Happy birthday my son! (16th letter)

Well, here I am, writing to you again so soon.

I’m back home now after my trip to the USA. It was eventful and good to see your grandfather, who seems to be on a real path to recovery (fingers crossed). But after all that, it’s quiet in the house again – we got a little bit of a cold that is going around, so we’re hunkered down.

So I just wanted to send a quick message to wish you a happy birthday and to let you know that, as always, I am thinking of you.

My you must be getting big! – nearly heading into your teenage years! An exciting time lies ahead, with lots of fun and adventures, I am sure.

One day, I know we’ll have a chance to talk about all the great things you have been living. Until then, I am you loving father,

Dad

My review of George Orwell’s ‘Coming Up for Air’




Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Before starting to read Coming Up for Air, I was 150 pages into a lesser known Dickens called Martin Chuzzlewit. I had resigned myself to the pompous 19th Century style, with its improbably overwritten dialogue and run-on sentences. After all, it was a Dickens, and that meant the payoff would be a good story.

Well, there is a reason why Chuzzlewit was lesser known. 140 years before the Fonz was doing it on waterskis, Dickens managed to jump a rather ugly shark – petty personal grievances arising from his America trip, and the even more unforgivable sin of writing what he did not know. And as the story of Chuzzlewit became less engaging, the prose appeared to grow more overwritten and tortorous by the page.

Coming out of this and into a nice George Orwell felt like, well, coming up for air. It also put Orwell’s style in just the right social context. He was among those post-WWI writers whose plain prose stood in deliberate counterpoint to the exclusive and pretentious verbosity of the Victorians, for whom ‘common’ was a synonym of ‘cheap’. For Orwell, a plainly written novel was in itself a political statement: the socialism of the written word.
This theme is also perfectly echoed in the book itself, which tells the story of an ordinary middle aged man with a deliberately ordinary name – George Bowling – whose life spans the trenches of the Great War. As his youth unfolds in memory, the reader is taken through the great changes that redefined England in the early 20th Century. The social: A shopboy finding a higher place in the new social order, with its illusion of meritocracy, and ‘iron cage’ economy. The physical: The engorgement of bucolic villages by industry, the surburban sprawl of London, turning the South of England into the ugly maze of A-roads, roundabouts and semi-detatched houses we all know and hate.

Coming Up for Air is also a deeply personal story, unlike Orwell’s more overtly political (and better known) works. Drawing on personal experience, the author manages to tread the perilous line of a flawed protagonist; one who yet remains human enough for us to like. That’s not easy to do. But Orwell goes further – he crafts a tale that is captivating despite having no real plot beyond whether or not George Bowling will catch a fish.
Yet the novel is most memorable not for its retrospective on the first four decades of the 20th Century, but rather for its precience concerning the fifth. At various times during my read, I had to return to the copyright page to check that the book truly was written in 1940. The foreshadowing of the Second World War was so uncanny it left the impression that Orwell had written it 8 years later, when the dust had begun to settle. This in itself makes the book compelling, especially for today’s reader, whose spidey sense is perhaps tingling with the same grim forebodings.
In summary, if you were to read only one book that covers the great social change in England caused by the wars, this would be the one I would recommend.




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Happy New Year (15th letter)

Hello my dear son!

Well, it is 2022 and I am in the United States, making an emergency visit to your grandfather, whom you don’t remember. But he did meet you once, when you were a tiny baby.
He’s not doing so well – he had a stroke, which is like a wound in your brain. He can’t walk and his speech is slurred. But the doctors think he could make a recovery, with hard work and a bit of luck.

The most I can do is give him encouragement. Your sister Anna is also here, helping and just being the wonderful person she always is.

In ways, I feel very blessed.

But of course I still miss you. The fact that you were taken out of my life remains the biggest point of soreness in my heart.

But one day, sooner or later, we will meet. I am sure of it.

Meanwhile: Happy New Year, my son.

Love,

Dad