Coming Up For Air by George Orwell: book review

Coming Up For Air (1939, this edition 1969) is narrated by the 45-year-old British character George ‘Fatty’ Bowling, pessimistic about life and the impending Second World War.

George Bowling is an insurance salesman, living in an ordinary suburb in England with 39-year-old wife Hilda and two children, Lorna aged eleven and Billy aged seven.

He takes a day off work to visit his dentist to get a new set of false teeth. He wins some money, but never tells Hilda. In a nostalgic mood, he decides to revisit his childhood town. He just wants peace and quiet – a week without Hilda and the children.

The town where he grew up thirty years before is not as it once was. His home is a tea shop, urban development has swamped the natural parks and gardens, and his fishing hole is – well, it’s disgusting. His childhood town has changed beyond recognition – so too has his childhood girlfriend. And no-one remembers him.

From Bowling’s memories, readers learn of his youth, the First World War, meeting Hilda, and the influences in his life as he grew into a man: ‘The war did extraordinary things to people. And what was more extraordinary than the way it killed people was the way it sometimes didn’t kill them.’ About Hilda he says, ‘Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop.’ She lacked the joy in life.

It is a pessimistic view of progress, rapid change, and the feeling that you can never re-create 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.’

George Orwell, real name: Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950) is the British author of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Animal Farm (1945), and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).  This story, Coming Up For Air, was described by George Orwell biographer, Thomas E. Ricks, as ‘close to unreadable.’ That is a bit harsh. Nevertheless, it is not Orwell’s greatest work, by a wide margin. It is barely passable, but the last chapter is interesting.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).