Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

Coming Up for Air by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this mild bildungsroman Orwell reminisces the blissful memories of childhood, dwells on the ennui of marriage and middle-age angst, loss of innocence – as in Gilmour’s and Waters’

When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look, but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown, the dream is gone
I have become comfortably numb

and addresses his favourite tropes – poverty, war, totalitarian regimes (fascism, communism).
The reader can see Orwell’s evolution of thought towards his doctrine which culminates in 1984. He writes simply yet masterfully

Just a prison with the cells all in a row. A line of semidetached torture-chambers were the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and the wife riding him like a nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches.

Everyone that isn’t scared stiff of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something. Jews sweating when they think of Hitler. It crossed my mind that the little bastard with the spiky moustache was probably a damn sight more scared for his job that the girl was. Probably got a family to support. And perhaps, who knows, at home he’s meek and mild, grows cucumbers in the back garden, lets his wife sit on him and the kids pull his moustache.

His take on processed foods

Everything comes out of a tin, or it’s hauled out of a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube. No comfort, no privacy. Tall stools to sit on, a kind of narrow ledge to eat off, mirrors all around you. A sort of propaganda floating round, mixed up with the noise of the radio, to the effect that food doesn’t matter, comfort doesn’t matter, nothing matters except slickness and shininess and streamlining. Everything’s streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler’s keeping for you.

You know the smell churches have, a peculiar, dank, dusty, decaying, sweetish sort of smell. There’s a touch of candle-grease in it, and perhaps a whiff of incense and a suspicion of mice, and on Sunday mornings it’s a bit overlaid by yellow soap and serge dresses, but predominantly, it’s that sweet dusty, musty smell that’s like the smell of death and life mixed up together. It’s powdered corpses. Really.

A bureaucratic Kafkaesque nightmare that could be something out of Catch-22, a scenario that Milo Minderbinder would thrive in

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. It was like a great flood rushing you along to death, and suddenly it would shoot you up some backwater where you’d find yourself doing incredible and pointless things and drawing extra pay for them. There were labour battalions making roads across the desert that didn’t lead anywhere, there were chaps marooned on oceanic islands to look out for German cruisers which had been sunk years earlier, there were Ministries of this and that with armies of clerks and typists which went on existing years after their function had ended, by a kind of inertia. People were shoved into meaningless jobs and then forgotten by the authorities for years on end.

Echoes of Yossarian – albeit a matured Yossarian

If the war didn’t happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking. After that unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and unquestionable, like a pyramid, You knew it was just a balls-up.

A queer trade, anti-Fascism. This fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do before Hitler came along? And what’ll he do if Hitler ever disappears? Same question applies to doctors, detectives, ratcatchers and so forth, of course.

Here, the British seemingly living in blissful ignorance, denial of the impending malign influence of Nazism

‘Tell me, porteous, what do you think of Hitler?’
‘Hitler? This German person? My dear fellow! I don’tthink of him.’
‘But the trouble is he’s going to bloody well make us think about him before he’s finished.’
‘I see no reason for paying any attention to him. A mere adventurer. These people come and go. Ephemeral, purely, ephemeral.’

He paints such a vivid picture of something so mundane as a smouldering pile of ashes

You know the look of wood fire on a still day. The sticks that have gone all white ash and still keep the shape of sticks, and under the ash the kind of vivid red that you can see into. It’s curious that a red ember looks more alive, gives you more a feeling of life, than any living thing. There’s something about it, a kind of intensity, a vibration – I can’t think of the exact words. But it lets you know that you’re alive yourself. It’s the spot on the picture that makes you notice everything else.

I don’t mind towns growing, so long as they do grow and don’t merely spread like gravy over a tablecloth.

So what is the title all about?

You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air! Like the big sea-turtles when they come paddling up to the surface, stick their noses out and fill their lings with a great gulp before they sink down again among the seaweed and the octopuses. We’re all stifling at the bottom of a dustbin, but I’d found the way to the top.
…
Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches up to the stratosphere.

Such artistry!

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