Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On picking up the book I thought that the Aspidistra was some sort of iconic revolutionary flag, like the Indian “Tricolour” or the “Stars and Stripes,” but it turned out to be a mundane genus of flowering plants in the family Asparagaceae. Aspidistra elatior is common worldwide as a foliage house plant that is very tolerant of neglect. Species of Aspidistra can also be grown in shade outside, where they are generally hardy to sub-zero temperatures. They are perennial herbaceous plants growing from rhizomes. The leaves are either solitary or are grouped in small "tufts" of two to four. Each leaf has a long stalk (petiole) and a blade with many veins. The flowering stem (scape) is usually very short so that the flowers appear low down among the leaves. The fleshy flowers are bell-, urn- or cup-shaped. Aspidistras can withstand deep shade, neglect, dry soil, hot temperatures and polluted indoor air (from burning coal or natural gas) but are sensitive to bright sunlight. As a popular foliage houseplant, Aspidistra elatior became popular in late Victorian Britain and was so common that it became a "symbol of dull middle-class respectability". In this book, according to the protagonist, it is a symbol of the need of the middle class to maintain respectability


There is no aspect of British life described that I could identify with, yet Orwell’s evocative but simple style is so gripping that one cannot simply put the book down. He is a master word-smith, painting vivid descriptions with his pen.

A nasty raw wind. There was a threatening note in it as it swept over; the first growl of winter’s anger.

In all bookshops there goes on a savage Darwinian struggle in which the works of living men gravitate to eye-level and the works of dead men go up or down – down to Gehenna up to the throne, but always away from any position where they will be noticed. Down in the bottom shelves the ‘classics’, the extinct monsters of the Victorian age, were quietly rotting.

He almost wanted to laugh at them, they were so feeble, so dead-alive, so unappetising. As though anybody could be tempted by those! Like succubi with pimply backsides.

Of all types of human being, only the artist takes it upon him to say that he ‘cannot’ work.

…the sort of dingy, drabby fornication that you can imagine happening between Egyptian mummies after the museum is closed for the night.

All over the darkish drawing-room, aging, discoloured people sat about in couples, discussing symptoms. Their conversation was like the dripping of stalactite to stalagmite. Drip, drip. ‘How is your lumbago?’ saysa stalactite to stalagmite. “I find my Kruschen Salts are doing me good,’ says stalagmite to stalactite, Drip, drip, drip.

Gordon walked up Malkin Hill, rustling instep-deep through the dry drifted leaves. All down the pavement they were strewn, crinkly and golden, like the rustling flakes of some American breakfast cereal, as though the queen of Brobdingnag had upset her packet of Tru-weet Breakfast Crisps won the hillside.

No rich man ever succeeds in disguising himself as a poor man; for money, like murder, will out.

As a rule a dwarf, when malformed, has a full-sized torso and practically no legs. With Mr Cheeseman it was the other way about. His legs were of normal length, but the top half of his body was so short that his buttocks seemed to sprout almost immediately below his shoulder blades. This gave him, in walking, a resemblance to a pair of scissors.

The books were published by special low-class firms and turned out by wretched hacks at the rate of four a year, as mechanically as sausages and with much less skill.

Orwell seems to have inspired the lyrics of Roger Waters

Yes, the war is coming soon. You can’t doubt it when you see the Bovex ads. The electric drills in our streets presage the tattle of machine guns. Only a little while before the aeroplanes come. Zoom – bang! A few tons of TNT to send our civilisation back to hell where it belongs.

The protagonist’s constant hostility towards the long-suffering aspidistra is very evident in the narrative. While attempting to escape the clutches of Mammon in his masochistic journey, he repeatedly encounters his botanical nemesis like a persistent totem

…his eye fell on the aspidistra in its grass-green pot. It was a peculiarly mangy specimen, It had only seven leaves and never seemed to put forth any new ones. Gordon had a sort of secret feud with the aspidistra. Many a time he had furtively attempted to kill it – starving it of water, grinding hot cigarette-ends against its stem, even mixing salt with its earth. But the beastly things are practically immortal> In almost any circumstances they can preserve a wilting, diseased existence. Gordon stood up and deliberately wiped his kerosiny leaves on the aspidistra leaves.

His animosity does not decrease with time

The aspidistra stood in its pot, dull green, ailing, pathetic in its sickly ugliness. As he sat down, he pulled it towards him and looked at it meditatively. “I’ll beat you yet, you b---,” he whispered to the dusty leaves.

It was an aspidistra. It gave him a bit of a twinge to see it. Even here, in this final refuge! Hast thou found me, O mine enemy? But it was a poor weedy specimen – indeed, it was obviously dying.

The seemingly immortal shrub responds to a change in the weather

The aspidistra, it turned out, had not died after all; the withered leaves had dropped off it, but it was putting forth a couple of dull green shoots near its base.

The protagonist’s antipathy seemingly gets attenuated

They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They ‘kept themselves respectable’ – kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do.

As he yields

’I expect we’ll settle down all right, though. With a house of our own and a pram and an aspidistra.

Finally, an epiphany dawns

The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.

One small but profound phrase

Poverty is spiritual halitosis

There’s so much more to George Orwell than Animal Farm and 1984.

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