Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #385652 in Books
• Published on: 1969-10-22
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com
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.

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

Download Description
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth. I remember the morning well. At about a quarter to eight I'd nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut the kids out. It was a beastly January morning, with a dirty yellowish-grey sky. Down below, out of the little square of bathroom window, I could see the ten yards by five of grass, with a privet hedge round it and a bare patch in the middle, that we call the back garden. There's the same back garden, some privets, and same grass, behind every house in Ellesmere Road. Only difference- where there are no kids there's no bare patch in the middle. I was trying to shave with a bluntish razor-blade while the water ran into the bath. My face looked back at me out of the mirror, and underneath, in a tumbler of water on the little shelf over the washbasin, the teeth that belonged in the face. It was the temporary set that Warner, my dentist, had given me to wear while the new ones were being made. I haven't such a bad face, really. It's one of those bricky-red faces that go with butter-coloured hair and pale-blue eyes. I've never gone grey or bald, thank God, and when I've got my teeth in I probably don't look my age, which is forty-five.

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Customer Reviews

Just Breathe
Most people know George Orwell by two of his later works - 1984 and ANIMAL FARM. What they don't necessarily know is that, in addition to the thousands of pages of reportage, journalism and essays he also produced in his all-too-brief career, he also penned six other books, including four novels and an autobiographical study of poverty (DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON) which reads better than 90% of the novels ever written. Nevertheless, Orwell is not really thought of as a novelist, but rather as a fiery political thinker who occasionally used fiction to make his points.

COMING UP FOR AIR is as good an argument for Orwell as a novelist as can be made without referencing his masterwork, 1984. Written during the "gathering storm" period of the mid-late 1930s, it reflects not only Orwell's anxiety, dread and disgust in regards to where the world was heading, but captures as well a keen sense of nostalgia for the world as it was during his own childhood - a world without secret police, bombing planes or political fanaticism. A world where it was still possible to believe that everything turned out all right in the end.

COMING UP FOR AIR is the self-told story of George "Fatty" Bowling, a wholly ordinary, lower middle-class salesman who lives in the "inner-outer" suburbs of London. Bowling is "full figured" (meaning fat), wears false teeth, has a nagging wife and two annoying kids, and lives in a generic rowhouse he'll never pay off. He's vulgar, cynical and tactless, but just perceptive enough to be capable of epiphany. One day, wandering down a London street, he's reminded of something from his childhood at the beginning of the 20th century, which he spent in a little farming town called Lower Binfield. Suddenly overcome with nostalgia, a feeling that the world around him is soon going to be smashed to pieces by war and political upheaval, and finally by the fact that his family is suffocating him, George decides to fake a business trip and spend a week in the placid countryside where he grew up - in essence, to crawl back into the womb. But what will the womb look like after the passage of twenty-odd years? Will it still provide comfort, or just reinforce his feelings that the world is not only changing out of recognition, but for the worse?

Like all Orwell's novels, COMING UP FOR AIR is at heart a political book, at once an attack on modern society and a warning that nostalgia for the past won't bring it back.
Masquerading as a "you can't go home again" sermon, the novel is actually about the brutal contrast between the modern world in which Bailey lives (which he hates), and the more pastoral, innocent time of his youth. Although Bailey repeatedly points out the harshness of life in rural England in those sleepy years before WWI, the feeling he himself returns to over and over again is a kind of clear-eyed sentimentality, an understanding that while conditions were physically tougher, people were actually much more secure mentally and emotionally, because the world they lived in was stable and not haunted by fear - of governmental tyranny, and of a greed-crazed corporate Kultur that would systematically disenfranchise and ruin independent business owners. Orwell shows impressive, perhaps even masterly skill at recreating the atmosphere of rural England in 1905, which in Bailey's mind is always summer - insects humming, a golden haze hanging over the fields, fish jumping in the farmer's ponds. The distinction between it and modern London, where everything is cold, chromed-over and streamlined, "even the bullet Hitler's keeping for you" is startling, and shows that Orwell, so often viewed as a mean-spirited misanthrope in public-spirited clothing, was capable of a very human longing for simpler times.

Semi-detached suburban Fatty Bowling
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.

Masterpiece
A fat middle-aged salesman goes back to his childhood home to fend off a rising anxiety in prewar Europe, and the result is tragicomedy.

One of the best novels I have ever read. Orwell was never better at creating a mood, an atmosphere, a state of mind, than in this book. It is engaging, witty, and powerful. I'm not sure I can say exactly what point Orwell (as opposed to the protagonist) was trying to make in this book, but I find a lot of resonance between his concerns in 1938 with a coming war and mine today. Not just a concern with a war, but a fear of the permanent, sweeping changes that war will bring with it.

Combine this with "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" and "Down and Out in Paris and London" and you get a very good look into Orwell's mind, and you can see the architecture behind his better-known books, "1984" and "Animal Farm." But both of those books, however great they are in their own way, are both curiously cold and impersonal. Here, we have Orwell at his warmest and most human.

If things made any sense, this is the kind of book that every teenager would read, the way they read (or at least used to read) Vonnegut and Ayn Rand and J.D. Salinger.