Work record

Coming Up for Air

Name: Coming Up for Air
Author: George Orwell

George Orwell

1939 · Early 20th Century · Novel · English

Copyrightedlow medical relevanceFive-minute digest

Abstract

Written: Published June 1939
Setting: 1938, with memories of 1900-1918; A London suburb; Lower Binfield in the Thames Valley
Author: George Orwell
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
Genre: Comic and elegiac novel
Form: Novel in four parts, first-person narration
Recommended: Grades 10–12 (Some marital infidelity and coarse humor.)

Premise. A stout, middle-aged insurance salesman with new false teeth wins a small bet and decides to spend it secretly on a visit to his boyhood village.

Memory. Most of the book recalls an Edwardian country childhood: his father's shop, church, boyhood gangs and the joy of fishing, especially a hidden pool of great carp.

War. He remembers the Great War, his wound and his rise to officer, and the loss of his parents.

Return. On his visit he finds the village buried under new estates and factories, his first love unrecognizable, and the carp pool turned into a rubbish tip.

Ending. A stray bomb falls on the town, and he goes home to face his suspicious wife.

For students. Discuss nostalgia, change and the coming war. Compare the narrator's longing with Ecclesiastes 7:10. The novel was written in Morocco during the winter of 1938-39 while the author recovered from illness, and it appeared just three months before Britain declared war. Because Bowling's 1939 monologue stays in US copyright through 2034, its comic voice is described here rather than reproduced; students need a borrowed or bought copy to hear it.

Main characters

George Bowling: insurance salesman and narrator
Hilda: his wife
Elsie: his first love
Porteous: retired schoolmaster

Portrait of George Orwell. Source · Public domain

Summary

Coming Up for Air is George Orwell's last novel before the Second World War, narrated in a comic, conversational voice by George Bowling, a forty-five-year-old, overweight insurance salesman with false teeth, a nagging wife named Hilda, two children and a mortgage on a semi-detached house in a London suburb. On the day he collects new false teeth, Bowling wins seventeen pounds on a horse and, sensing that a new war is coming and that modern life is cheap and hurried, decides to secretly spend the money on a trip back to Lower Binfield, the Thames Valley village where he grew up before 1914. Most of the novel is his memory of that childhood: his father's seed shop, his mother's kitchen, Sunday church, the gang of boys, the old Edwardian world that seemed permanent, and above all fishing. He remembers a hidden pool behind the old manor house full of enormous carp that he never had the chance to catch. He recalls the First World War, in which he was wounded and became an officer, and the death of his parents. On his trip in 1938, he finds Lower Binfield swallowed by suburban housing estates, factories and a modern arts-and-crafts colony. His old sweetheart Elsie has become a fat, shabby old woman who doesn't recognize him. The pool where the great carp lived has been filled in and turned into a rubbish dump. As a final blow, an RAF bomber accidentally drops a bomb on the town. Bowling returns home to face Hilda, who has discovered his lie. The book is a comic and elegiac meditation on nostalgia, modern mass society, and the fear of coming totalitarian war, with Bowling warning of the 'rubber truncheons' and slogans to come. Its affection for a lost, rooted English life sits beside Orwell's awareness that the past cannot be recovered. Since the 1939 novel stays in US copyright through 2034, Bowling's voice is paraphrased here, not excerpted.

Virtues in this work

Hope: The novel exposes misplaced hope in the past.

Plot or Argument

Part I: The new teeth
Bowling wins money on a horse and plans his escape.
Part II: Childhood
His memories of Lower Binfield before 1914.
Part III: Middle years
He recalls the war, his marriage and his dull adult life in the suburbs.
Part IV: The return
He visits Lower Binfield and finds it ruined.

Characters

George Bowling, narrator
Middle-aged insurance salesman.
Hilda Bowling, wife
Anxious, penny-pinching wife.
Elsie Waters, old sweetheart
His first love, now aged.
Porteous, friend
Retired schoolmaster who lives in the past.

Lessons

Nostalgia and reality
Bowling learns that the past cannot be recovered.
- What does Bowling find in Lower Binfield?
- Is his nostalgia foolish?
Related across the library
- Aesop's Fables, Full Text
  from which you had no means of escape Look before you leap The Raven and the Swan A RAVEN saw a Swan and desired to secure for himself the same beautiful plumage Supposing that the Swan s splendid white color arose from his washing in the water in which he swam the Raven left the altars in the neighborhood where he picked up his living and took up residence in the lakes and pools But cleansing his feathers as often as he would he could not change their color while through want of food he perished Change of habit...
- Saint Joan, Lesson: Praising saints and receiving them
  Praising saints and receiving them. In the Epilogue everyone honours Joan once she is safely canonized, but no one wants her alive again. Shaw asks whether people honour holiness more easily in the past than in their own day.
- The Fall of Constantinople, 1453: Eyewitness Accounts, Lesson: Holding a post to the end
  Holding a post to the end. Constantine XI was offered terms and the chance to leave, but the sources agree he stayed with his city and died in the final assault. His conduct, told by Greek and Latin witnesses alike, made him a lasting figure of loyalty. Ottoman writers in turn praised the courage and planning of Mehmed, a ruler of twenty-one who carried out what earlier sultans had attempted.
- Heidi, Lesson: An uncle’s thaw
  An uncle’s thaw. The Alm-Uncle’s hardness yields to a child’s love and to renewed faith.
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 2, Scene 1
  Speed lists the outward signs by which he knows Valentine is in love: folded arms, sighing, walking alone, loss of appetite and sleep, a catalogue of the love-melancholy conventional in Elizabethan writing.
Mass society
Orwell criticizes cheap, hurried modern life and the loss of rooted places.
- What does Bowling dislike about modern life?
- Is he fair?
Related across the library
- Testament of Youth, Lesson: The lost generation of women
  The lost generation of women. Brittain insists that women too were a war generation, deprived of partners and futures. Her account of postwar Oxford reveals the isolation of the survivor.
- Much Ado About Nothing, Full Text
  URSULA The pleasant st angling is to see the fish Cut with her golden oars the silver stream And greedily devour the treacherous bait So angle we for Beatrice who even now Is couched in the woodbine coverture Fear you not my part of the dialogue HERO Then go we near her that her ear lose nothing Of the false sweet bait that we lay for it They advance to the bower No truly Ursula she is too disdainful I know her spirits are as coy and wild As haggards of the rock URSULA But are you sure That Benedick loves Beatri...
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Lesson: Launce, Crab and the comedy of loyalty
  Launce, Crab and the comedy of loyalty. Launce weeps for a family and is ignored by a dog; he takes Crab's beating at the Duke's table as his own. The clown's loyalty to an unworthy companion parodies and quietly judges the gentlemen's quarrel. Shakespeare already uses prose comedy to say something the verse plot cannot.
- Heroides, Letter V (Oenone to Paris)
  Alas, wretched me, that love may not be healed by herbs! Oenone, taught healing by Apollo, owns every herb and root in the world, yet cannot cure her own love.
- Persuasion, Full Text
  had been smarting under year after year I could think of you only as one who had yielded who had given me up who had been influenced by any one rather than by me I saw you with the very person who had guided you in that year of misery I had no reason to believe her of less authority now The force of habit was to be added I should have thought said Anne that my manner to yourself might have spared you much or all of this No no your manner might be only the ease which your engagement to another man would give I le...
Fear of war
Bowling foresees the coming war and its slogans.
- What does he predict?
- How accurate was he?
Related across the library
- Sam the Minuteman, Lesson: War is real and costly
  War is real and costly. The story does not make battle into a game. Eight men die on the green and Sam's own friend is shot. Benchley lets children see that the freedom Americans celebrate was won by ordinary farmers who were hurt and killed.
- Macbeth, Summary
  Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings. Almost at once messengers bring news that King Duncan has made Macbeth Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth writes to his wife, and Lady Macbeth, fearing his nature is too full of the milk of human kindness, calls on...
- Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4
  I am in blood Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er After the banquet ghost, Macbeth resolves to press on with violence.
- Perpetual Peace, Lesson: Honesty and statecraft
  Honesty and statecraft. The appendices ask whether politics must be cunning. Kant rejects the maxims of seizing advantage and denying wrongs afterward, and proposes a test of publicity: a policy that could not survive being announced is unjust. The moral politician fits his conduct to principle and waits for favourable circumstances rather than forcing them.
- The Rights of War and Peace (Book I), Lesson: Law reaches even into war
  Law reaches even into war. Grotius's starting point is that war does not suspend all right: because war is undertaken for peace, it must be governed by rules that make peace possible again. Book I lays the definitions on which that claim rests.

Context

Orwell wrote the novel in Morocco during the winter of 1938-39 as war with Germany loomed; it appeared in June 1939.

Composition

Published by Victor Gollancz in June 1939.

Reception

Admired for its comic narrator and as a prophecy of postwar England.

Memory / Time Home Exile Technology Modernity War Violence Nature / Landscape Childhood

Comparisons

Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Orwell's previous novel of lower-middle-class life.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell's vision of totalitarianism, foreshadowed here.
The Great Gatsby
Another novel of nostalgia for a lost past.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

The hidden pool of giant carp.
The changes in Lower Binfield.
Bowling's predictions of war.
What he finds on his return home.

Key terms and names

Suburb: Residential area on the edge of a city.
Nostalgia: Longing for the past.
Edwardian: Belonging to the reign of Edward VII (1901-1910).
Rubber truncheon: Bowling's symbol of totalitarian violence.

Seminar Questions

Comprehension Why does Bowling go back to Lower Binfield?
Comprehension What has happened to the pool?
Interpretation What does the pool symbolize?
Interpretation How does Bowling view the coming war?
Interpretation What does the bomb at the end mean?
Big Question Can we ever go home again?

Faith Connections

Ecclesiastes 7:10 (Scripture)
Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these?
Hebrews 13:14 (Scripture)
Here have we no continuing city; our true home lies ahead, not behind.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The past cannot be recovered, and modern mass society and coming war threaten the rooted life that once was.

Rhetorical device: comic first-person narration. Bowling's colloquial voice blends humor and melancholy.

Debate: Resolved: that Bowling's nostalgia is wisdom, not folly.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Explain what Bowling learns from his return to Lower Binfield.

Comparison with The Great Gatsby: Compare Gatsby's and Bowling's attempts to recover the past.

Medical Lens

Bowling's war wound and his awareness of middle age.

WAR Wounds Aging Senescence

Part III
Bowling's wound in the war.
WAR Wounds

Creative Prompts

Essay
Is Coming Up for Air a hopeful or a sad book?
Fiction
Write Bowling's account of the pool he never fished.
Classroom
Compare village life in 1900 and today.