George Orwell - coming Up For Air
Review by: Stephen Kearney
It’s funny how you can get introduced to an author. Just like meeting new people, it is, outside of a formalised learning environment, mainly a random occurrence. It is one of life’s endless “ifs and buts” – “if I hadn’t stayed for another beer, I’d never have met her and I’d still be unmarried” or “if I hadn’t stayed for another beer, I’d have left the pub before the bomb went off and I’d still have my legs”. The 1998 film, Sliding Doors, is centred on this very aspect of life. A young woman, returning home early after just being fired from her job, momentarily delayed, misses a tube train by literally two seconds, but, as any pre-Covid London tube user will tell you, it’s not long a long wait to the next one – only this time there won’t be a next one due to a ‘suspension of service’. So, she takes a taxi instead and is presently back at home in the loving embrace of her boyfriend. Now the tape gets rewound and this time she avoids the two second delay and just catches the train and gets back home – in time to catch her boyfriend in bed with his ex. You can guess the rest.
In 1973 my life in Dublin had disintegrated – even more than it usually does, before anyone gets it in. I headed to London to get lost – and there is no better place for getting lost. I met up with a pal from the old place and the old days and, among other things, he put me on to George Orwell. Of course even I had heard of George Orwell as in 1984, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia….. well, that was it! This pal put me on to his other works which helped cushion my personal disintegration. You can get lost in a good book. A really good book is one you’re looking forward to continuing reading when you get home from work. Coming Up For Air is one such. I first read it in 1973 in a filthy squat in a, once grand, filthy terrace in, get this, Notting Hill Gate. The terrace has been long demolished. The grandness is back, the squalor and the squatters have long gone, along with the terrace, but the memory of that book hasn’t. Ultimately this is a review of a read from 1973, reread about 20 years later.
Coming Up For Air, Orwell’s only first person novel, is related by George Bowling. An insurance salesman, looking to all the world like respectable success, he reveals that behind that facade there lurks a very unhappy man. At the age of 45 he feels himself trapped in a loveless marriage and a future without hope. He is suffering from what we might today call a mid life crisis in a poignantly told tale with a light sprinkling of humour and sharp observation.
The man’s problems are mounting. He’s growing increasingly worried about the outbreak of war (the book was published in 1939 – and Orwell himself had been confidently predicting a war since 1936). But it is his home life that bothers him more. After only a few years of marriage, he realised that his wife, Hilda, is an utterly joyless member of the human race, and a frump to boot. He wishes he had never married her. He even whimsically pondered murdering but held back because, he says, “the police would always know it was you who did it” continuing “no matter how good your alibi, they always know it was you who did it”, concluding gloomily “when a wife is murdered the first person always suspected is the husband – which gives you a pretty good idea of what society thinks of marriage.”
I wonder which George is speaking here – Bowling or Orwell. Some critics suggest that Orwell harboured a streak of misogyny. Another of his novels, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a third person job, states that for every man there is a woman like a millstone around his neck dragging him down, down to a semi-detached suburban in Putney. Note the similarity of the theme: a man trapped by woman into a dead end, but ‘respectable’, life in the new ribbon developments that are spreading out across the land. It almost seems at some level Orwell hates the modern world, believing that no man would willingly submit himself to its confines and value structure unless lured by a radar-jamming woman. In addition to his apparent misogyny, Orwell seems to reveal some of his class based attitudes. We learn, for instance, that George Bowling had an older brother, Joe Bowling, who although not very bright “therefore he had a slight proficiency in mechanics”. The corollary of that observation is that anyone who is good at mechanics cannot be very bright. Manual work, regardless of its complexity or importance, is the preserve of the intellectually limited. This was a widely held view among the middle and upper classes at the time, a view that continued well beyond this time. I’m ashamed to say, it was a view with which I was brought up too – not that it was ever openly admitted. We just “knew”.
But back to the travails of George – Bowling this time. It’s not just his wife, of course. He sees a world around him that prizes possessions and careers over everything, the pursuers of this new creed, commuting back and forth to their new homes in the new suburbs, situated somewhere in the vast swathes of ribbon development, the mazes of modernity. This was, in fact, the true reality for many. There was an enormous expansion in housebuilding, both public (council) and private, in Britain in the inter war years. Whole swathes of London, for instance, were built in this period, marking the emergence for the first time of mass home ownership as we would understand it today. This, then is the world of George Bowling. Ironically, in rereading this book around 1990, I was very much reminded of the Britain ushered in by Margaret Thatcher. The parallels are uncanny; the rush for home ownership, the glorification of the suburbs, the pursuit of thrusting careers, the abandonment of earlier ways and methods, the acquisition of possessions, the ownership of a car and the desire for a new conformity. Indeed, apart from the makes and models of some cars, it is easy to confuse Bowling’s 1930s Britain with Thatcher’s of the 1980s.
George Bowling is not a happy man. Although apparently successful with a good job, a house in the suburbs and a car, he feels alienated by the modern world and what it has become. His loveless relationship with his cold, distant and mean spirited wife hardly helps matters. Their marriage, despite the two children, has descended, like many, into a relationship of convenience – like keeping a roof over your head. I used to know a guy whose parents’ marriage was just like that; they used to fight a lot until they realised that not fighting simply took less energy and that was the way they continued their lives – and it seems that’s the way Mr and Mrs Bowling continued theirs. These were people who simply did not respect each other. She simply retreated into a very small group dominated by a pushy woman who had a knack of finding free ‘opportunities’, their lack of cost being the governing factor in their selection. This would lead to the group of three, attending various (free) lectures, George Bowling tells us with some relish, which went completely over their heads yet somehow believing that they were ‘improving their minds’.
There can be fun in scorn but it’s hardly a solution. There is no real escape for Bowling: he doesn’t much like the modern world and his situation in it. He sees no real way out and like so many other fellow trapped, he starts thinking about his past. We learn a lot about his earlier life as he muses. Born in 1894, raised in Lower Binfield, a fictional but typical Home Counties rural village, his story was typical of so many born on the cusp of massive change and social upheaval. His parents, very much products of the Victorian age pre-dated that change. They were simple, untravelled, hard-working, thrifty and modest folk, who ran the village seed shop and kept all the rules all of their lives, firmly believing that they were doing the right thing, earning them a certain standing in the local community at the time. Yet despite doing the right thing and keeping all the rules, their once successful seed shop was in gradual decline, facing modern competition from a world they increasingly could not recognise. He comments, with a combination of sadness and relief that they never lived long enough to see that all their values by which they set such store, turned out to be so much junk.
We go on to learn of his boyhood and more about Lower Binfield, a village of 2,000 people; we learn of some of the people in it, of the young local girl who looked after him when he was a child, and later on, we learn of Elsie, his first girlfriend, whom he imagines is the love of his live. George Bowling tells us about all the other things in between, the happy childhood, the boyhood scrapes, the adventures and the surprises and his love of fishing. Sadly, this experience of childhood and the warm and happy embrace of Elsie’s love, and the feeling of the local community, is brought to an abrupt end with the Great War. He leaves Lower Binfield and never returns. And now, 25 years later he wants to go back. To escape the pointless quagmire of his present life, he wants to go back to the place of his happy memories, his happy times, to come up for air.
Taking a few days holiday, but telling Hilda, his wife, he has to go to Birmingham on business, he heads to Lower Binfield to once again feel the way he used to. Full of optimism and riding high on nostalgia, he arrives in the village, in the village of his happy childhood. Only it doesn’t exist quite the way it used to. For a start, Lower Binfield is no longer a village of 2,000 people but a town of 25,000, sporting new factories, shops and houses where none existed before, another victim of the accursed ribbon development. He expects that his family name, the legacy of his father’s once successful business, will at least evoke a resonance among the locals if not actual respect. It does neither. It does nothing. No-one remembers it. His parents’ contribution to village life is all but forgotten. It might as well never have happened.
As George Bowling wanders around the old centre, desperately trying to find something or someone on whom he can attach a memory, he encounters a toothless old hag. With a certain shock, powerfully transmitted to the reader, he realises that the old hag standing before him was once the lively young girl who used to look after him when he was a child. Worse was to follow. He accidentally encounters Elsie, his first girlfriend and follows her to a small shop operated by herself and her husband. Everything that used to attract him to her has long disappeared; the sweet smell of youth has been replaced by a grey haired frump. But still, taking a chance on contact, he enters the shop as a customer, wondering what will happen. She doesn’t even recognise him.
All the places that once brought him joy as a child have either disappeared, been turned into rubbish dumps, destroyed or built over. He realises he is on a fool’s errand. George Bowling’s past is dead and he knows it.
After a few days of searching for something that can never be found, he returns home to his family where his wife discovers, with a triumphant flourish, that he was never in Birmingham at all, coming to the conclusion that her husband was with another woman. He actually thought of telling her the truth, that he was just trying to find a connection with his past when he used to feel happiness and freedom, but he decided not to bother, knowing that such an idea would be way beyond her comprehension, utterly removed from her own enclosed, limited and joyless world. It was simply easier to pretend he was with that other woman and endure the consequences. His bid for freedom, even if only the freedom of his youth, had failed. Life would simply grind on as before. We can feel the life of George Bowling, trapped by economic circumstances, dribble away down the plug-hole to an existence of pointless mediocrity.
How do we look back on our pasts? What do we feel about the lives we have lived? Do we simply pull down the shutters on to the past and pretend we’re always “going forward”? Or do we create some imaginary Shangri-la, an imaginary existence that can never actually be realised but can, at the same time, offer us some hope?
Some years ago, RTE made a documentary about what had become of the Irish who had emigrated in the 50’s and 60’s to work on the roads and the building sites of Britain. Two old men told their tales, interspersed with a few tears, of how they had built the country and now they were on the scrapheap. Their dingy, north London bedsit, featured a shrine to Ireland, the tricolour forming a backdrop to the other symbols of their once native land that they left as little more than boys all those years ago. They worshipped that land. Now, having dug London’s roads myself once in an all Irish environment, I am quite familiar with that mentality. But my (English) partner isn’t. She wondered, quite reasonably, why these men did not return to the land of their youth where everything was so wonderful – do a George Bowling in other words. I suspect they were a step ahead of him. They didn’t go back because the Ireland of these men’s imagination never existed: it was never wonderful; it was poor and backward which is why they had to emigrate in the first place – and alcohol dulled their pain for the following four decades. Even the reality of the Ireland they left behind no longer exists in any case and the people who live there now, wouldn’t be able to relate to them, relics from another age. They’d be simply, an embarrassment. Far better to dream about a wonderful land that is forever waiting for you (“the green, green grass of home”?) than to find out it doesn’t actually exist, as George Bowling found out to his cost.
Coming Up For Air – review © Stephen Kearney November 2020