The Clergyman's Daughter by George Orwell

A Clergyman's Daughter: George Orwell by George Orwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Orwell described this book (his second published novel) disparagingly as a ‘silly potboiler,’ but then he also labelled Animal Farm as ‘a little squib!’ The tale has his favourite tropes – the impoverished and the disenfranchised – surviving on the periphery of society. He paints an accurate subjective description of poverty since it since it was his subjective experience as in Down and Out in Paris and London

She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had some back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream.

It was a life that wore you out, used up every ounce of your energy, and kept you profoundly, unquestionably happy. In the literal sense of the word, it stupefied you. The long days in the fields, the coarse food and insufficient sleep, the smell of hops and wood smoke, lulled you into an almost beast-like heaviness, Your wits seemed to thicken, just as your skin did, in the rain and sunshine and perpetual fresh air.

His vivid portrayal of nature and humans is underappreciated

Miss Mayfill was very old, so old that on one remembered her as anything but an old woman. A faint scent radiated from her – an ethereal scent, analysable as eau-de-Cologne, mothballs and a sub-flavour of gin.

A momentary spear of sunlight had pierced the clouds. It struck downwards through the leaves of the limes, and a spray of leaves in the doorway gleamed with a transient, matchless green, greener than jade or emerald or Atlantic waters.

The day, which, like some overripe but hopeful widow was playing at seventeen, had been putting on unseasonable April airs, had now remembered that it was August and settled down to be broiling hot.

When he was puzzled or in difficulties, his moustaches seemed to bristle forward, giving him the appearance of a well-meaning but exceptionally brainless prawn.

Certainly not his best book, yet, immensely readable.

View all my reviews