Coming Up for Air

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Wonderfully readable and true to life - Rated
An absolutely wonderful evocative novel, full of witty and poignant observations about lower middle class life between the wars, the fear of war (this was published in 1939), the securities and horrors of cosy family life and the power of nostalgia and the "golden age" myth of one's youth. Orwell's fear of war is that of the triumph of totalitarianism in Britain, and his descriptions of what he fears this will be like clearly presage his descriptions of Aistrip One in 1984. Despite this horror, there are many laugh out loud moments. This should be better known and more widely read than it is.

One of my favourite books. - Rated
I think all Orwell`s books are brilliant but I love this one the most, having just read it again for the umpteenth time. How this book can seemingly be overlooked by so many people is beyond me.

I am in my early sixties so I suppose that I can just about relate to the kind of world which George Bowling grew up in.

a Middle class dude of the 1930s goes back to his old neighboorhood. - Rated
a funny story about a mans reminiscences of his home town where he grew up.

England your England - Rated
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.

Coming up for air- what air? - Rated
George Bowling,middle-aged, pot- bellied and unhappily married with two children, goes through a mid-life crisis which takes him back to Lower Binfield where he grew up. He discovers that the place had been modernised beyond recognition;there was no point in returning to his boyhood past and the futility of Coming Up For Air- when there isn't any air!

Although there is little to the story-line,Orwell compensates with a well-written novel with an ability to engage a readers interest through the clarity and wicked humour in his writing.