Synopsis

George Bowling, the hero of this comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.

Amazon Review

Insurance salesman George "Fatty" Bowling lives with his humorless wife and their two irritating children in a dull house in a tract development in the historyless London suburb of West Bletchley. The year is 1938; doomsayers are declaring that England will be at war again by 1941.

When George bets on an unlikely horse and wins, he finds himself with a little extra cash on his hands. What should he spend it on? "The alternatives, it seemed to me, were either a week-end with a woman or dribbling it quietly away on odds and ends such as cigars and double whiskeys." But a chance encounter with a poster in Charing Cross sets him off on a tremendous journey into his own memories--memories, especially, of a boyhood spent in Lower Binfield, the country village where he grew up. His recollections are pungent and detailed. Touch by touch, he paints for us a whole world that is already nearly lost: a world not yet ruled by the fear of war and not yet blighted by war's aftermath: <blockquote> 1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir! It'll never come again. I don't mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling you've either had and don't need to be told about, or haven't had and won't ever have the chance to learn. </blockquote> Alas, George finds that even Lower Binfield has been darkened by the bomber's shadow.

Readers of 1984 will recognize Orwell's desperate insistence on the importance of the individual, of memory, of history, and of language; and they will find in Fatty Bowling one of Orwell's most engaging creations--a warm, witty, thinking, remembering Everyman in a world that is fast learning not to think and not to remember, and thus swiftly losing its mind. --Daniel Hintzsche

Review

A very different dish of tea from his earlier Animal Farm and recent Nineteen Kighty Four both of which instigated aroused controversy, is this book which was published in England before the war. Prophetic in its atmosphere, it is the total recall of George Bowling, 45, which is started by his set of new false teeth and some money he has won on the horses. The morning's events help him envision what will come with Hitler's threats growing stronger, lead him to think of his youth with special intensity and review the sort of secure, continuous life that went with World War I which took him out of the grocery business, turned him loose among books, inspired his thinking. The mental squalor of his life thereafter with Hilda and their two children and his present doubts as to what is coming - and the 17 quid - send him on a secret visit to his old home. It in turn offers only failure as an antidote for the country has turned into town, no one knows or remembers him or his family - everything is disillusion. In London again with the knowledge earned that there is no going back, that what is to come - horrible as it must be - cannot be stopped. Honesty in the picture of a man neither highbrow nor a fool of a poky milleu and the mingy situations of living, of the downhill path to a ghastly flux, this in its backward, introspective look offers a nostalgic, sincere appreciation of a way of life that can never be again, and will prove something new for his followers. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Coming Up for Air

Author George Orwell

Publication date June 1939

Coming Up for Air is a novel by George Orwell, published before World War II and predicting that conflict. It is written in the first person, with George Bowling, the forty-five-year-old protagonist, telling the reader his life story.

The social and material changes experienced by Bowling since childhood make his past seem as distant as the biblical character Og, King of Bashan, whom he remembers from Sundays at church. A news-poster about the contemporary King Zog of Albania, along with 'some sound in the traffic or the smell of horse dung or something' triggers the connection in Bowling's mind and his subsequent 'trip down memory lane'. Orwell's writing tends to show a real relish for pessimism and squalor; nevertheless, Bowling expresses a nostalgic melancholy of some tenderness. The novel presents an absorbingly realistic evocation of what is now called 'a mid-life crisis'.

What is most notable is not so much that Orwell predicted the start of World War II, which was becoming expected, but that he foresaw the transformation of society which would succeed it. Indeed, just a few years after the publication of this book, pre-war England was almost as different as George Bowling's Edwardian childhood.

The themes of the book are nostalgia, the folly of trying to go back and recapture past glories and the easy way the dreams and aspirations of one's youth can be smothered by the humdrum routine of work, marriage and getting old. George Bowling is not a very sympathetic character ?he is a fat, middle-aged insurance salesman who dislikes his wife and children and who would betray what few principles he has for a couple of pints or a good night out with a prostitute.

However, like many Orwell protagonists, his saving virtues are perceptiveness and candour, especially regarding himself.

Orwell wrote the novel while spending six months in Morocco.