By JF The author of this novel, George Orwell, most famously known for his satires on society in Animal Farm and , here composes what can be interpreted as the preliminary text in a trilogy which serves as a worthy political antecedent to these two great, significant literary pieces.
The novel opens with George travelling to London on his day off to collect a new set of false teeth and wondering what to do with the seventeen pounds he has won on a horserace. George is a very ordinary man in a safe insurance job, however, he struggles to get to terms with the contemporary world.
He is undoubtedly fearful of the future as he gets the sense that war is approaching, foreseeing food queues, soldiers, tyranny and despotism. Ideas relating to Orwellian socialism are prevalent throughout, for instance, at the very beginning George feels trapped on Ellesmere Road, most notably by Sir Hubert Crum and his ironically named Cheerful Credit Building Society who deceive the inhabitants in to thinking they own their houses.
Influenced by his previous works such as The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell evidently promotes the idea that socialism should fundamentally be about common decency and fairness for all, something which was clearly not apparent in s Britain.
Similarly, in the novel George attends a Left Book Club meeting on fascism, clearly drawing parallels with Orwell and the publishing group which strived to exert far-left influence between and You may disable these by changing your browser settings, but this may affect how the website functions. See More. Analytics cookies help us to improve our website by collecting and reporting information on how you use it. These cookies may be set by us or by third-party providers whose services we have added to our pages.
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Children's Children's 0 - 18 months 18 months - 3 years 3 - 5 years 5 - 7 years 7 - 9 years 9 - 12 years View all children's. Puffin Ladybird. Authors A-Z. Featured Authors. Gifts for bibliophiles. Book Bundles. Writing Workshops. View all. View all 6 comments. It took me a while to warm to George Bowling's 'voice' as the narrator. Part II is a change in conversation from Part I.
Part II starts off with George Bowling realising how much his life has changed since he was a young lad. There is a good deft portrait of a life of a working class girl, economically told in the description of the girl Katie, who although not much older than George, used to mind him and take him for walks as a boy - he sees Katie years later aged twenty seven, but looked fifty.
Orwell only focusses on how the war and coming out of the army to no jobs from a male perspective, he doesn't mention how women were displaced from jobs they held during the war. Women aren't drawn in a very positive light, mostly negatively or dismissively as 'platinum blondes' or 'a secretary with a permanent wave', a nagging wife and vindictive busybodies.
I'll get to Hilda the wife, and her friends shortly. Now I know! As if. George gives the whole system a royal serve in this novel. Orwell wrote Coming Up For Air in Marrakech while recovering from serious illness, the air was better for his lungs.
Maybe that is the real reason for the choice of title for the book. Coming Up For Air is really an essay in novel form, a cynical satire of the Western illusion of 'Progress'. I think the main subject Orwell is looking at with this book is what is euphemistically called 'Progress'. The increase in population on George's return to where he grew up, the river overcrowded and polluted, the fish long gone.
All the 'progress' and change clearing everything in it's path - erasing the past, which Orwell covers in another approach in The book is set in the late s, just before WWII. The housing estates and expanding towns and polluted river described in the story, sounds more modern, more the s. There are other structural similarities to , like the progress of the towns erasing the past. A man being watched and monitored by Big Wife. Confessing to things he didn't do.
Big Wife Is Watching You. George Bowling while walking around trying to recognise the old Lower Binfield town where he grew up amid the new growth, he is shocked and resentful that the paddocks and fields that were there in his youth have been built on with new housing estates.
As George is not one for self reflection but nostalgia, it doesn't dawn on him that his own house in the new estate in West Bletchley has been built on paddocks of someone else's childhood memories. Another interesting character is the elderly lanky pipe smoking scholar Old Porteous, who George visits occasionally who relates everything to the ancient past. I think this adds a nice contrast to the progress erasing the past statement in the story.
What is Orwell saying in his description of George's encounter with the chap in shorts at the pool "standing watching the kids"? Upper Binfield's exclusive new alternative estate, who's residents are all vegetarian weirdos. I recall Orwell having a dig at vegetarianism in one of his essays. The old Binfield House and grounds have been turned into an asylum. On the pretext of having a look around the grounds, George thinks of, if asked, that he's looking at admitting his wife.
Bloody hell, this book is hilarious. Marriage with Hilda - Why is cynicism so funny when written as fiction? The novel is also a portrait of the "this is serious" suburban middle-class world. George Orwell gives us his George Bowling reality check of how the world really is. Fiction turns cynicism into dark humour. George, on the one hand is not of much character, unfaithful in a flash given the chance, but at heart an optimist. He dabbles on the horses using a book called 'Astrology applied to Horse-racing'.
There's a lot of stuff in there that's subtle, the sarcasm is very funny but could be missed. Everything is drawn down to Hilda's worried view of everything. Hilda and her friends, the vindictive Mrs Wheeler and Miss Minns, they're into anything as long as it's free. This book is really a classic darkly satiric masterpiece of social analysis - I did glaze over in Part II at the nostalgic reminiscing for over ninety pages. I just find that stuff mind-numbingly boring.
Same case with Anthony Burgess' 'Little Wilson'. I think it's a feeling of the claustrophobic restriction at the limiting life choices that the English class system imposed, and maybe still does.
I'll revisit those ninety pages on finishing this otherwise superb book. Coming Up for Air is a character-driven novel about the life of forty-five-year-old insurance salesman George Bowling. Bowling tells his story in first person, starting with his early memories of growing up in the English village of Lower Binfield, the son of a grain merchant. He remembers the wars in his life — the Boer War of his childhood and his service in the Great War.
The story shows how life changed for the worse in the aftermath of those two wars. It also portrays life in England in the Coming Up for Air is a character-driven novel about the life of forty-five-year-old insurance salesman George Bowling.
The book was published in , and it is interesting to look back now knowing what actually happened. George Bowling is a coarse low-key character and there is not much interaction among the characters.
The plot is minimal. Coming up for air! I enjoyed the masterful writing style, but it is unevenly paced. At times I was drawn into the story and at other times I found my mind wandering. The ending is extremely odd. This book is realistic, and therefore, much different from his dystopian novels, and Animal Farm.
I liked it but not as much as the other two. Jun 12, Kim rated it really liked it Shelves: kindle. The novel does indeed contain quite a bit of humour. The narrator, George Bowling, decides to escape his unsatisfying life as an insurance salesman and family man for a brief holiday in his hometown. Before he embarks on that journey George recounts the story of his childhood and of his military service during World War I in an unsentimental tone that evokes both the positive and negative aspects of those experiences.
In this part of the novel, Orwell paints a detailed portrait of life in early 20th century England, a way of life changed forever by the advent of WWI. Orwell wrote the novel between September and March in Morocco, where he went to recover from a bout of illness caused by the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. For example, Orwell has his narrator share his own interest in the natural world and particularly his passion for fishing.
The inevitability of WWII, the commencement of which was still three months away when the novel was published in June , is the dark cloud hanging over this work. The fears Bowling expresses about the war to come, and more particularly about what will follow the war, are those that haunted Orwell.
This is a short work, written in an easy conversational style. It includes a detailed description of fishing that some readers may find rather hard to get through, but I loved every word of it.
Orwell was a masterful writer and the more of his writing I read, the more I appreciate his genius. Narrated by George Bowling, a man in his late 40s, living in the suburbs with a wife and two children, with an unexciting but stable white collar job, this is a book of reminiscences and a nostalgic look back over his life. Overweight, and with false teeth,George is a first world war veteran, now working in insurance, travelling regularly in an escape from his wife and children.
Set in the pre WWII early s, this book takes us through the life of George Bowling, as a child and adolescent pre-W Narrated by George Bowling, a man in his late 40s, living in the suburbs with a wife and two children, with an unexciting but stable white collar job, this is a book of reminiscences and a nostalgic look back over his life.
It is not a particularly miserable childhood, but neither was he the popular boy. His time is the army was no less inspiring; following a minor injury at the front he was sent to a remote stores dump, where he was to monitor non-existent military stores.
Once a month they sent me an enormous official form calling upon me to state the number and condition of pick-axes, entrenching tools, coils of barbed wire, blankets, waterproof groundsheets, first-aid outfits, sheets of corrugated iron, and tins of plum and apple jam under my care. I just entered 'nil' against everything and sent the form back. Nothing ever happened. Up in London someone was quietly filing the forms, and sending out more forms, and filing those, and so on.
After ruminating about his life, and where he has ended up, George decides he deserves a holiday, to spend his seventeen quid he won on a horse, and has managed to keep secret from Hilda. On a whim decides to return to Lower Binfield, and catch those carp which he had somehow never got around to catching as a child. So this is not a high octane, thrill a minute book.
In fact, very little happens, it is largely an internal monologue, and few people bother to interact with George very much. It is however well written, and descriptive in a depressingly British sort of a way.
Worth a read to calm down between exciting books maybe? Dec 03, Kevin rated it liked it Shelves: contemporary-fiction-modern-ish. Coming Up for Air was written whilst Orwell was convalescing in Morocco in , which would be a year after he returned from Spain in , due to his tuberculosis which would hinder him until his death in his convalescence didn't have much success apparently. Whilst not his most political novel say, compared to his later works , still has quite an insightful aspect regarding life in Britain for the Lower Middle Class on the eve of a coming global cataclysm that everyone expects - and G Coming Up for Air was written whilst Orwell was convalescing in Morocco in , which would be a year after he returned from Spain in , due to his tuberculosis which would hinder him until his death in his convalescence didn't have much success apparently.
Whilst not his most political novel say, compared to his later works , still has quite an insightful aspect regarding life in Britain for the Lower Middle Class on the eve of a coming global cataclysm that everyone expects - and George Bowling - the forty five year old protagonist, seeks some sort of solace in wanting to return to his youth where he he spent his adolescence in a small English Thameside village called Lower Binfield fictional location, but realistic portrayal on any Middle England location.
George Bowling is not really a happy man with his salesman job and his marriage, and he leads quite a mundane existence until he attends a Left Book Club meeting and the anti-fascist speaker makes him quite angry at the hate he spouts, along with some Communists who also were in attendance nice little kick against what he experienced in Spain I assume.
It encourages his and his unhappy, dreary life to want to return to Little Binfield on his own - away from his wife and dreary job, which he decides to do in secret. His old haunts as a youth have all been built over - Little Binfield should now be called Big Binfield realistically. Social change is key to this novel - an expected coming global conflict is the date it is assumed to take place according to the protagonist , modernisation, and possibly a disrespect towards nature with trees and lakes and so on being concreted over for the new 'modern' housing estates to house the workers in the new factories , as well as the new military airdrome a few miles away, with regular flyovers by the 'black bombers', and so on.
George Bowling ends up staying in a new hotel in the town, drinking too much the first day there he consumes two bottles of wine, several pints and brandy - nice one George more out of a sense of depression that all the population, shops and locations are new to him, and those romantic feelings of returning to ones youth and childhood - when life 'appeared' to be simpler are completely crushed and disillusioned.
There is still, as I mentioned above, a little kick against the Communist Party the Left Book Club meeting Bowling attends , as well as against vegetarians and from I perceive to be 'new age' folk of that time he writes a quite incisive critique better in Part Two of 'The Road to Wigan Pier', but you can see where he gets it from.
Personally, I found it a 'filler', which it was meant to be I assume, before the much more political Animal Farm and later , coming after Homage to Catalonia and it didn't sell much, just like Homage , but there is a genesis of his later thoughts regarding both Soviet Communism and the Capitalist work ethic and dreary mundane existences.
I would give it 3. May 25, Atri rated it really liked it. Brimming with typical Orwellian dark humour and cynicism, but brilliantly evocative and astonishingly prescient.
Apr 20, Loretta rated it liked it Shelves: classic , myreading-challenge. I usually don't like books written in first person but sometimes authors who write that way do grab my attention and it's an enjoyable read. Sadly this book didn't grab my attention.
Dec 23, Rowena rated it it was amazing Shelves: classics , favourite-authors , orwell. Loved it, just loved it. Orwell is fast becoming one of my favourite authors. Love his humour, wit and sarcasm. Lovely story about nostalgia which I would definitely read again. Feb 25, Lee Foust rated it really liked it. After listening to a terrific audio book version of Animal Farm on youtube, I found an even more delightful audio book version of this other Orwellian novel and enjoyed the heck out of it--an Australian actor reads it, I believe, judging from his pronunciation of the word "kids.
It's difficult to laugh at someone when yo After listening to a terrific audio book version of Animal Farm on youtube, I found an even more delightful audio book version of this other Orwellian novel and enjoyed the heck out of it--an Australian actor reads it, I believe, judging from his pronunciation of the word "kids.
It's difficult to laugh at someone when you feel like they're in the room with you telling their story. Still, I was unexpectedly drawn into this novel, having no expectations, and quickly became hooked on this bored, nostalgic, everyman character. What struck me most was the charming wistfulness of our narrator, George Bowling, and his nostalgia for the miserable, poverty-ridden and unfair world in which he grew up, which is, however, completely understandable as he's now living in a newer, more boring if perhaps more materially comfortable , tract-home, middle-class post WWI world.
The situation reminded me of the opening of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being , in which the narrator comes across a book of Holocaust photos and experiences the shame of being prompted by the photos to feel nostalgic for his lost childhood, since it was of the same time period as WWII. George's situation is as charming as it is tragic, as he pines for his youth although it's filled, to hear him tell it, with misery and uncertainty: the demise of his father's business, his parents' deaths, and the waywardness of his brother.
Then comes the absurdity of WWI, which wipes George's old word and personal past aside and sets both he and England on a whole new path The novel takes an even darker turn, then, when George attends an anti-fascist lecture and the specter of the coming second world war comes to threaten once again to destroy even the boring complacency of the narrator's nostalgia.
While he tries to recapture his past with a clandestine trip back to the hometown we've heard so much about, the specter of both modernity and the coming war overshadow everything. Yet George is so irascible and pessimistic, he's hardly fazed. Animal Farm. Burmese Days. Homage To Catalonia. Keep the Aspidistra Flying.