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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
England your England, 5 Aug 2006
Nobody has ever claimed that this is George Orwell's greatest novel. Nobody except me - it is. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm will always have more intellectual respect, but from an emotional standpoint, Coming Up For Air is in a class of its own. It is possibly Orwell's `softest' novel, as his concerns about poverty and politics feature less here than in any of his other books, fiction or non-fiction. But even today, nearly seventy years after it was written, the themes of Coming Up For Air apply to our ever-changing world more than ever. The England of George Bowling's childhood, a fading memory in 1939, is now gone, lost for ever after a hundred years of `progress'. Read this book and cry for England - its still dying, one day at a time.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An exceptionally realistic fictional biography..., 4 Jul 2002
...of a life that Orwell as an individual was never really a part of, making it all the more a masterpiece. This is definately a must-read piece literature for the modern youth who, without the understanding of the past will never learn to overcome the barriers that were faced in the described periods [~1900-1938] (e.g. ignorance to the fallacy of war being fun and beneficial, and the inability of youths to understand that overweight people or those over 30 are actually human too etc., which can be overcome simply by reading Bowling's chillingly sad contrasts of being young and old, thin and fat etc.). The novel also really encapsulates the early-20th century transitions that occured socially and geographically in semi-rural England; the whole rags-and-rich-sole to riches-and-no-sole industrialisational process which seemingly struck, as well as themes which have nothing to do with the setting in particular - aging, social acceptance and the dead-endness of 'modern' married/white collar life in particular. Mature readers will surely be able to relate to Bowling in his disgruntled approach to change, as the change is from something that he loves to something that he hates, but as he describes - the new people of Lower Binfield have no concept of pre-ww1 Lower Binfield and so don't really care about what he has to say, and so he is resigned to accept that he is merely a relic of the past, a 'ghost', as Orwell puts it. Apart from this exquisite narrative of the transitions in the period, Orwell is also extremely witty with his writing, whilst still being very readable for any lay-man. He uses the title 'Coming Up For Air' to describe Bowling's situation; currently being underwater and suffocating in his current lifestyle and feeling an inner desire to breathe again by 'coming up for air' (by going back to his youth, where he was free to breathe). In the same way he compares the situation to being under a great heap of garbage and trying to come up for air.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Undeservedly neglected - one of Orwell's best, 15 Jul 2001
By A Customer
I doubt if 1% or the people who've read "1984" or "Animal Farm" have read this novel. This is sad indeed, as it's a fine novel in its own right, not just a book to be read for Orwell completists. The narrator, George Bowling, is an ordinary, pretty decent middle England sort of character, trapped in a lifeless marriage and nostalgic for days gone past. To try to recapture better days, he revisits his home town - but things don't go as planned... The plot of the book is sparse, with much of the text being George's recollections of old times and people, and his observations about British (or should that be English) life in the 1930s. Orwell's powers of observation were never sharper than here, and in the narrator, he created one of his few memorable fictional characters. And there's humour too. It is interesting to compare this novel with some popular books of the late 50s and early 60s such as "Hurry on Down" and "Saturday Night & Sunday Morning". I found myself wondering whether Orwell was the spiritual father of the Angry Young Men.
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