Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product Information

He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family, and this aspect comes through strongly in George Bowling’s memories too. Hilda Bowling, his wife, belongs to the poverty-stricken officer class of an Anglo-Indian family who after marriage has settled-down into a depressed lifeless middle-aged frump.

But when he arrives home, George finds his cover has been blown, and Hilda knows he was not on a work trip. It made me wonder how Orwell managed to so credibly know, and be able to relate, a childhood in a small rural community. One day, after winning some money from a bet at the races, George steals away from his family to visit the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before.Nonetheless, Orwell perfectly illustrates that sooner or later youth gets smothered by mundane, unvarying routines of work, marriage and children. This results in a string of memories from his childhood, and readers are immediately transported to Lower Binfield, George’s own little Garden of Eden. This is of vital importance to Orwell as he believed that ‘by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies, and…toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable’.

His unique political allegory Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age.

Hemmed in on every side ̶ by job, home, history – Bowling neither comprehends the political world nor tries to change it. George Bowling feels vaguely dissatisfied with his life overall; feels that he needs to “come up for air”. At perhaps one house in fifty some anti-social type who'll probably end in the workhouse has painted his front door blue instead of green.Ancora una volta Orwell predice il futuro, analogamente al controllo costante del Big Brother preconizzanto in 1984 e che diventa ogni giorno più attuale. Il problema di Orwell è uno solo: 1984 è un capolavoro tale da eclissare tutti i suoi primi lavori letterari degli anni Trenta.