In This Life We Lead: George Orwell's Coming Up for Air

Orwell’s classic was on the syllabus in one of my grad school courses, where we were assigned one novel a week to read. I don’t think I even cracked its cover that term. But I’m thankful I bought it and had it on my shelf to rediscover, years later. Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I’ve learned from Coming Up for Air?

There are so many strengths to this work, but an obvious one is Orwell’s first-person narrator. George Bowling has an engaging and nerdy sort of self-awareness, and slips from one quirky commentary to another. He is a born storyteller, kind of a Cliff Claven, but with more depth. George spends the novel unspooling the tale of his own middle-age, wondering how he (and the rest of society) ended up where it is. This is London, 1938. An ominous time, and one that we think of now as quaint and innocent, positioned as it is before the bloodiest war in human history.

And yet the things that George Bowling misses and can never get back are the same sorts of things that any of us might long for from our childhoods. Simple, unadorned pleasures and the feeling of unbounded time. A world that made sense to us. A life where we were not enslaved to the “rat race”, a scheduled day, a repetitive commute, or the social expectations of a “progressive” lifestyle. A time when we had a waistline.

But let’s let Bowling speak for himself for a little. He’s just spent two chapters ruminating about fishing. Which you’d think would shade into boring, especially for someone like me who has no interest in it. Instead, I’ve been rapt. And then he takes his treasured experiences fishing and pitches them in the trash:

..[T]he other confession is that after I was sixteen I never fished again.

Why? Because that's how things happen. Because in this life we lead--I don't mean human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country--we don't do things we want to do. It isn't because we're always working. Even a farm hand or a Jew tailor isn't always working. It's because there's some devil in us that drives us to and fro on everlasting idiocies. There's time for everything except the things worth doing. Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you've actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you've spent on things like shaving, riding to and from on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers.

We might substitute a traffic light for a railway junction, or social media for a newspaper, but these words hit home. As a reader you’ve been patiently, pleasantly fishing along the shore of Bowling’s verdant memories. Then suddenly, dangling on your hook, is a truth about yourself and your own life and you’ve tugged it up and reeled it in before realizing that you now have to unhook the wriggling thing and put it out of its mercy. There is no way to throw any of this stuff back in the lake.

As you can read from the excerpt, the sentences Orwell uses (in the voice of George Bowling) are flat out powerful. They are not caught up in conveying, they simply convey. All use of wording, metaphor, and detail is precise and useful. Orwell’s writing as a journalist seems to impact this novel.

Personally, I also love that Orwell has tackled this subject matter. To be able to say something meaningful about the suburbs and the “ordinary” middle-class lifestyle is a talent. He does it by way of contrasting the world in which Bowling finds himself as an adult with the world in Bowling’s memory, the days of his life which had colour, and promise. When it had been possible to be a better person.