Read It In Books:Coming Up For Air.

"He's dead but he won't lie down" - Gracie Fields

George Bowling, 45 and overweight, knows that war is coming and he fears it. He fears modernity too. He fears much. So he spends most of his time living in the past. Thinking of what life was like when he was a child. He doesn't seem a happy man but then he doesn't, particularly, seem an unhappy man. He seems an unlikely person to base a novel around.

In George Orwell's 1939 novel Coming Up For Air we're introduced to Bowling at a crucial point, a crisis point, in his life. He's getting fed up with family life. His wife Hilda and kids (Lorna, 11, and 7 year old Billy) just seem to annoy him, he lives in an ordinary house in anonymous suburbia (which, for some reason, made me think of Radiohead's Street Spirit and also No Surprises), and he's just got some new false teeth.

He constantly rakes over the past. In fact he does nearly as much remembering as one of Peter Kay's mediocre, and increasingly irritating, comedy routines. If he's not remembering the price of sweets when he was a kid, he's remembering the time someone he knew stole some turnips. If he's not remembering when it was two pence for a pint of beer he's remembering the time he went fishing and caught a stickleback. And if he's not remembering any of that he's remembering playing conkers and masturbating as a school boy. Not at the same time though.

More then anything though he seems to like remembering the very few times he went fishing. Catching a cod to George Bowling is better than any woman. His incessant obsession with the past reminded me of a guy I used to know called Denim Nick (he rocked the double denim look at the time it was considered terminally uncool). Denim Nick's catchphrase was "it's not as good as it used to be". George Bowling lives that catchphrase.

Both the book and George Bowling's life become far more interesting when war arrives. Initially, World War I but later World War II (or at least the threat/inevitability of it). The war(s) change Bowling's status, change his life, and change his perspective. His observations become both more acute and a lot drier. He starts to understand class distinctions and how they're not so simple as upper/middle/lower. He can see how things people have believed to be certain and still for years have been, or will be, uprooted. When he visits his friend Porteous, a man who believes nothing of worth has happened since the fall of the Roman Empire, he marvels at how Porteous is not the only one not to worry about the danger of Hitler and the Nazis.

But he also sees how those who oppose fascism are creating their own rules and their own form of hatred. At times like this it's hard to distinguish between George Bowling the fictional character and George Orwell the author. Not much at all actually happens in the story. Bowling thinks about the past, speculates about the future, and goes for a few days away which he lies to his wife about.

Orwell/Bowling considers such questions as how it feels to have a soapy neck ("rotten" and "sticky all over"), how people murdering each other in Spain and China is "as usual", and what it means to live in suburbia where the houses are "a line of semi-detached torture chambers", "a prison with all the cells in a row", and yet comes to no firm conclusions.

The first person stream of consciousness narrative reminded me of J.D.Salinger's Catcher In The Rye (written over a decade later, it's not inconceivable at all that Orwell was an influence on Salinger) and some of the observations that Orwell/Bowling make seem like prototype ideas for a future manosphere. Killing things is as close to poetry as a boy can get and no woman could ever understand how great it feels to be a man. Elsewhere, and as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell fetishises the proles who he sees as free.

Or is that Bowling? A book that starts off seeming to be about George Bowling ends up slowly morphing into one about George Orwell himself and it's all the more interesting for that. The first half wasn't particularly interesting but the second half was a very good read, full of Orwell's precise, accurate, and funny observations. It's not his best book (that's a bloody high bar) but it's well worth a read.