa where he stayed, in French Morocco
French Morocco
French Protectorate of Morocco was a French protectorate in Morocco, established by the Treaty of Fez. French Morocco did not include the north of the country, which was a Spanish protectorate...
, mainly in Marrakesh, from September 1938 to March 1939. (Orwell never learned the source of the money and he accepted it only on condition that it be considered a loan. He repaid the loan, eight years later, when he began making money from the success of Animal Farm
Animal Farm
Animal Farm is an allegorical novella by George Orwell published in England on 17 August 1945. According to Orwell, the book reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II...
.) Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air while he was in North Africa and left the manuscript at his agent's office within a few hours of arriving back in England on 30 March 1939. It was submitted to Victor Gollancz
Victor Gollancz
Sir Victor Gollancz was a British publisher, socialist, and humanitarian.-Early life:Born in Maida Vale, London, he was the son of a wholesale jeweller and nephew of Rabbi Professor Sir Hermann Gollancz and Professor Sir Israel Gollancz; after being educated at St Paul's School, London and taking...
, who had an option on Orwell's next three novels, in spite of the 'cold treatment which [Orwell] had been given when Homage to Catalonia
Homage to Catalonia
Homage to Catalonia is political journalist and novelist George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War. The first edition was published in 1938. The book was not published in the United States until February 1952. The American edition had a preface...
was rejected.' In fact Orwell heard in April 1939 that Gollancz had reservations about the book, and was delaying a decision to accept it. The descriptions in the novel of a character who lectures at a meeting of Gollancz's Left Book Club
Left Book Club
The Left Book Club, founded in 1936, was a key left-wing institution of the late 1930s and 1940s in the United Kingdom set up by Stafford Cripps, Victor Gollancz and John Strachey to revitalise and educate the British Left. The Club's aim was to "help in the struggle For world peace and against...
, and of the meeting itself, were such that Gollancz 'could not have helped being offended by them.' Nevertheless, the publisher did bring out the novel without demanding major changes and it was published on 12 June 1939. It was the last Orwell novel to bear the Gollancz imprint.
Plot summary
The themes of the book are nostalgia, the folly of trying to go back and recapture past glories and the easy way the dreams and aspirations of one's youth can be smothered by the humdrum routine of workCareer
Career is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a person's "course or progress through life ". It is usually considered to pertain to remunerative work ....
, marriage
Marriage
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...
and getting old. It is written in the first person, with George Bowling, the forty-five-year-old protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
, who reveals his life and experiences while undertaking a trip back to his boyhood home as an adult.
At the opening of the book, Bowling has a day off work to go to London to collect a new set of false teeth. A news-poster about the contemporary King Zog
Zog of Albania
Zog I, Skanderbeg III of the Albanians , born Ahmet Muhtar Bey Zogolli, was King of the Albanians from 1928 to 1939. He was previously Prime Minister of Albania and President of Albania .-Background and early political career:...
of Albania sets off thoughts of a biblical character Og, King of Bashan
Og
Og, according to the bible, was an Amorite king of Bashan who, along with his army, was slain by Moses and his men at the battle of Edrei...
that he recalls from Sunday church as a child. Along with 'some sound in the traffic or the smell of horse dung or something' these thoughts trigger Bowling's memory of his childhood as the son of an unambitious seed merchant in "Lower Binfield" near the River Thames. Bowling relates his life history, dwelling on how a lucky break during the First World War landed him in a comfortable job away from any action and provided contacts that helped him become a successful salesman.
Bowling is wondering what to do with a small sum of money that he has won on a horserace and which he has concealed from his wife and family. He and his wife attend a Left Book Club
Left Book Club
The Left Book Club, founded in 1936, was a key left-wing institution of the late 1930s and 1940s in the United Kingdom set up by Stafford Cripps, Victor Gollancz and John Strachey to revitalise and educate the British Left. The Club's aim was to "help in the struggle For world peace and against...
meeting where he is horrified by the hate shown by the anti-fascist speaker, and bemused by the Marxist ramblings of the communists who have attended the meeting. Fed up with this, he seeks his friend Old Porteous, the retired schoolmaster. He usually finds Porteous entertaining, but on this occasion his dry dead classics
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
makes Bowling even more depressed.
Bowling decides to use the money on a 'trip down memory lane', to revisit the places of his childhood. He recalls a particular pond with huge fish in it which he had missed the chance to try and catch thirty years previously. He therefore plans to return to Lower Binfield but when he arrives, he finds the place unrecognisable. Eventually he locates the old pub where he is to stay, finding it much changed. His home has become a tea shop. Only the church and vicar appear the same but he has a shock when he discovers an old girlfriend, for in his eyes she has been so ravaged by time that she is almost unrecognizable and is utterly devoid of the qualities he once adored. She fails to recognize him at all. Bowling remembers the slow and painful decline of his father's seed business—resulting from the nearby establishment of corporate competition. This painful memory seems to have sensitized him to - and given him a repugnance for - what he sees as the marching ravages of "Progress". The final disappointment is to find that the estate where he used to fish has been built over, and the secluded and once hidden pond that contained the huge Carp he always intended to take on with his fishing rod, but never got around to, has become a rubbish dump. The social and material changes experienced by Bowling since childhood make his past seem distant. The concept of "you can't go home again" hangs heavily over Bowling's journey, as he realizes that many of his old haunts are gone or considerably changed from his younger years.
Throughout the adventure he receives reminders of impending war, and the threat of bombs becomes real when one lands accidentally on the town.
Characters
- George Bowling is a fat, married, middle-aged (45 years old) insurance salesman, with 'two kids and a house in the suburbs'.
- Joe Bowling is George's older brother. He was not intellectual, and, according to George 'therefore he had a slight proficiency in mechanics'. He never did any sizable amount of work and worked for his dad as an 'errand boy'. One day whilst George was younger, Joe stole all the money from the shop till. He was said to have always wanted to emigrate to America, and was never mentioned again.
- Uncle Ezekiel was a shop owner and had quite liberal beliefs, being a 'little EnglanderLittle EnglanderLittle Englander is an epithet applied in criticisms of English people who are regarded as "xenophobic" and/or overly nationalistic and are often accused of being "ignorant" and "boorish". It is applied to opponents of globalism; for instance those who are against membership of the European Union...
'. He kept an assortment of caged birds inside his shop as decoration. - Hilda Bowling, his wife, belonged to the poverty-striken officer class of an Anglo-Indian family who after marriage has settled-down into a depressed lifeless middle-aged frump. 39 years old, 'very thin and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes.'
- Old Porteus, a retired public-school master whose whole life has been lived in an atmosphere of Latin, Greek, and cricket.
- Elsie, George's ex-partner, they met in the vicar's reading circle, and was said to be 'deeply feminineFeminineFeminine, or femininity, normally refers to qualities positively associated with women.Feminine may also refer to:*Feminine , a grammatical gender*Feminine cadence, a final chord falling in a metrically weak position...
'. They stayed together 'living in sin' until George enlisted. Shortly afterwards he loses contact with her. Upon his 1939 return to Lower Binfield, George sees her and remarks that 'the milky white skin was gone...' and that she was now a cylinder with lumps sticking out. She also now speaks with a strong cockney accent and married a shop owner, also named George.
Style
In their 1972 study of Orwell, The Unknown Orwell, the writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, described the novel as Wellsian. Whilst at his prep school in Sussex (1911-1916), Wells had been a favourite author of Eric Blair/Orwell. As with other writers he had read while at St Cyprian's Prep school, - KiplingRudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
, Wodehouse, Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
, Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
, Thackeray - his loyalty, "was virtually unwavering. What he valued in Wells was not the later polemicist, but the novelist whose evocation of certain aspects of life in England before the First World War recalled to Orwell comparable experiences of his own. He and Connolly
Cyril Connolly
Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English intellectual, literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon and wrote Enemies of Promise , which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of...
would leave the school grounds and set out across the Downs
South Downs
The South Downs is a range of chalk hills that extends for about across the south-eastern coastal counties of England from the Itchen Valley of Hampshire in the west to Beachy Head, near Eastbourne, East Sussex, in the east. It is bounded on its northern side by a steep escarpment, from whose...
to Beachy Head
Beachy Head
Beachy Head is a chalk headland on the south coast of England, close to the town of Eastbourne in the county of East Sussex, immediately east of the Seven Sisters. The cliff there is the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain, rising to 162 m above sea level. The peak allows views of the south...
, or far along the plunging leafy roads that led deep into the Sussex
Sussex
Sussex , from the Old English Sūþsēaxe , is an historic county in South East England corresponding roughly in area to the ancient Kingdom of Sussex. It is bounded on the north by Surrey, east by Kent, south by the English Channel, and west by Hampshire, and is divided for local government into West...
countryside, to villages that might have figured in a Wells novel: Eastdean and Westdean and Jevington. They would pause in each, and buy penny sweets and various fizzy drinks. This was the plain, decent, bread-and-sunlit world that Orwell recalled so nostalgically the further it retreated from him; eventually he would write [a] Wellsian [novel of this kind], in Coming Up For Air. "
The writer Michael Levenson remarked upon the influence at this period in Orwell's life, of Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
, and Miller's attitude to what was happening in the world. Miller sees what is happening, but is inside the whale
Inside the Whale
"Inside the Whale" is an essay in three parts written by George Orwell in 1940. It is primarily a review of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller with Orwell discursing more widely over English literature in the 1920s and 1930s...
, he " feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah
Jonah
Jonah is the name given in the Hebrew Bible to a prophet of the northern kingdom of Israel in about the 8th century BC, the eponymous central character in the Book of Jonah, famous for being swallowed by a fish or a whale, depending on translation...
act of allowing imself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting - even when this means accepting "concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, bombs, aeroplanes." "George Bowling is Orwell's Jonah, and Coming Up For Air is in significant respects a contribution to the 'school of Miller'. Hemmed in on every side -by job, home, history - Bowling neither comprehends the political world nor tries to change it. He merely wants to rediscover the grounds of happiness. In its central movement, Coming Up For Air is an unembarrassedly affirmative recovery of early-century innocence:boyhood, family life and country rambling in the town of Lower Binfield. Fishing in Coming Up For air is what sex was in Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Cancer (novel)
Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller which has been described as "notorious for its candid sexuality" and as responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature." It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the...
. 'Fishing', as Bowling puts it, 'is the opposite of war'.
Critical responses
The novel sold three thousand copies, a thousand of which represented a second printing and thus bettered, "the dismal response in the bookshops which had met the publication of Homage to Catalonia." The reviews were among the best that Orwell had received for a novel. Margery AllinghamMargery Allingham
Margery Louise Allingham was an English crime writer, best remembered for her detective stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion.- Childhood and schooling :...
, in Time and Tide
Time and Tide (magazine)
Time and Tide was a British weekly political and literary review magazine founded by Margaret, Lady Rhondda in 1920. It started out as a supporter of left wing and feminist causes and the mouthpiece of the feminist Six Point Group. It later moved to the right along with the views of its owner...
, wrote that her only regret, "is that the story was written in the first person. This device, although it has the important virtue of making the narrative clear and easy to read, tends to falsify the character slightly since [Bowling's] uncanny perception where his own feelings are concerned makes him a little less of the ordinary mortal which his behaviour would show him to be." A recent biographer, Michael Shelden, praised the "many passages of lyrical beauty, not unbecoming a novelist who once aspired to be a poet. The one serious defect in the novel is Orwell's attempt to be the voice of his narrator-protagonist. He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman, and the book is at its best when Orwell is 'out-of-character', speaking in a voice which is recognisably his rather than an imitation of 'Fatty' Bowling's. "
The writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, in their 1972 The Unknown Orwell, noted :" Eric Blair looked back unforgivingly on the world before 1914 - it was that world that had sent him to his prep school - while George Orwell could believe it was superior to what came after it, and looked back to it nostalgically in Coming Up for Air." The writer John Wain
John Wain
John Barrington Wain was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group "The Movement". For most of his life, Wain worked as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio. He seems to have married in 1947, since C. S...
thought the book " not a success in novelistic terms", but saw, "vitality in its hinterland." He considered the novel - " a bleaker work than Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published 1936, is a socially critical novel by George Orwell. It is set in 1930s London. The main theme is Gordon Comstock's romantic ambition to defy worship of the money-god and status, and the dismal life that results....
; in Aspidistra everybody fears the sack, hankers for more money and security, cringes to the boss. But only to the boss at work, the economic boss. When Bowling thinks of the future, he fears not only the ever-present financial insecurity, the endless work, work, work with the gutter only a few steps away; he fears also the new breed of tyrants, the leader and his strong-arm boys." And Wain noted the third region of Bowling's nightmare - " what we have since learnt to call 'the environment'." He places Coming Up For Air alongside Orwell's 1946 essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
"Some Thoughts on the Common Toad" is an essay published in 1946 by the English author George Orwell. It is a eulogy in favour of spring.-Background:...
where he had written that, "retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and - toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable". "What makes Coming Up For Air so peculiarly bitter to the taste is that, in addition to calling up the twin spectres of totalitarianism
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
and workless poverty, it also declares the impossibility of 'retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies' - because it postulates a world in which these things are simply not there any more."
External links
- Coming up for Air - Searchable, indexed etext.