Coming Up for Air

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.

Top Lessons

• Nostalgia and reality

  Bowling learns that the past cannot be recovered.

• Mass society

  Orwell criticizes cheap, hurried modern life and the loss of rooted places.

• Fear of war

  Bowling foresees the coming war and its slogans.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

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

• Part III

  Bowling's wound in the war.