Customer Reviews

Orwell: The Life

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Well, I guess idols routinely crumble under scrutiny, so I shouldn't really be surprised that I came away from D.J. Taylor's biography of George Orwell viewing the famous author more as a man than as a hero. That is how it must be, however. When we study our fellow humans their flaws become discernible regardless of their greatness. As a man, Eric Blair was far from grand. He appeared to have the same faults present in many writers (all-be-they to a lesser extent). I now have a better appreciation of the author, and for the suffering he went through along with the challenges of his life. My one complaint is that Taylor did not treat his subject with the respect to which he was entitled. More empathy and less Thackeray would have been immensely appreciated. As for me, I'll always treasure 1984, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Hitchens was right; Orwell remains relevant. This biography heightens our awareness of the man even though it comes at the cost of his no longer seeming transcendent. Orwell's creative genius is not something undermined by these pages, but I do think that it's hard to appreciate his political outlook after closely examining it. His animosity towards Marxism is rather comical when one considers his continuing, quasi-religious belief in socialism. His time at the BBC taught him a little bit about the way in which bureaucracies function and we can only hopefully speculate that, if he had lived longer, he would have eventually renounced his love for statism and seen the light.

Well, I guess idols routinely crumble under scrutiny, so I shouldn't really be surprised that I came away from D.J. Taylor's biography of George Orwell viewing the famous author more as a man than as a hero. That is how it must be, however. When we study our fellow humans their flaws become discernible regardless of their greatness. As a man, Eric Blair was far from grand. He appeared to have the same faults present in many writers (all-be-they to a lesser extent). I now have a better appreciation of the author, and for the suffering he went through along with the challenges of his life. My one complaint is that Taylor did not treat his subject with the respect to which he was entitled. More empathy and less Thackeray would have been immensely appreciated. As for me, I'll always treasure 1984, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Hitchens was right; Orwell remains relevant. This biography heightens our awareness of the man even though it comes at the cost of his no longer seeming transcendent. Orwell's creative genius is not something undermined by these pages, but I do think that it's hard to appreciate his political outlook after closely examining it. His animosity towards Marxism is rather comical when one considers his continuing, quasi-religious belief in socialism. His time at the BBC taught him a little bit about the way in which bureaucracies function and we can only hopefully speculate that, if he had lived longer, he would have eventually renounced his love for statism and seen the light.

This is one of the most tediously judgmental biographies I've read in a long, long time. D. J. Taylor spends most of his time correcting or chiding or simply doubting Orwell. He sifts through "Such, Such Were the Joys" determined to prove that Orwell exaggerated how unhappy he was in school. He defends the families that Orwell characterized in ROAD TO WIGAN PIER as if this were a legal brief and not some of the most vivid prose in English literature. He discusses the great essay "Shooting an Elephant" solely in terms of whether it's literally true or not. And so on. Asking a few questions of the material is one thing, but Taylor grinds on and on and on.

He is so determined not to let Orwell get away with anything that this book never achieves any dramatic or narrative momentum. The only bits of life are the short snapshot chapters that describe Orwell's voice, say, or his face. And Taylor flubs long stretches of the story. His pages on the background to the Spanish Civil War and the factional fighting in Barcelona are total gibberish. I had to pull out a couple of other books to find out what exactly was going on. It was at this point I decided to stop reading.

For all their faults, the Bernard Crick, Stansky/Abraham, and even the Michael Shelden are better, more readable biographes.

I couldn't finish this book, which is something I generally strive to do. The book gives the impression you're reading about the author, rather than Orwell, every page exudes authorial arrogance with constant subjective views, which some may find interesting, however that is not why I read a biography.

I ordered this for one of my students, so I appreciated the prompt shipment and the condition of the product. Thank you.

To be quite frank, I did not enjoy this book.

Not only did I not like the way it's written, but I didn't like what I was reading either.

Firstly, his research is impeccable, but it was so hard to know who anybody was in this book, he just pops up random characters left and right, and he'll just casually mention cousins and neighbours and you are expected to remember them all.

I think it's because he spent so long researching the stuff that he just has everybody memorized, but for a reader remembering casual friends and stuff like that by last name when they haven't been mentioned for 150 pages is hard.

He also mentions Orwell's father's death as an afterthought.
He has chapters about the most mundane stuff, and he mentions Orwell's father being sick many times.
But then he changes the subject and you are wondering whatever happened to his father.
Then you read another 20 pages and he mentions it while talking about something else.

Furthermore, after reading nearly 500 pages on this man's life, you begin to view the book as written for the purpose of revealing his dark nature.
Orwell's eccentricity and lack of social tact are basically what the book is about.

The back of the book jacket reads, "Taylor's magisterial assessment cuts through Orwell's iconic status to reveal a bitter critic who concealed a profound totalitarian streak and whose progress through the literary world of the 30s and 40s was characterized by the myths he built around himself."

Taylor writes the book to convince us that Orwell was a creepy poor man with an unhappy marriage, a womanizer and pitifully helpless father.
Then you remember the magisterial books that the man produced, and you realize that nothing in this portrayal of the man gives any indication of greatness or of the material he ended up producing.
The sole convincing argument was that 1984 was so gloomy because of the tortuous state the author himself was in when he wrote it.
I would give it 2 stars if I felt that the research was poor, but the author does display his knowledge of Orwell's works several times.
Towards the end he even mentions a few specific scenes and passages from the 1984 that appeared in Orwell's earlier writing. He has clearly pored over the hordes of work Orwell produced.

Pros:

Very well researched.
The photographs included are a great help in visualizing the people in his life.

Cons:

Disjointed, disorganized, haphazard writing. More than once he is making an argument, only to digress and be sidetracked for several pages. Then he continues his argument out of the blue and you are reminded, "Ah, that's what he was talking about."

Seems to write for the purpose of debunking Orwell's mythological status, which would be fine, but it makes for a very poor first read into the man's life.

So, if you are not an Orwell fan, and would like to read a dissertation on the man's darker side, then this book is for you.
However, if you are looking for your first biography on the man who produced utter genius like 1984 and Animal Farm, then I would suggest you start with something else.

B-

This is one of those catch-all biographies that attempts to throw in everything including the kitchen sink and fails in all regards. The author, D. J. Taylor attempts to connect Orwell's writings with his life but spends so much time on trying to find little kernels of truth in the authors mundane diary entries that he accomplishes almost nothing. Since Taylor has no ability to write critically about Orwell's works he should have focused on the details of Orwell's life which are easier to record. Also one gets the feeling that Taylor isn't a fan of Orwell's writing and has little simpathy for his weaknesses in character. So why write the book?