Coming Up For Air, book review. (George Orwell)

If you like books about absolutely nothing but are so beautifully written that you end up speeding through the narrative as if it's the most exciting literary experience you've ever encountered then read, Coming Up For Air by George Orwell.

Our main protagonist, George Bowling is forty-five years old, weighs too much, doesn't much like is wife, thinks his kids are a nuisance and wishes he were young, so he could spend his days fishing.

As a traveling salesman he's reasonably successful, pulling in five to seven pounds a week - it's 1939 by the way - but he has an undeniable passion for his past and what could have been.

A large chunk of this novel is about Bowling's past and is written in a way that, in spite the fact that I could never truly comprehend what living in England was like over a hundred years ago, felt familiar. The author's ability to wrap you up in George Bowling's childhood, his father's work in the shop selling seeds and animal feed, his mother keeping house and what school was like were all superb and made me wonder if there was an autobiographical element to this book.

When war comes, George Bowling signs up and goes to France but is injured so returns home to convalesce before being sent to a small village in Cornwall where he spends a somewhat idyllic few years looking after a supply depot that doesn't exist. After the war he chances across one of his superior officers from the army whilst in London and lands himself a job which sets him on the road to all that follows: a three-bedroom house in the suburbs, a mortgage, a wife, kids and the monotony that is everyday life.

That monotony however is broken when George Bowling wins a bet and, having a whole seventeen pounds of undisclosed cash to his name, decides to take a holiday - telling his wife he's going on a business trip - he head back to his childhood town.

But, the shop his father ran is now a tearoom, the secret pond so full of fish when he was a young boy is no more, and the fields in which he absently wandered all those years before have been built upon and, due to the flashback nature of this book, how much we've been told about George Bowling's childhood and the skill of the author, you can't help but feel a deep sadness, a longing for what came before, and it emanates from the page.

So, Coming Up For Air is a superbly written book about the absolutely ordinary but a book I can and will heartily recommend. Four Star.

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