11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A mixed bag, December 25, 2004
This review is from: Orwell: The Life (Hardcover)
In the first few chapters of Taylor's Orwell the Life you get the feeling that he isn't particularly fond of his subject matter, Eric Blair aka George Orwell. In an odd early segment Taylor even attempts to discredit Orwell's recollections of his days at St Cyprians which he wrote about in his famous "Such, Such Were the Joys" essay. The author even goes so far as to make an issue of the fact that maybe, just maybe, Orwell may have ate at a relatives house while "down and out" in Paris instead of total submission to the hardships of the city . He tries to lay the groundwork for an argument that Orwell created his own personal mythology but this "Orwell says he did this but how could he have- I think he did..." approach leaves a residue of antagonism between the writer and the subject throughout the biography. One gets the feeling that perhaps the Orwell of this biography is not to be totally trusted. Certainly, this Orwell is not anyone most of us would like to be around and perhaps that is Taylor's point.
The biography paints the portrait of a somewhat troubled eccentric man distracted by his own thoughts, who compartmentalized his friendships, and was a pathetic womanizer. Throughout the book Taylor has inserted chapter "interludes" that spend a few pages on a particular aspect of Orwell. While some of these are quite valuable their effect is to interrupt the narrative flow of the biography. I'm not sure why this wasn't addressed by an editor but the ad hoc nature of these chapters could have easily been integrated.
Taylor attempts to analyze Orwell's writings, especially his early novels and a few important essays. In this he succeeds to some extent, but again inserts doubts about Orwell's real experiences. Strangely he barely addresses the controversial list of communist sympathizers Orwell gave to the British Information Research Department. This is a bit of a stunning omission I believe. Barely three paragraphs are dedicated to an incident that has shadowed Orwell's ghost over fifty years.
Orwell is too important a figure to have this biography be either the standard or the last word on his life. This isn't a bad read, Taylor has a good writing style, and that does help. Readers are cautioned that there are other more objective works on Orwell's life out there and, while it gives some good information it should not be the first or only biography to seek out. What Taylor needed perhaps more than anything was a good editor with a few words of caution to avoid the pitfalls into which he so obviously fell.
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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
REVIEW OF D. J. TAYLOR'S ORWELL THE LIFE BY JOHN CHUCKMAN, April 13, 2005
This review is from: Orwell: The Life (Hardcover)
This is a difficult book to categorize. It is well written, contains many interesting anecdotes, but it misses the essential Orwell.
Taylor's gloomy, otherwordly, ex-Etonian, ex-imperial policeman simply does not add up to Orwell. The sum of the parts is much less than the man. Taylor's book is a bit like an autopsy, the pathologist clearly never being able to comprehend the stiff, dead flesh and bottled samples before him as the full human being they were. Nevertheless, autopsies do tell interesting tales.
Orwell's gloomy temperament puts him not outside the mainstream of writers but exactly in the company of so many important writers. The list of writers with some form of depression, whether alcoholism or gloominess, is so huge - Greene, Swift, Hemingway, Le Carré, Dickens, Gissing, O'Neill, Twain, Faulkner, etc, etc. - one comes to think of the quality almost as a job requirement. It provides one of the special lens through which critical writers see the world. One has to believe Taylor understands this, but his book conveys only clinical observations of gloominess snipped from letters, diaries, and conversations.
As far as Orwell's otherworldliness, Orwell was clearly in the great tradition of English eccentrics, and that is an important component of his appeal. There is a long and glorious line of them from Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen down to Alec Guinness, Margaret Rutherford, and Vanessa Redgrave. Yet Taylor only offers clinical observations and never puts them in their proper context.
Orwell was not an important novelist, so it seems a bit gratuitous to say so as Taylor does. In fact, he wasn't even a very good novelist. Yet books like Keep the Aspadistra Flying do provide a keen sense of his Englishness. Missing entirely from Taylor's autopsy is a sense of Orwell's quintessential Englishness. When Orwell writes of getting back to the feel of heavy English coins and having mahogany tea, readers get a sense of pure distilled Englishness. This comes through also in quasi-journalistic books like The Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris and London - important early efforts at what today might be called investigative journalism - books which Taylor rather disparages both in terms of Orwell's re-arranging actual events and being an observer mentally wearing an Eton tie.
What Orwell was is a critic, and a rather magnificent one. I am reminded of Degas' description of Monet as "Only an eye, but what an eye!"
Orwell had an exquisite sense of justice and a very sensitive barometer for tyranny plus he had the words to convey vividly his sensibilities. Taylor virtually misses this in his examination of bile and stool samples. Taylor too often puts Orwell's political criticism down to miss-directed, soft-Left thinking of an ex-Etonian. Orwell himself recognized the simpering nature of much of the Left's views, yet he struggled bravely with finding a vocabulary to accommodate his sympathies. He possibly did not come to recognize himself for what he was, a scorching critic of both Left and Right. After all, his time was short. That is how it is when you die in your forties.
He was also an important literary critic, and while Taylor recognizes this, I don't believe he gives it a full enough examination.
Taylor sadly drags out the subject of anti-Semitism, perhaps the most overly-used epithet of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If Orwell was anti-Semitic - and I do not believe this for a second - it was in the same vague sense of virtually all Englishmen of his time. The English have always had a degree of xenophobia, a quality whose obverse side is the very set of qualities defining Englishness. I am tired of discussions of whether Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice makes the greatest playwright in human history anti-Semitic, discussions which always ignore the human qualities and sense of justice Shakespeare gives his character, and just so, Orwell, overall a truly decent man.
There has been a good deal of writing in recent years about Orwell, much of it wrong-headed, from claims being made that he would have supported Bush's invasion of Iraq (!) to sentimentality. Little of it captures Orwell the independent and remarkably clear-thinking critic. Taylor gives us no sense of what it was that animated Orwell, other than some almost silly stuff about getting back at people like the headmistress of his school. There is almost a sense in this book of a high-class hatchet job done on Orwell, but I don't want to push that point. What makes Orwell truly important is minimized, and what wasn't important is given a good deal of weight. Perhaps that is the fate of great critics who support no one's ideologies and preconceptions.
This book should be read only with an awareness of its limited approach to the subject. This is not Orwell, but a somewhat interesting display of bits and memorabilia in museum cabinets.
Please see my review of Gordon Bowker's Orwell biography, a superior work (published in the same year) in most respects to Taylor's.
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Silly book, March 29, 2005
This review is from: Orwell: The Life (Hardcover)
This is a book that has no reason to be.
The author appears to have two primary objectives, viz.,to exhibit how clever he is and, secondly,how awful a man and writer Orwell was.
The author is not clever;he is repetitious and snide in a schoolboy boastful manner. He is incredibly careless as a writer and editor, appears ignorant of basic grammar and rules of punctuation and mistakes coyness for principle.The reader may open the book at random for examples of these failures.
His knowledge of history one may measure by his statement that Chamberlin flew to Berlin in 1938. Again, the curious reader can find errors of this sort almost at random. Just open the book--if you must.
The more serious criticism of the book is that it is entirely a tendentious assassination of reputation. The argument of the book the author recapitulates in a chapter three quaters through, entitled "The Case Against".This apparently is for the slow learners who may have missed Taylor's derogatory points liberally supplied throughout the previous three hundred pages. In two pages and a paragraph, the author releases the proverbial cat;one understands why this text appears so late in the book. Had the author a proper sense of honest intellectual protocal, he would have announced in an introduction his purpose. So silly this is,no reader would have bothered with the book.
A ploy Taylor favors is to set forth alternative and always invidious explanations for Orwell's words and actions.If no one is at hand to quote, Taylor sets up a straw dog built from his own ever so sensitive reading, and precedes to demolish it.He makes no attempt at balance.He is utterly unpersuasive because he works so hard at being so unfair. As a deflator, he lacks subtley. One can imagine how little Orwell would have respected Taylor and how little he would have cared.
This is a mean spirited, unconvincing, and finally, unnecessary production.
The reader caring to read about Orwell has many fine alternatives, not the least meritorious of which is the Bowker life, published the same year as Taylor's spam of a study.
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