Paradise Lost

The other day, I had what I like to think of as a ‘George Bowling moment’: I had been looking at the face reflected back at me from our small bathroom mirror, telling myself that age had been, so far, not unkind to me, when the sun emerged from behind a gloomy- looking cloud on the horizon and illuminated a broad expanse of scalp through my thinning hair. Within the hour, I had booked myself an appointment with my hairdresser, and within the week I had adopted, on their advice, a more flattering haircut for a man of my age.

George Bowling is the narrator of George Orwell’s delightfully pessimistic Coming Up for Air (1939). Bowling is a victim of a succession of disappointments just like mine – the tiny catastrophes of ageing – all in the shadow of a catastrophe that was not tiny: Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air between September 1938 and March 1939, on the eve of war, while convalescing near Marrakesh. With global conflict seemingly unavoidable and desperately missing his comparatively idyllic childhood in south Oxfordshire, it is perhaps no surprise that he chose a plot that centred on nostalgia and disappointed hopes. We are first introduced to Bowling on the precipice of a midlife crisis: he is 45, overweight, harried by his wife, disappointed by his children and depressed by his job as an insurance salesman. The situation in Europe isn’t helping his state of mind either, and war – with ‘the bombs and the machine guns’ – and what he refers to as the ‘after-war’ – ‘the coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons’ – are never far from his thoughts. More than anything, though, Bowling has become intensely (and often hilariously) cynical about modern life. Almost everything, from housing corporations and insurance policies to his own wife and children, is viewed with suspicion. The road on which he lives is ‘just a prison with the cells all in a row’, and London is ‘just one great big bull’s-eye’ for Hitler’s bombers. Food isn’t what it used to be: eating a frankfurter at a milk-bar, where everything is ‘slick and shiny and streamlined’ and the food is ‘phantom stuff that you can’t taste and can hardly believe in the existence of’, gives him the feeling that he has ‘bitten into the modern world’ and discovered what it is really made of. He even looks back nostalgically on homicide, commenting ‘how dull the murders are getting nowadays’. Bowling is a man at odds with himself – his emotions, his body, his age – and it is his attempts to overcome these awkwardnesses that make Coming Up for Air both outrageously funny and thoroughly depressing at the same time. It was Orwell’s only novel written in the first person and, though Michael Shelden in his 1991 biography suggested this first-person experiment was the ‘one serious defect’ of the novel, I have to disagree: the voice of George Bowling pulls together the tragicomedy of the novel perfectly. Within only a few pages, it is clear that our narrator isn’t actually a very nice person, and unlike the narrators of other novels that pivot around nostalgia – Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, for instance, or Leo in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (see SF no.78) – the more time you spend with Bowling, the less you like him. His attitude towards women, for instance, swings from the arrogantly misogynistic to the downright murderous. It is his wife Hilda who bears the brunt of his bigotry, infidelity and financial irresponsibility, yet somehow it is he who has ‘serious thoughts of killing’ her, and not the other way around. Bowling’s recollections of his picturesque childhood in Lower Binfield are similarly troubling for today’s reader, as the majority seem to involve torturing the local wildlife with a ‘tough gang of boys’; taking shots at birds with their catapults and stamping on half-fledged chicks. As he himself admits,

the truth is that kids aren’t in any way poetic, they’re merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish . . . Killing things – that’s about as near to poetry as a boy gets.

This is not to say that George Bowling is without any redeeming features. Aside from his dry, brash humour, there are moments of disarming sensitivity that almost make you forget his previous unpleasantness. His memory of reading adventure stories from Chums weekly in the cobweb- and mouse-infested loft behind the yard (‘the quietest place in the house’) certainly resonated with me, as it must with anyone who has been a keen young reader:

I’m twelve years old, but I’m Donovan the Dauntless. Two thousand miles up the Amazon I’ve just pitched my tent . . . I’m watching the mouse and the mouse is watching me, and I can smell the dust and sainfoin and the cool plastery smell, and I’m up the Amazon, and it’s bliss, pure bliss.

Aside from reading, fishing is the other pastime that meanders through Coming Up for Air, offering our narrator some consolation (though even this hobby is ultimately mostly about killing things). In fact, there is rather a lot of fishing in the book and, having never so much as touched a fishing rod myself, I have to admit that a lot of the technical detail went straight over my head; yet, as Bowling describes it, there does seem to be something glorious about it:

The still summer evening, the faint splash of the weir, the rings on the water where the fish are rising, the midges eating you alive, the shoals of dace swarming round your hook and never biting. And the kind of passion with which you’d watch the black backs of the fish swarming round, hoping and praying (yes, literally praying) that one of them would change his mind and grab your bait before it got too dark.

For Bowling, fishing is a lost paradise, something from ‘before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler’, one of those things that ‘don’t belong to the modern world’. In fact, more than the need to escape the pressures of work, family and current affairs, it is fishing that is the final impetus for Bowling’s return to his home town of Lower Binfield, to ‘catch those big carp’ – and to attempt to recapture something of his lost youth at the same time. I won’t spoil the ending but, suffice to say, his ‘quiet holiday’ doesn’t go quite as he expected (though perhaps exactly as we knew it would). Yet Coming Up for Air is about much more than just a midlife crisis: it seems to contain within it Orwell’s two later masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945, see SF no.65) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949, see SF no. 69), in embryo – a social history of class tensions and a vision of totalitarian oppression, but all rooted in the realistic landscape of interwar Britain, instead of a fairytale allegory or a dystopian future. Countless ideas echo between the books. Bowling’s reflections on the impact of big business on agricultural England would find parallels in Animal Farm. His fear of the totalitarian results of war foreshadows the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four:

the world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world . . . the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.

More fundamentally, as D. J. Taylor has highlighted in his perceptive second biography of the author, all of Orwell’s novels, including Coming Up for Air, are ‘essentially about rebellions that failed’. While the consequences of Bowling’s return to Lower Binfield may not be as devastating as those of Winston Smith’s rebellion, both are fundamentally pessimistic about the chances of an individual ever being able to resist control, whether that be the control of an all-seeing, totalitarian state or of the institutions and conventions that define modern life: mortgages, insurance, marriage, children and – above all – war. The real strength of Coming Up for Air is that, by the time you’ve finished reading it, you can hardly tell which vision is more dystopian. Yet, even in the face of Orwell’s bleak portrayal of suburban discontent, the book’s wry comedy seems to offer a glimmer of hope absent from the conclusions of either Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bowling’s cynical and sarcastic humour is his only defence against the modern world and the tiny catastrophes of ageing. It is a humour he manages to maintain until the novel’s closing pages (and, I hope, beyond). Though not quite Bowling’s age, and very happily married, Samuel Saloway-Cooke is already rehearsing a cynical outlook and heartfelt nostalgia in preparation for his own midlife crisis.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Samuel Saloway-Cooke 2025