Coming Up For Air

By George Orwell

On the eve of the Second World War, George “Fatty” Bowling places a bet that changes his life. Unlikely winnings in his pocket, George sets off to revisit the happier days of his childhood, distancing himself with each step from his unhappy life, dour wife, and annoying daughters. Along the way, however, Bowling learns that time does not stand still, even in memory, as many of his old haunts have either disappeared or irrevocably changed. Published in June 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, Coming Up for Air is George Orwell’s nostalgic look at an idyllic world on the brink of collapse.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781443417495

George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India where his father was a civil servant. After studying at Eton, he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma for several years which inspired his first novel, Burmese Days. After two years in Paris, he returned to England to work as a teacher and then in a bookshop. In 1936 he travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, where he was badly wounded. During the Second World War he worked for the BBC. A prolific journalist and essayist, Orwell wrote some of the most influential books in English literature, including the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four and his political allegory Animal Farm. He died from tuberculosis in 1950.

Reviews for Coming Up For Air

[kylekatz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book. It had the most marvelous old-world feeling to it. It's about a middle-aged insurance salesman named George Bowling. He lives in a suburb called West Bletchley and more or less hates his wife and kids, but he's used to them. He kind of accepts his lot in life. He's got to scrape by and keep on plugging to meet the bills with his wife worrying and nagging at him.One day he gets nostalgic for his childhood and starts to review his life. He grew up in a village of about 2,000 souls and was a child at the time of the Boer War. His youth is rather idyllic without being too romantic. He runs around the countryside with other boys, fishing and ratting with ferrets, and not really having a care in the world.When he's Sixteen his father sends him to work at a grocer's to earn his keep and he does so for a few years with the idea of learning the business and maybe having his own shop one day.Then bam it's World War I and he goes off to fight without a thought. It's what good Britons do. The war disillusions him greatly and after an injury sends him to the Home Guard, he's more then happy to wait out the last couple of years reading books in a backwater.He can no longer imagine going back to his village after the war and he starts selling insurance presently. Gets married and finds himself stuck in the rat race.One day he wants to go back to the simplicity of life before the war and he basically discovers that you can't go home again.The beauty of the book is in the language and the homely sort of philosophy of the main character. His love of nature and the things he's seen pass away in his lifetime. The coming of cars and planes and bombs and radio and pictures. The growing of industry and towns and urbanization. It would be nostalgia if it wasn't such great literature. As it is I'm sad it ended.

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is one of Orwell's comic novels, but with a serious undertone. It's 1938, and there are hints that England may soon be at war again. "Fatty" Bowling is a middle-aged suburban insurance salesman. He feels oppressed by his wife--"She's one of those people who get their main lack in life out of forseeing disasters. Only petty disasters of course." Disasters such as the price of butter going up, the gas bill being enormous, the kids needing new shoes. His children are monsters: "The truth is that kids aren't in any way poetic, they're merely savage little animals, except an animal is a quarter as selfish." His life is stultifying, and his street "a prison with all the cells in a row. A line of semi-detached torture-chambers."When Fatty has to get false teeth--a landmark: "When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you can kid yourself that you're a Hollywood sheik is definitely at an end. And I was fat as well."--he decides to stop and run away for a week--to come up for air--to reflect on his life. He returns to his childhood village in an attempt to recapture his idyllic pre-WWI youth. Of course he finds the village irrevocably changed, and the impending war with Germany intrusive. There are even hints of 1984 here:"The world we're going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. and the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering the leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him..." We all know that you can't go home again--can't recapture the Edenic past. So while there is plenty of humor in this book, it is ultimately a downer, and even Fatty recognizes this:"I'm finished with this notion of getting back into the past. What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist! Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dust bin that we're in reaches up to the atmosphere."

[benkline · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not the greatest of Orwell, and definitely doesn't follow that 'typical Orwell' feel to it. I love how the quote on the cover says its a "Charming, cheerful, minor masterpiece" when the entirety of the novel is pessimistic and about how horrible suburban life is, how bad married life is, with kids, and nothing but bills, and how the future (and not just WWII but the after-war) will be likewise horrible if not worse. Definitely not a 'charming and cheerful' novel. Not a BAD novel.... but slow, plodding, pessimistic, and altogether forgettable.

[histreader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have little toleration for pessimistic people. In real life, I avoid cynics and their defeatist attitudes; likewise, in literature, I tend not to read too much of it either. Yet, there is something fascinating about George Orwell that I keep coming back to and make accommodation for.On so many levels, he plays into my nostalgia. No, I was not a child of the '80s,'90s and turn of the century... one-hundred-years after George Bowling grew up. I was probably of the last generation to race down to corner store only to spend unnecessary minutes anguishing over the selection of penny candies. George Orwell fictionalizes a true life phenomenon; he taps into a universality that struck close to home, even a century later. Boys never change. I was much like a young George Bowling. I fished as a child; somehow, the activity slowly became less a part of my life. I biked everywhere, climbing the social ladder based on the model of bike; the number of speeds determined one's independence. I too worked in a grocery as a teenager, and once thought it possible to labor amongst the aisles and goods, seeing the middle-aged men and women who had made retail their career.Orwell writes with all five senses in mind. For a young Bowling, there were enough similarities to my youth, there seemed no difference. As I began this review, cynicism has little appreciation for me, yet I for some reason give Geogre Orwell a pass. Perhaps it is my affection for his book 1984 and a nostalgia for Animal Farm? Per chance, he triggers my memories of the punk band The Subhumans. Like so much of British sensibilities, both the band and author share an overt vein that one's life is determined by those in command, and little choices provide a sense of control over one's destiny. Streams of 1984 were evident in Coming Up for Air, almost like a precursor to a dystopian society was just around the corner. Hitler would have been the catalyst for Big Brother to campaign on safety and slowly develop a system of Ministries.Overall, it is hard to imagine this book was not in some way - possibly a profound one - an autobiography, a memoir of sorts.

[whiteriot · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When I was 15 and living in 1970 Essex suburbia my English teacher chose this Orwell novel (not Animal Farm or 1984) and made us read it. It has remained fresh in my mind throughout my life and when I reached 45 I thought it would be a good idea to check back in with George Bowling. This rates as one of my most loved books, funny, moving and inspiring.

[theboylatham_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Seven out of ten. eBook.

Set in the days immediately leading up to WWII, this novel follows George Bowling as he temporarily escapes from his average life. He returns to the village where he grew up, only to find that everything had changed and he couldn't return to his younger, thinner days.

Strangely enjoyable for someone essentially having a mid-life crisis.

[meggyweg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When I first had a look at this, I wondered if it was really by the same George Orwell. It certainly didn't seem to be anything like 1984 or Animal Farm. But it was indeed he. I spent most of the book wondering if anything was actually going to happen in this story. And nothing really did. I hated it at first, but for some reason I kept coming back to it. It grew on me.The protagonist, a fat and rather unlikeable father of two named George Bowling, leads a rather boring middle-class existence in the mid-1930s. He sells insurance. He lives in a suburban house. He doesn't love his wife anymore and he doesn't really like his children. The impetus for the plot is that George won seventeen pounds in a horse race and decides to keep it a secret from his family and go on a secret trip back to Lower Binfield, the village where he grew up. Another good title for the book might have been You Can't Go Home Again, but Thomas Wolfe had already taken it. When George returns to Lower Binfield, he doesn't even recognize it.The true beauty of the book is its description of the settings. A large chunk of the story is taken by George describing his youth and young adulthood in a time lost to us forever: before the War to End All Wars, then the world seemed a much safer place. As George puts it, it's a time you either know already and don't need to be told about, or a time you don't know and could never understand. Also important is Orwell's prescience for the future: war is looming, and George is well aware that it might change the world forever once again.I would recommend this books to scholars of modern English literature and also turn-of-the-century England.

[dylanwolf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've read this in a couple of days after expensively ordering it from Waterstones. I wanted to read it before seeing a play based upon the book at the Edinburgh Fringe. I've read 1984 and Animal Farm but not read any other Orwell. This I loved. I put aside the joys of Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea" which I've only just begun, forty pages or so in and read this with pleasure and ease. Iris Murdoch is a wonderful writer but makes much greater demands on the reader than Orwell. He wants to put across his philosophy; you can tell that it is his primary objective in writing the book. So he keeps it clear and simple. Iris Murdoch is deep and luxurious like rich, damp fruit cake. Orwell is more a rock cake, lumpier and to the point.I appreciated the fatalism of Bowling in "Coming Up for Air". He already knew his journey back to nostalgia was doomed before he set out on it. He knew he was hopelessly tied into the under the thumb fat middle-aged insurance salesman that he was. He as checking his exit route in order to see that it wasn't clear so that he had no need to chastise himself for his abject surrender to his fate as a nobody. Yet within that Orwell conjures an intoxicatingly attractive and sentimental vision of pre-WW1 England. George Bowling was not worthy of it as a child let alone now as a failing adult but it was there and it recieved him in a way that the modern pre-WW2 world didn't. He is caught up in the angst of the fast arriving war and is equally powerless to affect it as he is his own life. So disillusioned he can mock everything around him even as he recognises himself within it.A very much under-rated Orwell novel, I think.

[brianc6_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Set against the backdrop of the inevitable approach of war (WW2) in Europe and the political turmoil running rampant through England at the time, this is the very small story of a very small man who has lost himself and his attempt to recover something of his life by searching out a favourite childhood haunt. Moving and real, one of my all time favourites.

[tzelman_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Nostalgic account of a trip to a non-exstant past; Fatty Bowling as a pessimistic insurance salesman

[griff_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of the more memorable passages for me involves George Bowling's reflection on being transported in time - through memories triggered by one's sense of smell."The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment."How true that is.

[brittanysteve · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beautufully written pre war cynicism from suburbia with social history of england

[mbmackay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The third of Orwell's books I've read over the past few months. None of these books has been in the Animal Farm/1984 category, but this one has a verve lacking in Burmese Days and Clergyman's Daughter.Curiously told in the first person, the book tells of the life and reflections on a fat 45 year old insurance salesman. I thought Orwell nailed the non-elite voice of his protagonist, but I see other comments that suggest that the character couldn't have had the complexity suggested in the book. Why not?Written before the war, the book strongly states that a coming war is inevitable, and that the consequences will be shattering. Absolutely correct on two counts.

[ionas_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was somewhat disappointed by this book since I found the main character, George Bowling, and his life so utterly boring. George’s father was a shopkeeper who mostly sold poultry food and fooder for tradesmen´s horses; the family lived in Lower Binfield, which was a town with about five hundred houses, all of which were filled with insects. George grew up to be “a fat middle-aged bloke with false teeth and a red face”. He became a shop assistant, sold insurance, and married a girl called Hilda who within only about three years had “settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump”. George joined the army during the First World War and got wounded. Later, he was very focused on the approach of the Second World War, Hitler, Stalin, bombs and so on. But this absolutely well-written book turned out to be very readable, despite its depressing content; I admit it was only towards the end that I realized it was a comedy. P.S. The book was not autobiographical; George Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair.

[eglinton_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Orwell drops the simpering sensibilities and experimental narration of the earlier novels, developing here the vigorous delivery of plain words and thoughts so effective in his later essays and in 'Animal Farm' and '1984'.  A suburban clerk everyman looks back nostalgically to an already distant Edwardian golden age, and too to the timeless pleasures of boyhood; but also prefigures the war and upheaval that's round the corner (the book came out in 1939). A memorable portrayal, and a snapshot of the bullish spirit of the English, as well as their chippiness, the latent fear and tension within the bland calm and continuity of the age (that reliable and comforting social order still familiar in the satirical world of Profesor Branestawm's stories, which I note were written in this period too).

[pilgrimjess · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Life's here to be lived, and if we're going to be in the soup next week-well, next week is a long way off."'Coming Up for Air' is effectively a social document echoing Orwell’s socialist views and tells the story of Fatty George Bowling, a middle-aged man who lives with his wife, Hilda, and their two children on Ellesmere Road, London. George is a very ordinary man in a safe insurance job but who is fearful of the future in which he sees the approaching war. George feels trapped on Ellesmere Road and in particular by the ironically named Cheerful Credit Building Society and it's owner Sir Herbert Crum. George believes that each deceives the inhabitants in to thinking they own their houses when in reality they don't expanding on what Orwell regards as the upper classes ruling over the working class proletariat and continuing the socialist ideals about fairness and equality first muted in his earlier novel The Road to Wigan Pier. Similarly, George and Hilda attend a meeting on fascism, clearly drawing parallels with what was happening on mainland Europe at the time. After introducing the Bowlings and the world they live in, readers are transported to George's childhood life in Lower Binfield, where he remembers how ‘it was summer all the year round’, his father’s seed business, his mother’s cooking and in particular his love for fishing. Childhood for George is ‘ a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing’, reminding us that we are all nostalgic at times and how we sometimes dream of recapturing past glories but as George informs us, ‘There’s time for everything except the things worth doing’. George eventually enlists for the army and after being demobbed moves away from Lower Binfield.Twenty-five years later George returns, without telling Hilda, to spend a week in Lower Binfield but finds that the streets that he remembers has been swallowed up by a much larger town as is no longer recognisable, where virtually all his childhood shops have changed hands and no one remembers him of his family, including the local vicar and his first love Elsie Flowers’ whose ‘deeply feminine’ look had disappeared and she was now ‘a fat old woman muddling about a frowzy little shop’. But most importantly to George is the fact that the pond at Binfield House where he once saw some huge carp which he had always dreamt of catching had become a rubbish dump. Realising that the last piece of his childhood has been ravaged by time George returns home only to find out that Hilda has discovered his lies about his whereabouts.George is a likeable if highly flawed character whereas the female characters are strictly two-dimensional but this shouldn't really detract from this book. Orwell uses irony to portray how the effects of an earlier war has changed society but also reminds us that actions have consequences in our personal lives as well and no matter how much we wish it, it is impossible to turn back the clock. Similarly he reminds us that the future is largely out of our control and instead we should make the most of the present. Whilst this book may not be of the same calibre as his more famous books, Animal Farm and 1984, it does how forward thinking much of his writing was and shows that many Orwellian themes and ideas are still applicable today, as such I feel that it still deserves to be read.

[tibobi · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Short of It: An odd little book, but what a treasure. The Rest of It: I’m not sure why I enjoy Orwell’s writing so much. It may be his pessimistic take on what we call civilization, or it could be that I am a bit of a realist. I see things as they are…no imagined glory here. The same can be said for this book. Coming Up for Air is a novel about George Bowling. He’s a married, middle-aged man who after winning a horse race, decides to visit his hometown to re-live the years of his youth. There’s a bit of a problem though. George is married to Hilda and lives the typical suburban lifestyle that includes a house and two kids. George doesn’t seem to want to remember this though. The day-to-day that George shares with us is anything but dreadful, but the normalcy, the lack of excitement is a constant thorn in his side. With war looming in the distance, he reminisces on how life was, and how it could be. "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 fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers." [Page 93] But Lower Binfield is not what it used to be. As you can imagine, progress can be a wicked thing to behold and George’s quaint hometown is not so little anymore and even the things that haven’t changed, seem to be different twenty years later. "It’s a queer experience to go over a bit of country that you haven’t seen in twenty years. You remember it in great detail, and you remember it all wrong." [Page 209] To add insult to injury, the people are not the same either as evidenced by this account where he happens to run into an old flame. "Only twenty-four years, and the girl I’d known, with her milky-white skin and red mouth and kind of dull-gold hair, had turned into this great, round-shouldered hag, shambling along on twisted heels." [Page 243] What’s wonderful about this book is that everyone can relate to it. Things change. We change. There is a “George” in all of us and Orwell’s wry, sarcastic take on progress is at times very funny. This isn’t an account of a man falling apart. There is no mid-life crises per se, but what we view through George’s eyes is a quiet realization that one cannot recapture their youth and that time marches on whether or not we accept it. If you enjoy “day in the life” type stories you will enjoy this one.

[fourbears_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

George Bowling, in his mid forties and a WWI vet looking at the approach of a new war in the late Thirties reminisces about his life and times. An ordinary guy, not very educated, a commercial traveler with a wife in a slightly higher social cast. He starts out telling the reader about his new false teeth and ends of telling the story of his life. He’s not a terribly interesting guy, but he’s honest and not too hung up on himself. And the everyday detail of someone born at the turn of the twentieth century is great. Historians should read it too