Coming Up for Air
George Orwell
Coming Up for Air
George Bowling, a fat, middle-aged insurance salesman who senses that war is coming, spends a secret windfall on a trip back to the Thames Valley town of his boyhood, looking for the England he remembers (1939).
About the book
Published in 1939, Coming Up for Air is narrated by George Bowling, a forty-five-year-old insurance salesman with a mortgage, a new set of false teeth and a strong sense that another war is coming. When he wins a little money on a horse, he decides to spend it on a secret trip to Lower Binfield, the country town where he grew up before the First World War. George Orwell gives Bowling a comic, confiding voice, and the novel moves between suburban present and remembered Edwardian childhood: fishing, the family seed shop, the old certainties of a slower England. It is a book about nostalgia and about what modern life, with its semi-detached houses and approaching bombers, was doing to the places people remembered.
Characters
George Bowling — Narrator
A fat, cheerful, forty-five-year-old insurance salesman who feels the world closing in.
Hilda Bowling — George’s wife
His anxious, economising wife, whose life is spent worrying about money.
Samuel Bowling — George’s father
A seed merchant in Lower Binfield, steady and old-fashioned.
Joe Bowling — George’s brother
His rough older brother, who ran wild as a boy.
Elsie Waters — First love
The girl George loved when he was young in Lower Binfield.
Porteous — Friend
A retired public-school master who lives among his books and the classics.
About the author
George Orwell (1903–1950) was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English novelist and essayist who turned plain, exact prose into a political act. Born in India and schooled at Eton, he served five years in the imperial police in Burma, then lived among the poor of Paris and London, and was shot through the throat fighting Franco's forces in Spain — and each of those became a book. He wanted prose to be "like a window pane", and distrusted any language built to hide what it meant. Animal Farm made him famous; Nineteen Eighty-Four, finished on a Scottish island while tuberculosis was killing him, gave the world Big Brother and doublethink. His work also includes Burmese Days, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.