Coming Up For Air, by George Orwell

Coming Up For Air is a novel, set in Britain immediately before the outbreak of WW2 (around 1938). The central character is a sort of everyman, a fat, balding 45 year old salesman with false teeth and a little semi-detached house in the "inner outer suburbs of London". George is not a likeable man: a "vulgar" drinker who cheats on his wife and finds his children an expensive irritation. But then I guess this is deliberate. The novel was published in 1939, the year Britain declared war on Germany, and its central theme is nostaligia for pre-WW1 Britain. But Orwell, unsentimental as ever, is determined to avoid being labelled a romantic. He wants to show us (i.e the modern world, not just the British), where we've gone wrong, but does so without romanticising either the past or any of the characters who inhabited it.

The novel is written in the first person, with George telling us his life story in a casual, chatty manner, as if we've just met him in the local pub. He was born in a small English village in the late 1890s, the son of a shopkeeper and housewife, he loved fishing, fought in WW1, met his wife and so on. His life has been more or less unremarkable. But he is no pub bore. He is not telling us his life story because he thinks it fascinating, but because he is trying to understand where we have gone wrong. George is well-aware that life in the countryside in 1900 was tough, he knows that most people were brutal, ignorant and poor, but on the whole he believes things were better. And that is the heart of the story, his attempt to understand why, to nail down just what it was about life in 1900 he so misses. George is living in a world teetering on the brink of disaster, a world being torn apart by those great, conflicting 'isms' 'fascism', 'nationalism', 'communism', 'capitalism' and so on, and these conflicting isms look set to destroy western civilization. Compared to 1938, the average individual in turn of the century Britain seemed somehow freer. Everywhere George looks he sees the countryside being ruined by hideous housing estates full of ugly, tiny, overpriced boxes (my god if he could see it today he'd weep!!). The roads are clogged with cars, the rivers and canals polluted. Orwell uses fishing as a sort of symbol. As a child George wandered the countryside with rod and reel, sat dozing by river banks and so on. Throughout the novel he considers going fishing again but dismisses the idea as absurd: fishing has no place in a world of big ideas and marching armies. Fishning belongs to a world of silence and space and natural beauty, not a world of radios and housing estates and cars. People in his youth also had a sense of stability and security, wheras the isms of his time have created a society in which they are frightened of the future and unsure whether anything they cherish will last. It would never have occured to people in his little village that life would be any different 50 or 100 years from now. To George it seems likely that everything will be different in just 2 years time.

I have never read a pre-WW2 novel that felt so contemporary. All of George's complaints (with the exception of the Nazis)- the destruction of the English countryside, the cost and size of the hideous little houses popping up all over the place, the nostalgia for a time of certainty in which life seemed slower and quieter, all of these pre-occupy people in the Britain of 2013.


Worth a look, but not as good as his non-fiction.

It is quite a bleak book as I remember. From what I remember the protagonist receives a windfall, and rather than hand it over to the ball-and-chain, uses it to go on a short holiday to the village where he grew up. There, he finds everything is not what it was. Everything has been spoilt. Eventually he tracks down his first girlfriend only to find she's an ageing hag. Then he goes home where his wife has found out about the money.