Coming Up for Air

by George Orwell

Book Overview

From George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, Coming Up for Air is the classic, comic novel about the everyday struggles of the common man and a satiric look at the trappings of middle-class... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156196255
• Release Date: October 1969
• Publisher: Mariner Books Classics
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Trolling Sinclair Lewis?

In these reviews someone has compared George Bowling to Winston Smith. I think an even closer comparison would be George Babbitt. The similarities between the two novels is uncanny - the over the hill businessman, ditching the wife for a fishing vacation, the infidelities. Ok novel but pretty much the same book.

Angst Aspects.

This is a book about angst. Societal angst at the ominous clouds of an approaching war and the personal angst of a pointless lifetime slipping away into an irrelevant old age. George Bowling is a moderately successful insurance "tout"... I love the dated English slang in these books..."tout" means salesman. Bowling's thought life is far away from his boring middle class existence in pre-war England. George lives in the Edwardian England of his childhood. A world lost to a modern age of faux tudor building projects...urban sprawl. One day on a pretext, he leaves his home for a dream-like journey to his childhood village only to find the shadows of the world that once was. Shadows erased by an accidential bombing by the RAF during a practice flight which abruptly ends the trip and wakes Bowling from his dream. George is searching for a secret place...a symbol of the untamed...a long overlooked drainage pond teeming with large carp which only he seems to know about. While stationed in France during The First World War he finds another pond in a village abandoned by war and struggles with a comrade to quickly make fishing eqipment only to find out that his unit must move out on short notice. The dream of fishing as a symbol of freedom must be forgoed until later. "Later" comes with the rude realization that a subdivision has been built over the first pond and his dream has been paved over by the modern age. The profane present obliterates the sacred past throughout the book. George travels to the church where much of his childhood was spent, remembers the psalm readings, and notes that the headstones in the churchyard mimic the relationships in the congregation. One of the paradoxes of Orwell was that his secularism seemed to lament the memory of a lost faith. It seems that the "socialist who hated socialism" was also the secularist who was uncomfortable with secularism.The Pilgrim's Progress The book has the strengths and weaknesses of Orwell's other early novels...the backgrounds are convincing, yet the characters exist in a kind of two dimensional Edward Hopper world...shadow figures on a interesting bleak background. This novel is the last written just before WW2; It is worth reading for its time capsule quality. Orwell's true gift was as a journalist, not a novelist, his novels have a descriptive news-like quality that make them interesting time capsules... waiting to be opened and pondered.

Masterpiece

A fat middle-aged salesman goes back to his childhood home to fend off a rising anxiety in prewar Europe, and the result is tragicomedy. One of the best novels I have ever read. Orwell was never better at creating a mood, an atmosphere, a state of mind, than in this book. It is engaging, witty, and powerful. I'm not sure I can say exactly what point Orwell (as opposed to the protagonist) was trying to make in this book, but I find a lot of resonance between his concerns in 1938 with a coming war and mine today. Not just a concern with a war, but a fear of the permanent, sweeping changes that war will bring with it. Combine this with "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" and "Down and Out in Paris and London" and you get a very good look into Orwell's mind, and you can see the architecture behind his better-known books, "1984" and "Animal Farm." But both of those books, however great they are in their own way, are both curiously cold and impersonal. Here, we have Orwell at his warmest and most human. If things made any sense, this is the kind of book that every teenager would read, the way they read (or at least used to read) Vonnegut and Ayn Rand and J.D. Salinger.

The Ultimate Fraud?

Orwell may be perpetuating the ultimate fraud here. His gift as a reporter may just be the talent he needed to...pawn off his own life as fiction.This fabulous novel documents the mid-life crisis of an aging and bloated insurance salesman who vaguely remembers a time when people weren't scared of war and believed that most of life's more visible elements would endure without end.This isn't a comming of age story, its more of a passing of an age story. The miracle here is the incredible emotion the reader feels as "Tubby" recalls his youth and the passing of his parents...events he barely aknowledged as they happened...and while they don't quite haunt him now, he wonders how he lost them.Set in pre-war (WWII) England, the spectre of Hitler and Stalin always loom large in the background as our hero decides to go after the fishing hole he never got back to 20 years ago.It probably doesn't matter whether or not the fishing hole is still there, only that we realized that it needed to be found again.Like all Orwell, as touching and emotional as this effort is, it is never dire or heavy. This is a quick and rewarding read, and, I am guessing, more autobiographical than the author would have us believe.It is a shame that Orwell is known these days only for the monumental works high-school students are forced to read. As unlikely as it seems, the man who penned the brutal "1984" has also written a wonderful collection of light reflections that should not go unread. Consider "Burmese Days" and "A Clergy Man's Daughter" as well.

Orwell's best novel

It's a shame that George Orwell's two best-known novels, "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty Four" are neither one his best novel. The peak of Orwell's fiction is this almost forgotten novel, "Coming Up for Air." Set in the last few years before a World War II that was obviously looming on the horizon, this elegant book memorably chronicles the life of George Bowling and his attempt to escape domesticity and the horrors to come for a few days by visiting his old home town. Every time I reread "Coming Up for Air," I wonder what Orwell might have achieved if he had lived longer and had not been as ill as he was in the ten years that remained to him. If all you've read of Orwell is his two "famous" novels, you owe it to yourself to read this.

Before 1984 - and even better than it.

Imagine Winston Smith in 1938. 1984 is a long way off yet. But he can see it coming, can taste it in the putrid plastic sausages and flavourless, fetid factory beer. The people with the jackboots - in Germany, in Russia, in England, everywhere - will soon have their hammers out, smashing faces, smashing ideas, smashing a way of life. But it's not Winston Smith, it's George Bowling. And before the world comes crashing down around his ears, he tries to find back that part of his life when it was always summer, when there wasn't a care in the world, when there was just bright hope, and fishing, and endless lazy days. Of course, it wasn't there anymore. The men with the jackboots and hammers had been preceded by the men with bulldozers and pre-packaged, pre-digested pork pies. And maybe that world had never existed in the first place. But the journey we take with George Bowlings, back and forth between his childhood and the 1984 that waits round the corner, between his suburban family prison and his childhood home, is perhaps the most involving, unsettling and mesmerising Orwell has ever taken us on. I love Animal Farm and 1984. Coming Up For Air is better.