By Rodamanthi Sofikitou, @greek_studyholic
Orwell’s “Coming Up for Air” is an extraordinary book, which tells a story from a point in the late 1930s. It was published in 1939, just months before the start of World War II. His main character, George Bowling, represents an ordinary Englishman who tries to find himself between the wars. He is a mediocre middle-aged man married with a middle-class wife, Hilda, and they are living in a middle-class house.
The protagonist is deeply nostalgic and anxious about the modernity and the future. Even though he seems to idealise the past, as he wants to visit his own “roots”, he criticises the society and warns us about the future.
It is clear that this novel is more intimate, as it reflects deep personal concerns about the loss of nature and community in a changing society. He is constantly referring to the past, because he is trying to find his old self there.
The problem is that society is constantly industrialising: George Bowling lives in a house that is not his, because it belongs to a building society. The people living in those houses do not actually own them, even though they have paid them off. This loss of control over your own life shows hopelessness in this post-war society. Everyone is living with a fear over food prices, as Hilda does, and they constantly wonder if they will survive long enough to pay off their house, as George does. In other words, society has to live in constant fear, and George Bowling needs to deal with it.
War has not only damaged his individual attitudes and ideas, but also it has destroyed his entire life: society has to deal with the frantic desire to sell things and the preoccupation with keeping one’s job and paying for one’s house.
So, he decides to escape to the world of his childhood, to his village where he grew up and try to remember himself. To the village he remembers as heaven on earth, “a heaven of piece and tranquillity” as it is written in the book cover. But he will soon figure out that the past is not continuous with the present. The present has destroyed the past and especially his own past.