Coming Up for Air (Harvest Book) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "THE IDEA came to me the day I got my new false teeth..." (more)
Key Phrases: seventeen quid, bread paste, big carp, Lower Binfield, Binfield House, Uncle Ezekiel (more...)

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Amazon.com 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:

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.

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

-- The readers' poll for the best novels published in the English language since 1900,- closed with 217,520 votes cast. NINETEEN EIGHT-FOUR, was place number 6 out of the best 100 novels. ---George Orwell, wrote most of Nineteen Eighty-Four on the island of Jura, Scotland, during 1947-1948 while critically ill with tuberculosis.

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--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (October 22, 1969)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156196255
• ISBN-13: 978-0156196253
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #435,347 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Orwell's best novel, May 30, 2000

By	Susan Paxton (Columbus, OH) - See all my reviews

It's a shame that George Orwell's two best-known novels, "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty Four" are neither one his best novel. The peak of Orwell's fiction is this almost forgotten novel, "Coming Up for Air." Set in the last few years before a World War II that was obviously looming on the horizon, this elegant book memorably chronicles the life of George Bowling and his attempt to escape domesticity and the horrors to come for a few days by visiting his old home town. Every time I reread "Coming Up for Air," I wonder what Orwell might have achieved if he had lived longer and had not been as ill as he was in the ten years that remained to him. If all you've read of Orwell is his two "famous" novels, you owe it to yourself to read this.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Semi-detached suburban Fatty Bowling, April 10, 2008

By	H. Schneider "Hermit" (window seat) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: Coming Up For Air (Paperback)

Oddly, the pocket book cover quotes the NYT that this book is a 'charming ... minor masterpiece'. It took me a while to realize that this is exactly the case.
The novel is set in London in 1938, with WW2 looming. It was Orwell's first novel after risking his life in Catalonia. It was his last novel before Animal Farm. He still had ambitions to play in James Joyce's league as a novelist. He greatly admired Ulysses. In a way, his George Fatty Bowling is Orwell's Leo Bloom in London. But not quite. As charming as the novel is, it is also the final proof that Orwell was not the great novelist that he would have wished to be. He was a great essayist. Even his two later masterpieces, Animal Farm and 1984, essentially demonstrate that he was in first place an essayist and a man with a message.
Coming up for Air is the monologue of a middle aged middle class man who takes a break from his oppressive family and job life. He is the antisocial character who paints his front door green, where all others are blue. He escapes for an outing and 'comes up for air'.
The story is told by the hero in an odd mixture of stream of consciousness and autobiography. One might say, Orwell told parts of his own life story. And that is the crux of the matter: he remains the intellectual who sympathizes with the proles and despises the upward ambitions of the lower middle classes.
The book is a failure insofar as Orwell never manages to let Bowling speak. Bowling is just a pretext for Orwell's own words.
The book is not a failure, because what Orwell has to tell us of England between 1893 and 1938 is well worth knowing. Bowling should be an uninteresting man, by all criteria, but Orwell fails to let him bore us.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ultimate Fraud?, December 3, 2001

By	Tom (Palatine, IL USA) - See all my reviews

Orwell may be perpetuating the ultimate fraud here. His gift as a reporter may just be the talent he needed to...pawn off his own life as fiction.

This fabulous novel documents the mid-life crisis of an aging and bloated insurance salesman who vaguely remembers a time when people weren't scared of war and believed that most of life's more visible elements would endure without end.

This isn't a comming of age story, its more of a passing of an age story. The miracle here is the incredible emotion the reader feels as "Tubby" recalls his youth and the passing of his parents...events he barely aknowledged as they happened...and while they don't quite haunt him now, he wonders how he lost them.

Set in pre-war (WWII) England, the spectre of Hitler and Stalin always loom large in the background as our hero decides to go after the fishing hole he never got back to 20 years ago.

It probably doesn't matter whether or not the fishing hole is still there, only that we realized that it needed to be found again.

Like all Orwell, as touching and emotional as this effort is, it is never dire or heavy. This is a quick and rewarding read, and, I am guessing, more autobiographical than the author would have us believe.

It is a shame that Orwell is known these days only for the monumental works high-school students are forced to read. As unlikely as it seems, the man who penned the brutal "1984" has also written a wonderful collection of light reflections that should not go unread. Consider "Burmese Days" and "A Clergy Man's Daughter" as well.