The coming up for air

2.1.The important parts and events which were discussed by readers.

This novel were learned by readers and critics in several times and in different places. In the following, We are going to talk about the comments which were told by them.
George Bowling, the hero of Orwell's comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.
This comment is about George Bowling who is the main character in this novel.He was comic actor.In this comment, reader told about George Bowling's fortuna.
In the following passage, Shelwes telll about clasicism in the novel.
I have read the book “Coming Up for Air” written by George Orwell. He was a British author whos native born name is Eric Arthur Blair. He lived from (*1903 to † 1950). Orwells book is a tragedy which is combined with a lot of humour. Its not only based on the historical events of this story, but also based on incredible aphorisms which consequently motivates the reader to deal with the details and messages. It´s a very personal book which broaches the issue of a normal childhood combined with the fear of the therefore upcoming World War. Moreover he uses the example of George Bowling to narrate the uprooting of the lower middle class after World War One, which failed by searching for a way out. All in all it`s a very interesting and especially emotional book. It leads to unconscious interests in the personal story and historical events and is consequently a book I would definitely recommend.
Late in the book George sees an old girlfriend from nearly 30 years previously. She has changed greatly and he barely recognises her (he inwardly reflects that she has aged badly without making the jump that she has not recognised him). George does have moments of clarity when he almost grasps how ridiculous he is, but not quite.
The female characters are not well drawn and are feminine stereotypes, although Orwell does capture the monotony of suburban life. Usually Orwell’s female characters are more rounded (Julia in 1984), but the focus here is firmly on George Bowling and he certainly perceives the women around him in two-dimensional ways.
Orwell is also satirising suburbia, he describes the road on which Bowling lives as a “line of semi-detached torture chambers”. Although Bowling dislikes his lot, he accepts it reluctantly, despite his brief foray into his past.
Ever in the background is the threat of war; by this time war with Hitler was seen as inevitable and there is a sense of impending doom. George is aware that a good deal of what is around him will be destroyed, as the 1914-1918 war swept away the world of his childhood. Orwell also lets his own political feelings slip in occasionally and his description of a New Left Book Club meeting is very well drawn.
It is a good read and has a deep vein of humour in the face of coming destruction. Not Orwell at his best, but certainly a different aspect of his work.
The themes of the book are nostalgia, the folly of trying to go back and recapture past glories and the easy way the dreams and aspirations of one's youth can be smothered by the humdrum routine of work, marriage and getting old. It is written in the first person, with George Bowling, the forty-five-year-old protagonist, who reveals his life and experiences while undertaking a trip back to his boyhood home as an adult.
A novel that explores the pastoral life and experiences of youth in Edwardian England before the First World War as a memory of a man who is anxious about his own existence and pessimistic about his nation's inevitable progress towards another world war.
I think John Wain was right when he said, "What makes _Coming Up For Air_ so peculiarly bitter to the taste is that, in addition to calling up the twin spectres of totalitarianism and workless poverty, it also declares the impossibility of 'retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies' - because it postulates a world in which these things are simply not there any more."
This is a pessimistic novel that deals with sevearl paired themes:
- nostalgia for the past vs fear of the future
- memory vs truth
- memento mori vs inevitable change
- the individual/internal vs the universal/external
- liberty vs loss
- poverty vs wealth
As with Orwell's other work, 'Coming Up for Air' has some amazing prose and is definitely worth the effort.
If Orwell had ever divided his books between "entertainments" and serious works, as Graham Greene did, I assume he would have classified Coming Up for Air (1939) as the former, but it's still a fascinating window into the pre-war anxiety experienced by ordinary people in England. When George Bowling finds himself glancing worriedly at the sky on his way to work, his thoughts seem to be picking up directly from Orwell's previous book, Homage to Catalonia, which ends with Orwell contemplating "the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs."
Ultimately this is a story about running away, or at least the desire to run away, and it includes some of Orwell's best comic writing. There's a particularly inspired moment when George, in the process of trying to escape for the weekend without letting anyone know, glances at the road behind him and imagines everyone in his life in hot pursuit, including Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle: "There's the chap who's trying to get away! After him!"
Some readers might find it surprising that Orwell had a bit of sympathy for the chap trying to get away. Orwell was a man, after all, who in his late 30s volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War when he didn't have to, who seemingly couldn't conceive of an individual life without a certain responsibility to civilization as whole- a man I find morally admirable but for the same reason intimidating. But there's nevertheless some additional evidence of this sympathy in "Inside the Whale", Orwell's critical but not unsympathetic essay about Henry Miller- ostensibly a review of Tropic of Cancer, it turns into a reflection on Miller's worldview:
I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense of obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human — a prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit throughout his work.
The desire to get inside the whale- or to admit that you are already inside it, as Orwell refuses to condemn Miller for admitting- was understandable then, and it's understandable now. Who wants to think about this effing Coronavirus? Who wants to think about the warming of the planet, the concentration camps in China, and all the things that we don't seem to have any control over as individuals?
In another chapter that I remember somewhat vividly from this novel, George reminisces about getting to spend a few months alone on an island, at some strange care-taking job, just sitting alone, reading and thinking. Coming up for air, you might say. Life might offer a peaceful interregnum here or there, Orwell suggests, but there's also an awareness throughout his work that the world will not simply allow us to go into hiding and read books. Not for long, anyway.
Maybe what draws you back, finally, is your own sense of responsibility as a human being, an understanding that the world's problems are your problems. That if I see other people suffering, that has something to do with me. I can accept the lie that I just worked harder than they did, that I "deserve" what I have that others don't, and that's certainly more pleasant, or I can remind myself day in and day out that things are really fucked up. That I make this choice every day is something that Bernie Sanders's campaign for president, win or lose, has made me more conscious of, and something that Orwell's writing insists upon as well. The world won't simply leave us to our self-involved pleasures. And maybe that's as it should be.
Those are very important comments about "Coming up for air". Those were told by the protogonists of the novel.