Friday, October 24, 2008
Coming Out For "Coming Up For Air"
My previous comment aside, I did enjoy the book. The elegy for a vanished England was beautiful, with just the right mix of realism (so I imagine) and sentimentality. The mix looked to be 95% to 5%, but there's no way for me to know since I don't know a great deal about late 19th and early 20th century England. I've read several biographies of Churchill, but he was on the other side of the tracks, so to speak. His recounting of a vanished rural England could be far more sentimental than I'm able to divine, but I'll give Orwell the benefit of the doubt since he was known for a clear-eyed appraisal of the world.
What made the book more pleasurable than I expected was that I didn't expect that kind of book from Orwell. I think of him as a writer of allegories, and of journalism. Coming Up For Air has elements of the latter, in the detailed recounting of life in Lower Binfield. The former element is also there and unmistakable, but since Lower Binfield's and Bowling's fate are presented as something which can't be prevented or brought back, it is a much more hopeless allegory than is Animal Farm.
Orwell is good at making the reader feel Bowling's loss and frustration. Added to his frustration was mine-after all, what could I do to prevent the industrialization of England? He makes one feel the way of life that slipped away. If I read a textbook about Pompeii, I might feel a very abstract pang of sympathy for those folks now immortalized in lava (obsidian?). Late 19th-early 20th-century England is much less foreign to me, but it's still a very far cry from anything I've experienced. Orwell does such a good job of narration that one can feel the change between 1914 and 1938.
The most jarring thing about the book were Orwell's acid comments about the impending war. I initially thought it was strange that someone who saw through to the truth of the Nazis and of Stalinism would write with such disdain for the character who Bowling knows is envisioning smashing the faces of Nazis with a pipe wrench during the entire time he is speaking. But I quickly realized that while Orwell likely did realize that war between Britain and Germany was inevitable, he also understood the atavism and misplaced enthusiasm driving the march to war (and also that the pipe wrench fellow was probably the mirror image of his imagined Nazi). He also understood what war did to all of the people living on the battlefield, and furthermore intuited correctly that in the new war the battlefield would be more or less everywhere. And just as WWI had, it would destroy the time in which Bowling was living, and accelerate the destruction of another span of time after the war. Bowling might not have liked 1938 relative to before 1914, but he really wasn't going to like post WWII England, should he survive to see it. There's also a solid dollop of dislike of militarism in general. It is Orwell, after all. It's too bad they don't make socialists like him anymore.
There might be another post coming about the mid-life crisis aspect of the book. ¶ 22:33
What made the book more pleasurable than I expected was that I didn't expect that kind of book from Orwell. I think of him as a writer of allegories, and of journalism. Coming Up For Air has elements of the latter, in the detailed recounting of life in Lower Binfield. The former element is also there and unmistakable, but since Lower Binfield's and Bowling's fate are presented as something which can't be prevented or brought back, it is a much more hopeless allegory than is Animal Farm.
Orwell is good at making the reader feel Bowling's loss and frustration. Added to his frustration was mine-after all, what could I do to prevent the industrialization of England? He makes one feel the way of life that slipped away. If I read a textbook about Pompeii, I might feel a very abstract pang of sympathy for those folks now immortalized in lava (obsidian?). Late 19th-early 20th-century England is much less foreign to me, but it's still a very far cry from anything I've experienced. Orwell does such a good job of narration that one can feel the change between 1914 and 1938.
The most jarring thing about the book were Orwell's acid comments about the impending war. I initially thought it was strange that someone who saw through to the truth of the Nazis and of Stalinism would write with such disdain for the character who Bowling knows is envisioning smashing the faces of Nazis with a pipe wrench during the entire time he is speaking. But I quickly realized that while Orwell likely did realize that war between Britain and Germany was inevitable, he also understood the atavism and misplaced enthusiasm driving the march to war (and also that the pipe wrench fellow was probably the mirror image of his imagined Nazi). He also understood what war did to all of the people living on the battlefield, and furthermore intuited correctly that in the new war the battlefield would be more or less everywhere. And just as WWI had, it would destroy the time in which Bowling was living, and accelerate the destruction of another span of time after the war. Bowling might not have liked 1938 relative to before 1914, but he really wasn't going to like post WWII England, should he survive to see it. There's also a solid dollop of dislike of militarism in general. It is Orwell, after all. It's too bad they don't make socialists like him anymore.
There might be another post coming about the mid-life crisis aspect of the book. ¶ 22:33
