Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

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George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with children, is an insurance salesman with an expanding waistline, a new set of false teeth - and a desperate desire to escape his dreary life. He fears modern times - since, in 1939, the Second World War is imminent - foreseeing food queues, soldiers, secret police and tyranny. So he decides to escape to the world of his childhood, to the village he remembers as a rural haven of peace and tranquillity. But his return journey to Lower Binfield may bring only a more complete disillusionment ... In another chapter that I remember somewhat vividly from this novel, George reminisces about getting to spend a few months alone on an island, at some strange care-taking job, just sitting alone, reading and thinking. Coming up for air, you might say. Life might offer a peaceful interregnum here or there, Orwell suggests, but there's also an awareness throughout his work that the world will not simply allow us to go into hiding and read books. Not for long, anyway. I can’t help but draw parallels between Orwell’s comedic take on bad marriage [ Coming Up For Air] and Tolstoy’s dramatic take on bad marriage [ The Kreutzer Sonata]—the difference being that Orwell’s character blissfully daydreams about the death of his wife (thus the comedy) and Tolstoy’s character actually murders his wife (thus the drama). Is each man questioning the whole institution of matrimony with similar conclusions? Or is it just me? After all, I have personally been twice married and twice divorced. Maybe I’m projecting? …

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. Some people have found George Bowling endearing; he isn’t. Orwell draws his caricature sharply. He is human, not a grotesque. But consider the point where George is laid on his bed and considering how women let themselves go after marriage; conning men to get to the altar and then suddenly rushing into middle age and dowdiness. This is from a man who is 45, fat, has false teeth and bad skin and wears vulgar clothes. Orwell is laying on the irony with a trowel. Late in the book George sees an old girlfriend from nearly 30 years previously. She has changed greatly and he barely recognises her (he inwardly reflects that she has aged badly without making the jump that she has not recognised him). George does have moments of clarity when he almost grasps how ridiculous he is, but not quite.This first section is very reminiscent of H.G Wells, in his social novels such as “Kipps” or “The History of Mr. Polly”. We know that as a boy, Eric Blair did admire H.G. Wells, to the point of him being a favourite author. He enjoyed those novels, because they evoked particular aspects of life in England before the First World War, which made George Orwell recall comparable experiences of his own. Perhaps George Orwell had those novels in mind as a template. Their protagonists are very similar, although George Bowling tells his own story. George Bowling is a fat, married, middle-aged (45 years old) insurance salesman, with 'two kids and a house in the suburbs'. Orwell sen ne muhteşem bir yazarsın! Kitabın daha ilk sayfalarında bu cümleyi kurduyor Orwell, en ünlü eserleri 1984 ve Hayvan Çiftliği olsa da (ki onları çok severim), geri planda kalan eserleri de onlar kadar iyiymiş bu kitapla bunu daha iyi anladım. Kitabı okudukça sevdim, sevdikçe okudum. War! I started thinking about it again. It's coming soon, that's certain. But who's afraid of war? That's to say, who's afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? 'You are,' you say. Yes, I am, and so's anybody who's ever seen them. But it isn't the war that matters, it's the after-war. The world we're going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It's all going to happen. Independently of the book’s narrative logic, it seems appropriate, inevitable even, that Orwell should have arrived at this dead-end destination.

George che nella prima parte ricordava, nella seconda ritorna dove è cresciuto. Se mi venisse chiesto di declinare il mio concetto di “tristezza” credo che mi avvarrei delle sue parole The female characters are not well drawn and are feminine stereotypes, although Orwell does capture the monotony of suburban life. Usually Orwell’s female characters are more rounded (Julia in 1984), but the focus here is firmly on George Bowling and he certainly perceives the women around him in two-dimensional ways. Orwell is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and the satirical novella Animal Farm (1945) — they have together sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author. His 1938 book Homage to Catalonia, an account of his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, together with numerous essays on politics, literature, language, and culture, have been widely acclaimed. Orwell kitabı çok yalın bir dille kaleme almış, süslü cümleler yok ama anlatılan onca düşünce var. Kitapta savaşın insanlar ve ekonomi üzerindeki etkilerini görüyor ve orta sınıfa mensup bir sigortacının ağzından okuyoruz. Kitabın dili öyle güzel ki, hem anlatmak istediğini anlatıyor hem de sizi hiç yormuyor, akıp gidiyor. Kitapta hem sistem eleştirisi, hem hayata bakış, yaşamın evreleri, savaş.. bir çok konu işleniyor ve hepsi de kitaba öyle güzel yerleştirilmiş ki, okuduktan sonra ufkunuzun açıldığını hissediyor ve yazarın değindiği noktalarla ilgili düşünmeye başladığınızı fark ediyorsunuz. In an article written during the war in 1944, entitled The English People, Orwell wrote: “The English are great lovers of flowers, gardening and ‘nature’ but this is merely a part of their vague aspiration towards an agricultural life. In the main they see no objection to ‘ribbon development’ or to the filth and chaos of the industrial towns. They see nothing wrong in scattering the woods with paper bags and filling every pool and stream with tin cans and bicycle frames.” Orwell is here reflecting on the tendency of the English to turn their green and pleasant land into a pig-sty exactly as Bowling does in Coming Up For Air. Is that a betrayal of their country – though – or in a perverse way an expression of an enduring spirit?Some readers might find it surprising that Orwell had a bit of sympathy for the chap trying to get away. Orwell was a man, after all, who in his late 30s volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War when he didn't have to, who seemingly couldn't conceive of an individual life without a certain responsibility to civilization as whole- a man I find morally admirable but for the same reason intimidating. But there's nevertheless some additional evidence of this sympathy in "Inside the Whale", Orwell's critical but not unsympathetic essay about Henry Miller- ostensibly a review of Tropic of Cancer, it turns into a reflection on Miller's worldview: I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense of obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human — a prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit throughout his work.The desire to get inside the whale- or to admit that you are already inside it, as Orwell refuses to condemn Miller for admitting- was understandable then, and it's understandable now. Who wants to think about this effing Coronavirus? Who wants to think about the warming of the planet, the concentration camps in China, and all the things that we don't seem to have any control over as individuals? It’s 1938, and George Bowling is a middle-aged insurance salesman. The son of a struggling seed merchant, he has risen to life in a London suburb, where he lives with his wife and kids on a typical middle-class street.

Let’s break down Bowling’s humble break-out plans into bullet-points. He wants to escape from a number of things that would make sense to the man in the street: 1) He wants to escape from his wife and family commitments 2) He wants to get away from the rat-race and the anxious financial concerns of the Thirties that afflict all working-men, not only married ones. 3) He wants to flee suburbia and what it represents, a kind of “mental squalor”, as he puts it and 4) He wants to get away from thoughts of Hitler and the world war he knows is just around the corner.And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up, and the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for ever.” Like the fish-filled pool into which George Bowling peers as a boy in rural Oxfordshire, maybe it has hidden depths. That’s not the world though that awaits the grown-up, married-with-kids Bowling, who sneers with dismay during his first attempt to go fishing: Very funny, as well as invigoratingly realistic ... Nineteen Eighty-Four is here in embryo. So is Animal Farm ... not many novels carry the seeds of two classics as well as being richly readable themselves' The English People was itself a partial rehash of elements from his better known 1941 pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn, in which the oft-quoted line appears:

There is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature.” Before turning to Coming Up For Air, let me briefly trace that pattern through the preceding works of fiction. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself – to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being underground. He liked to think about the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning… It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself for ever.” George Bowling is an unhappily married, middle-aged insurance salesman and social conformist. One day, after an unexpected windfall of cash, he embarks on a sabbatical journey to his childhood home hoping to find a respite from his miserable existence and to re-discover the mythical ’Walden Pond’ of his youth. But, much to his dismay, George discovers that every touchstone of his upbringing has been obliterated by urban sprawl and development.

Açıkçası bu kitap kütüphanemde aylardır bekliyordu. Bir iki defa elimde gezdirdim ama tam anlamıyla canım istemediği için bıraktım. Neden sonra bir iştahla bu kitabı aradım rafların arasında ve elime almam ile bitirmem bir oldu demek isterdim ama araya hastalık girdiği için birkaç gün ertelendi kitabın bitişi ve bu inceleme yazısı. Ognuno di noi ha un ricordo struggente della propria giovinezza, quella di George fu interrotta niente meno che dalla Grande Guerra ed ora, mentre ricorda, il mondo sta andando ad ampie falcate verso il secondo tragico conflitto mondiale, ed ora, mentre leggo, Hamas ha attaccato Israele e probabilmente molti dei ventenni che lo hanno fatto, nemmeno hanno mai sentito parlare di guerre mondiali, hanno solo sentito parlare dei loro territori invasi. Nereden ve nasıl başlasam bilemiyorum. Öncelikle tek sözcükle özetleyeyim de. Mükemmel! Gerçekten mükemmel bir kitaptı. Hayvan Çiftliği ve 1984 ile tanınan George Orwell'in bence ilk okunması gereken eseri. Çünkü zekasını, sözcüklerle oynama becerisini ve muhteşem bir yazarın sinyalini veren çok güzel bir eser bu. In this final section George Bowling remembers the slow decline of his father’s seed business, mainly because a large attractive store belonging to a successful chain had opened nearby. George’s father had no idea why his business was failing, when he had always managed to break even before, but he died before he was made bankrupt. This painful memory has made George particularly sensitive and resistant to what he sees as the marching ravages of so-called “progress”.