Tag Archives: 1984

Book review

Julia, by Sandra Newman, 2023

My first review of 2025 is of Sandra Newman’s compelling Julia, a retelling of the events of George Orwell’s 1984 from the perspective of Winston Smith’s young lover, whom he betrays in the novel’s bitter climax in Room 101 “‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'”

Which poses the very simple question as to whether 1984 needs to be retold from Julia’s perspective. The source novel is told from Winston’s point of view. Through Winston (and bearing in mind his relationship with her is quite short and comprises a few snatched moments and afternoons) we learn a little about her background and childhood, her life as a mechanic in the Fiction Department of the Ministry of Truth, and her living arrangements, sharing a hostel room with thirty other young women.

Julia sent me back to 1984 to try and ascertain how much was the author’s creation, filling in the gaps left by Orwell’s account, and how much was based on the source material. I was surprised at how much the original novel does actually tell us about Julia – she certainly isn’t the two dimensional character some critics would have you believe, and I don’t think she necessarily needed to be re-imagined by this novel to be made more believeable or rounded. Of course the original novel doesn’t contain her full life story or her internal monologue – Winston’s point of view narration precludes this. More honestly, Winston isn’t that interested in Julia’s background or history. Their relationship is not simply one of an older man being sexually attracted to a younger, more independent woman – Winston is genuinely interested in Julia’s ideas and is guided by her in acts of rebellion other than ‘sex-crime’ – “In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, ‘just to keep people frightened’. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing.”

A lot of the critical commentary on Julia is based on the assumption or claim that the original novel is in some way unfair to her. The Guardian put it this way: “This ambitious retelling from Julia’s point of view gives Winston Smith’s lover the agency she lacked. ” Is this fair? Did Orwell have a ‘women problem’? And does 1984 underplay Julia’s role, reducing her to a sexual partner and victim, requiring this attempt to rehabilitate her? Certainly women play only minor roles in most of his earlier novels, and the one exception, Dorothy in A Clergyman’s Daughter, is a largely unconvincing portrait used principally as an avatar for Orwell to recycle some of his journalism. But I think there is a case to made for Julia being one of his most fully-rounded female characters. She is independent, brave, forthright, and kind. The Julia we are introduced to in Newman’s novel is very closely modelled on Orwell’s original – Newman has been very respectful to the source material, and only made one significant change. Fairly early in in the novel Julia is recruited into the Thought Police, and in addition to her relationship with Winston she is instructed to seduce a number of other Outer Party members and encourage them to commit thought- and sex-crimes.

The idea that Orwell’s version of Julia lacks agency is unfair and wrong – it is Julia who initiates the affair with Winston, finds them somewhere to go to have sex, and has previously had many other lovers. She is a strong woman who knows what she wants and is perfectly willing to take calculated risks. Newman’s Julia is not significantly more independent than Orwell’s – arguably her early recruitment into the Thought Police actually reduces her agency. From that point she is compelled to follow their instructions and cannot freely pursue her own choices.

Day to day life in Airstrip One is vividly described in 1984. These descriptions would have been painfully familiar to Orwell’s original audience in a Britain only slowly emerging from the hardships of the Second World War. Newman builds upon this portrait, giving more detail on the petty humiliations that young women have to face. She describes the Party’s ArtSem (artificial insemination) programme which is used as cover when women fall pregnant outside of marriage and other aspects of women’s lives which the original novel did not describe or consider. Overall the Airstrip One she describes is vividly recognisable and very faithful to Orwell’s portrait.

As long as Julia remains safely within the guide rails of the source material, the novel remains on track, but the text fails to convince as soon as it goes beyond the undeniably bleak ending of 1984. Newman understandably chooses to omit Orwell’s suggestion that Julia has been lobotomised during her torture and goes on to suggest that the end of Big Brother’s rein of terror is imminent. This is nowhere suggested in the source text – quite the opposite, Orwell suggests that Big Brother is unbeatable (although the appendix on Newspeak implies that one day IngSoc’s rule comes to an end).

Orwell’s handling of Winston’s torture, and in particular the climax of this process in Room 101, is a very hard read. Newman takes this several steps further – the descriptions of Julia’s abuse is really hard to stomach. Orwell would not have been allowed by his publishers to be this explicit, but sometimes less is more. Newman doesn’t blink and follows through with the implication that the ultimate torture conceived for Winston is applied instead to Julia. The horror of this is undermined by the deus ex machina resolution Newman applies, which is that Julia survives the torture because the time each victim has in Room 101 is limited to fifteen minutes, because of the sheer volume of torture candidates. This is a serious misstep – I understand why Newman wanted to show the horrific consequences of Winston’s betrayal and at the same time keep Julia alive, but this resolution is deeply improbable in a world of bitterly realistic situations.

Novels based on and inspired by well-known original texts need to overcome some high hurdles to avoid being dismissed as mere fan-fiction. They need to be respectful to the source material – in most respects Newman does this, with some important exceptions. They need to have a clear reason for returning to the source material, and I think Newman ticks that box as well, giving a clear and recognisable voice to a character who often appears enigmatic in the source text, and exploring what life on Airstrip One would be like for women, a subject Orwell is largely silent on. The tightrope between simply being an attempted impersonation of Orwell’s voice and being faithful to his creation is an awfully difficult line to tread and I think for the most part, with one or two significant exceptions, Newman achieves this. It often felt like I was reading an authentic description of life under Big Brother, chapters that Orwell would have not disowned. For these good reasons alone Julia is definitely worth reading. I did have just one minor complaint – the cover design is awfully drab. It tries to suggest the relationship between the novel and the source text but I am sure there must be better ways of doing it.

Julia, by Sandra Newman, 2023

Aside
Book review

Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell, 1938

Homage to Catalonia is Orwell’s memoir of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Covering the period between December 1936 and June 1937, he tells how he stumbled into the war having originally intended to observe the conflict and ‘write newspaper articles’, but then quickly got caught up in the revolutionary atmosphere in Barcelona and signed up to fight. After some rudimentary training he describes his uneventful but miserable time on the front lines in Aragon and then his involvement in the May Days conflict in Barcelona. Although he returned to the front line after this short break, his time in Spain was brought to a sudden end when he was shot through the throat. A further close shave followed quickly when the political group he was serving in, the POUM, was declared an illegal organisation causing Orwell and his wife to flee for their lives, following closely by the police. The memoir elements of the book are interspersed with Orwell’s commentary on the war and the May Days conflict, in which he is heavily critical of the actions of the Government forces.

This analysis of the May Days conflict is central to this narrative and all subsequent commentary on the book. Orwell saw the May Days as a microcosm of the struggle between revolutionary socialism and communism. This isn’t some obscure metaphorical parallel but a real time playing out of the conflict between Trotskyism and Stalinism , fatally undermining the ability of countries such as Spain to resist fascism. Orwell comes down firmly and unambiguously on the side of revolutionary socialism and against Communism as represented by the Soviet Union and its counterparts in Spain and elsewhere. You could argue that as an almost accidental member of the POUM militia (he joined because it was aligned with the Independent Labour Party) it would have been impossible to imagine him taking any other position – who cheers on the people who are trying to arrest you and who are killing your friends and comrades. all the while telling the world that you are a fascist collaborator?

A common accusation levelled against Orwell’s non-fiction is that it is to a greater or lesser extent made up. He didn’t shoot an elephant, witness a hanging, etc. This accusation is almost never expressed as simple dishonesty – instead critics talk about things being ’embroidered’ and of ‘journalistic licence’ – but that’s what they mean. Homage to Catalonia was attacked on this basis from the moment it was published – instead of being an honest eye-witness account of the six-month period Orwell was in Spain, it is alleged that it is a carefully edited and at times simply untrue portrait of the war, most contentiously the street fighting in Barcelona. One critic who takes this position on HtC is Paul Preston, an academic at the London School of Economics. His Light and Shadows in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia dissects HtC in meticulous detail and gives credit for the book’s vivid descriptions of the conflict, but is assiduous in picking up on contentious issues in the account. To take one fairly minor example, early on in the book Orwell contrasts the food shortages being experienced by the ordinary citizens of Barcelona with the food being wasted in the barracks. Preston observes

“If Orwell’s POUM unit could really afford to waste food, it must have been a rarity among the Republican forces.“

To support this rather snide comment (it is implied that Orwell is lying, but not directly stated), Preston refers an extremely hostile essay on HtC by Bill Alexander called George Orwell and Spain. This essay was part of a collection of critical attacks on Orwell published in 1984 called Inside the Myth (see what they did there?) Why Alexander’s account is considered reliable and Orwell’s dishonest is not explained. But if Orwell was lying about the food shortage situation, Preston implies, his other observations might also be untrue or unreliable.

There’s fundamental category error in many of Preston’s cricitisms of HtC. For example he claims

Orwell’s eye-witness testimony guarantees the inclusion of Homage to Catalonia in any list of important books on the war. However, it would certainly not be there as a reliable analysis of the broader politics of the war and particularly of its international determinants.

Whereas of course it never claims to be a reliable analysis of the broader politics of the war, as a few minutes spent reading it will clearly demonstrate. Orwell goes out of his way to stress the partisan and incomplete nature of his account:

In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war. (HtC)

Another accusation repeated by both Preston and Alexander is that Orwell was some kind of literary tourist, travelling to Spain simply to collect content and material for future books and articles and was not really interested in the Spanish or their struggles.

“Orwell had no understanding of the world wide significance of the struggle in Spain, he knew little of the national efforts of the Popular Front government to achieve a united front against fascism, he had never seen the Republican flag, he did not agree with the actions of the POUM – he took the rifle in the role of an outsider, a journalist looking for different experiences to figure in a future book.” (George Orwell and Spain, Bill Alexander, 1984).

Again Orwell anticipated this criticism. Initially it was the case that he had gone to Spain to write, but the sincerity of his subsequent conviction – he returned to the fighting despite the betrayal (as he saw it) of the May Days, was shot in the throat and came very close to death – is hard to doubt. In fact Orwell wrote very little about his time in Spain outside of HtC, and the book struggled to find a publisher and was famously a commercial and literary failure. You can question the accuracy of some of his writing, but surely the authenticity of his convictions cannot be questioned.

Some of the other claims made against Orwell, crafted solely to undermine his analysis of the war, are petty in the extreme. For example Preston casts doubt on the record of events at the end of the book when he is at risk of being arrested for his association with the POUM, claiming he (Orwell) couldn’t speak Spanish. There is however unambiguous eye-witness evidence that contradicts this allegation. It is also not disputed that Orwell commanded a group of young Spanish volunteers who presumably had little English. Orwell was a bright man and a quick learner and surrounded by Spanish speakers I can easily imagine he learnt the basics of the language quickly. The alternative – that he did not learn any significant amounts of Spanish during his months there and subsequently invented conversations to fit in with his anti-Government narrative – is surely far less likely?

I don’t want to spend to much time on the case for the defence, because frankly Homage to Catalonia doesn’t need it. It is superbly written and an important snapshot of pre-war European politics. It explains very clearly why Orwell become a convinced socialist and I would argue that it adds significantly to any reading of 1984 in its portrait of Stalinism. I challenge anyone to read his description of revolutionary Barcelona and not be moved, even if you accept that in doing so Orwell was overlooking the bloodshed of the early days of the conflict:

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. […] And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that
I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

The book ends with this wonderful and profoundly prophetic description of returning to England, an experience any English tourist will recognise:

“And then England—southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from seasickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage underneath you, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”

Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell, 1938

Aside
Book review

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens, 2002

This extended essay on the continuing significance of Orwell as a writer and thinker is a tour de force of analytical writing by the late, great, Christopher Hitchens. Orwell has been seconded to a wide range of causes over the years, by cold warriors, reactionaries and revolutionaries, but I don’t think anyone has written as clearly nor as intelligently about his work as Hitchens does here.

There’s an immense but loosely worn scholarliness about this analysis. Hitchens has not only read and remembered virtually everything Orwell ever wrote, (and in case I haven’t mentioned it before that was an enormous, prodigious amount), but he seems also to have read everything written about Orwell. What is wonderful is that this isn’t an account bogged down in footnotes and irrelevant detail. Heavyweight critics of Orwell from left and right are batted away with ease. If I found some of the debates about Orwell’s legacy hard to follow at points, due to the arcane academic language used by some critics, (in complete contrast to Orwell’s one writing of course) I nevertheless felt in safe hands in Hitchens company.

A lesser critic would have been tempted to call this text ‘Why Orwell was Right’ but Hitchens is a far subtler writer than that. He appreciates that the idea of Orwell having a fixed set of ideas that never changed throughout his life and which can be tested by later critics as either correct or otherwise is facile – Orwell changed his mind constantly, as any human being will, particularly as he lived through the political turbulence of the 1930’s and 40’s. Orwell was at heart a journalist, and he frequently opened his articles with provocative statements intended to engage the reader rather than as statement of positions he genuinely felt. Orwell’s early anti-Semitism and later attempts to address the issue within himself is charted fairly here, as is his more troubling and apparently life-long homophobia. Orwell the flawed but ultimately heroic author and man emerges more clearly from these pages than from most of his biographies.

Hitchens is very good on Orwell’s novels, and their relationship to the rest of his work. The earlier works before Animal Farm are considered fairly but also I think accurately as a minor contribution to his work. He describes (page 186) Coming Up for Air, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Burmese Days wonderfully thus: “These four pre-war efforts constitute a sort of amateur throat clearing” which is exactly how I have always thought of them – like an orchestra warming up discordantly before the symphony begins. Hitchens writes of Orwell’s final masterpiece (page 190) 1984 “It is the first and only time that his efforts as a novelist rise to the level of his essays”. That might be , in fact almost certainly is, hyperbole, and is totally unfair with regard to Animal Farm, but the essays are much under-appreciated, beyond one or two pieces such as Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging which are still taught in schools.

Despite this very positive reaction I still found something to disagree with on almost every page. That’s going to happen with polemical writing and is part of the fun! Some points of fact were I think missed (for example Hitchens claims Orwell was right to deduce (in his essay, Boys’ Weeklies, published on Horizon) that the Greyfriars/Billy Bunter stories were written by more than one person, whereas Frank Richards’s wonderful response to Orwell’s essay is rightly cherished and to my knowledge never disproven) but equally Hitchens invites disagreement and I suspect would have relished it. Perhaps he was not being deliberately controversial, but it is clear he never backed down from a fight either.

For Orwell enthusiasts this is a must-read. For anyone looking for an introduction to Orwell this might be quite advanced – it assumes a fairly extensive knowledge of Orwell’s life and works – but there are many far worse places to start.

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens, 2002

Aside
Book review

Orwell, A Man of our Time, by Richard Bradford, 2020

I can’t remember ever having so passionately agreed with the central premise of a book before – yet also found myself profoundly disagreeing with many of the conclusions the author draws. I know that might sound like a slightly artificial opinion adopted to make a good opening line to a blog post, but I mean it. (I’d rather be honest than interesting, although ideally I’d like to be both of course!).

Bradford’s thesis is summed up in the book’s subtitle – Orwell is a Man of Our Time. In other words his work has an immediate relevance to the 2020’s – to the era of Trump, Brexit, social media and the ever intrusive state. And that’s utterly unarguable – of course he does. Orwell has in many ways shaped the way we see the world. That’s why the media manages to find a dozen things a day ‘Orwellian’, from facial recognition software to social media cancel culture. So here’s the first problem – this thesis has already been written. In 2002 Christopher Hitchens wrote Why Orwell Matters adopting the same format as Bradford, or rather anticipating it, demonstrating vividly Orwell’s continuing relevance. Although Bradford has written in more detail than Hitchens, and obviously included more recent material, fundamentally the point has already been made, far more convincingly. (If you prefer there is a short YouTube video of a speech Hitchens made that covers his key points. I disagree with much of what he says – he argues that Orwell died of poverty, which is simply nonsense, and he has nothing to say about Orwell’s defining characteristic, his Englishness, but he is entertaining and persuasive).

There’s a second equally obvious problem with the biographical structure that Bradford adopts. He goes through Orwell’s life in the manner of a traditional biography and gives equal space to his childhood and early novels compared to for example his final great works. If you are trying to trace the origins of (say) Animal Farm in Orwell’s time at the village store in Wallington, fair enough, but that immediately begins to stray from the declared intention of the book, to demonstrate Orwell’s continuing relevance. I would argue (as Orwell himself does, in Why I Write) that his work really only begins to be distinctively in his voice after the Spanish Civil War. Almost everything before that is of minor interest only (I would exclude the Down a Mine section of Wigan Pier). Putting it another way, if that sniper’s bullet that bisected his throat in 1937 had been centimetres to the left or right, we would never have heard the term “Orwellian”. The biographical structure of this book therefore means that we spend a long time waiting for the main event, the major two novels and the classic political essays of the 1940’s, and that some earlier parts of the text feel like ‘filler’.

(Just a quick aside on the term Orwellian. It seems to me it is used in three distinct ways nowadays. Increasingly the first application has come to predominate – to describe totalitarian behaviour by the state or the agents of the state, particularly through the use of technology. Facebook’s algorithms are Orwellian, automatic number plate recognition is Orwellian, etc. The second use is in the ironic commentary on official language, referencing the slogans of Oceania – appointing a Minister for Brexit Benefits was quintessentially Orwellian. Finally, and this is more rare nowadays, is the use of the term to describe writing in Orwell’s distinctive style – as he famously put it in the essay just referenced, “Good prose is like a windowpane”. )

Bradford often strays from his original concept. Instead of demonstrating Orwell’s relevance to contemporary events, (‘our time’) he instead finds parallels between incidents in Orwell’s life and things that happened later. Oswald Mosley is compared to Nigel Farage, for example, a perfectly fair comparison but nothing to do with Orwell. Conditions in mines in the 1930’s were hard, as recorded in The Road to Wigan Pier, but in the 1980’s miners in the UK went on strike to save their jobs – again hard to argue with, although the two things are barely connected with one another let alone Orwell. Where Bradford’s argument nears breaking point is in his apparently preposterous claim that Orwell’s ‘foresaw Brexit‘. That might seem ridiculous given that the EU didn’t exist before Orwell died in 1950, but surprisingly Bradford does a good job of defending this point. Orwell thought a lot about what the world would look like after the end of the second world war and in a world dominated by nuclear weapons. He lived just long enough to see the beginning of the end of Empire and new post-war political and military structures emerge, one of which was likely to be a form of united Europe. IN the event such a body was created, Britain’s role in it would be uncertain. It is not much of a leap to imagine Orwell’s understanding of colonialism, imperialism and nationalism all coming together to predict Brexit. In England Your England (1941) for example, Orwell wrote about “the famous ‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English, and in 1947 recorded anti-Polish sentiment very similar to the prejudices that drove Brexit. Orwell also foresaw that it would be in America’s commercial interests to weaken a centralised United States of Europe.

Unfortunately, for every worthwhile observation there are far too many misses, irrelevancies or demonstrations of the author’s own prejudices. The television cook Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall is bizarrely attacked for no apparent reason than he went to Eton. Anti-Semitism within the Labour Party is bafflingly compared to the two-minute hate in 1984. Jacques Derrida’s syntax is attacked as overly complex, and claimed to be an example of something Orwellian, I am not quite sure what given that Newspeak was defined by its lack of complexity. The book’s analysis ends with a scattergun critique of Boris Johnson, Trump, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, political correctness, wokeism, cancel culture in universities, deconstructionism, and last but not least Islam.

There are some errors in this text, or at least things that I found debateable, although I make no pretence of authority on the issue. First, Bradford says that Orwell spent a year at Wellington college before going on to Eton (page 17) – Taylor’s far more authoritative work says he was there for just nine weeks (page 60). In his discussion on homelessness as presented in Orwell’s work Bradford appears to believe that anyone using the ‘tuppenny hangovers’ (the cheapest place to sleep, resting over a rope) were at risk from arrest under the Vagrancy Act because they were outside, which is simply incorrect. He later describes Orwell’s voice as indicating “irredeemable boredom and monotony” without acknowledging that no recordings of Orwell’s voice can be found. To give one final example Bradford criticises China’s one-child policy, citing it as an unexplained example of the state attempting to control the private lives of the citizenry (and being therefore Orwellian) without giving a moment’s thought to the famine in China less than a decade earlier which lead to the deaths by starvation of millions of people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine).

This might be a bit clumsy, but I found this edition’s front cover strangely apposite. It is illustrated (see above) with a print of Orwell’s head and shoulders, cut into segments then partially reassembled, leaving his face crooked and askew. In a way that is what Bradford has done with Orwell’s life work – he has broken them down into different constituent parts and then poorly reassembled them.

Orwell, A Man of Our Time, by Richard Bradford, 2020

Aside
Book review

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, by George Orwell, 1936

Gordon Comstock, anti-hero of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, is a failed poet, struggling with a premature mid-life crisis, and what we would now characterise as depression. He expresses his feelings as resentment at demands placed upon him by family and friends, and rages against the need to work for a living. OrwellRejecting a well-paid job in advertising, which he feels is beneath him, he instead works in a bookshop, spending long sad weeks struggling to make sure he can afford the next cigarette or pint of beer. He obsesses over the cost of everything. At first this is slightly comic, but the intensity of this obsession soon becomes wearisome. He is a misanthropic, grumpy figure who doesn’t deserve the friendship and love of those around him who care for him and look out for him, even though he goes out of his way to reject their help.

He lives a mean life in a dingy bedsit in Hampstead, working in a bookshop and in his spare time picking away at his magnum opus ‘London Pleasures’. His fantasy of himself as a poet is fed by the earlier publication of a slim volume of poetry – ‘Mice’ – which sold only 153 copies despite positive reviews. His obsession with money poisons his relationship with his girlfriend Rosemary. They have nowhere to go to be together, and Gordon’s pride means he wont allow her to pay for even a cup of coffee. Rosemary suggest a day in the countryside , with a hint that this might be the long awaited opportunity to finally consummate their relationship (Orwell was to return to this idea – of a couple travelling out into the countryside to find somewhere private to have sex – in 1984).

The day doesn’t go well – in an attempt to impress Rosemary, he wastes most of his money on lunch at a fancy hotel. Later when they are about to have sex en plein air it doesn’t happen because Gordon has forgotten to bring any contraception. Like a spoilt child he is angry with her:

“Money again, you see! … You say you ‘can’t’ have a baby. … You mean you daren’t; because you’d lose your job and I’ve got no money and all of us would starve.”

When some money does finally come his way, in the form of payment for a poem sent speculatively to an American magazine, Gordon wastes it on a fancy dinner and ostentatious tips. He gets completely out-of-control drunk, leading to a night in the cells and the sack from his job the next morning. I am not sure if Orwell intended this episode to be comic, but it is quite the opposite, not least in the assault on Rosemary.

After “sponging” for a while off Ravelston, a more prosperous literary friend, Gordon secures a post in another book shop/lending library. Determined to sink to the lowest level of society but afraid of sleeping on the street, Gordon takes an even seedier bed-sit in Lambeth, (to have fallen so low!) and isolates himself from family and friends. There is no question at this point that Gordon is clinically depressed, and he is hugely lucky to be loved by some of the most patient people on the planet. In desperation Rosemary has sex with him, and while this doesn’t jolt him from his depression, the result of this and thereby the conclusion to the novel is predictable.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying has a strong, semi-biographical flavour. It was written in 1934 and 1935 when Orwell was living in London, and clearly draws on his experiences in this period. There are numerous points of comparison between the life of the novel’s protagonist and his own. Orwell had written for The Adelphi, a left-wing literary journal edited by Sir Richard Rees, an obvious model for Ravelston, Comstock’s upper-class publisher and friend. Orwell had also worked in a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, lived in squalid bedsits and struggled to find female companionship while attempting to write.

The novel has not aged well. Many of the social attitudes here will be uncomfortable to a modern reader. Comstock is homophobic, referring to a customer as a “nancy”. Orwell gives this character an affected lisp, and used similar language in correspondence and articles, so it is a reasonable assumption that he is here reflecting the everyday prejudice against homosexuality that was common in the 1930’s. Comstock also has disrespectful attitudes towards women, seeming only interested in them for sex:

This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can’t cut it right out, or at least be like the animals—minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the hen’s backs without so much as a with your leave or by your leave. And no sooner is it over than the whole subject is out of his mind. He hardly even notices his hens any longer; he ignores them, or simply pecks them if they come too near his food.

Equally there is a horrible disdain for the working class in this novel that only someone born in the middle-class (and having been to Eton) could display. Of course one needs to be careful to not ascribe the character’s views to the author too easily, but the disgust with which the working classes – not least their terrible smelliness – seems authentic, and is on a par with some of Orwell’s other work. Take this description of a pub for example:

“A foul yet coldish air enveloped them. It was a filthy, smoky room, low-ceilinged, with a sawdusted floor and plain deal tables ringed by generations of beer pots. In the corner were four monstrous women with breasts the size of melons.” 

Comstock explores the underworld of the very poor, as Orwell himself did when Down and Out in Paris and London, but is always an outsider looking in, with the safety net of the £4 a week job waiting for him whenever he wants it. There’s a cursory discussion of socialist ideas which could help Comstock escape the money he feels trapped by, but Orwell’s heart doesn’t seem in it. Gordon’s conversations with Ravelston never progress beyond the level of point facile scoring:

Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.

Whatever its aspirations this isn’t a novel of ideas. It is at best part of the tapestry of 20th century literature. The portrait of the profoundly grumpy, sexist poet with a flair for getting extremely drunk may have been an inspiration for Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, although there equally are some clear signs of borrowing from Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt about a another individual’s struggle against the pressures of capitalism. “Keep the aspidistra flying!” is also the final line of Henry Miller’s novel Nexus (1959), and last but least it provided the title (if little else by way of inspiration) for Nancy Mitford’s 1949 “Love in a Cold Climate“.

Orwell wrote Keep the Aspidistra as a source of relatively easy income, and it shows. In a 1946 letter to a friend he wrote that this novel was one of the two or three books of which he was ashamed, saying that it was “written simply as an exercise; I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for money [-] At that time I simply hadn’t a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so.” It wasn’t until towards the end of his life, after the second world war, that he was to find his authentic voice as an  author of novels. Much of his best writing is to be found elsewhere, in his journalism, his essays and book reviews. 

Standard
Book review

Animal Farm by George Orwell, 1945

Why reread ‘Animal Farm‘? I could spin you a line that the novel has a new importance in our post-Brexit world, but the honest answer is that my list of reviews looks a bit sparse without this novel. I can’t really claim to have read extensively across the great novels written in English without including ‘Animal Farm’ can I?AF

At the same time I was interested to see how it had changed. To be clear, I don’t mean the words on the page will have changed, of course. But all literature exists in a specific cultural context, and as that context has changed dramatically since ‘Animal Farm’ was first published, and even since I first read it (in the 70’s, I guess) the novel is bound to be different. Continue reading →

Standard