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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Animal Farm, book review. (George Orwell)

It’s been a while since I read this book but I needed something short and punchy to get me back reading again and so it was an obvious choice really.

Many of you will know the story of the uprising at Manor Farm and how the animals’ revolt usurps the farm’s owner, Mr Jones and that there is much rejoicing by those who have taken control but what I had forgotten was just how accurate the author’s prediction of the future was, that all those years ago – written in the mid-1940s remember – he could have guessed that the situation the world finds itself in now is so accurately depicted in this book.

I am of course referring to those regimes that suppress the masses with fear and punish those who choose to oppose with draconian measures but let us not forget ourselves, and this goes for wherever you live, for we are all to some extent, taught to fear – why else would the wealthy and selfish have cleared the supermarkets out at the beginning of the pandemic, if not for fear, queued at petrol stations for hours when they already had half a tank of petrol, gone diligently to their Covid vaccinations (I include myself in that one by the way, for the record), if not for fear - and it is fear and the subsequent suppression of the rights and freedoms of the animals that is the crux of this novel.

It starts in jubilation, the animals having liberated Manor Farm and for a while, a short while, there is harmony but not for long. Before long there are rules, rules that the animals all agree on but then, the pigs begin to take charge, which again is fine because most of the animals can’t read or write, can’t come up with fancy ideas about how to feed themselves through the winter, and so the pigs set the narrative.

The writing here is simple but effective, not a word is wasted or unnecessary and so it is a short book, more novella than novel, so you’ll speed through it, but the power each of those words holds, the images they depict, the subtleties they portray, are superb. You envisage the farm with ease, the windmill as it is built and then destroyed, the animals and their traits: the cat sloping off when work is mentioned, as any cat would, Boxer the Shire horse and Benjamin the donkey, who, due to his vast age has seen it all before, work hard and do virtually nothing in equal measure; the hens, who lay ever more eggs for them only to be sold for money - something all the animals at the beginning had agreed they would never deal with as it is a human vice and creates greed, and Napoleon, their self-appointed leader, surrounding himself with dogs and sowing fear through misinformation; everything that goes wrong apparently is down to the disgruntled and then banished pig, Snowball.

Napoleon and his clan continue to do less but take more, much, much more, and they gradually implement tighter controls on the others for ever greater reward, until Benjamin's doctrine of having seen it all before becomes reality again as Animal Farm becomes Manor Farm once more.

George Orwell was a genius (or he had a time machine) because, after everything I have discussed above and the war in Europe still raging, Animal Farm is as relevant today as the day it was first published, which is kind of scary.

Four and a half stars.

 Don't forget to search my blog for your favourite authors and books and if I haven't read them, message me with your recommendations.