Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

Here is another book I abandoned in my twenties.  I came back to it because I thought I was 'ready' for it.  I am glad that I did, mainly because I have not duplicated the mistakes of the protagonist of the story.

George Bowling is an overweight man.  At the age of forty-five, he discovers he is married with two children.  He is in a safe and respectable job that he performs well.  Life is comfortable but unchallenging for George, and he becomes disquieted by it all.

A little piece of luck comes George's way; but instead of sharing it with his family, he decides to use it for his own selfish purposes.  He tells his wife he is going to Birmingham on business for a few days.  In reality, George goes back to his childhood village to do a spot of fishing and to take a walk down memory lane.  What he finds unsettles him even more.

Coming Up for Air is a book about the anxiety of a mid-life crisis and the folly of seeking a cure in the past. It is a pessimistic book.  Through George Bowling, we feel the oppression of the prospect an imminent war, we witness both the harmless and the hateful lunacies to which human fall prey in their lives: lives that are portrayed as long, barren and pointless.  George Bowling thinks his present-day life is in the 'bottom of a dustbin', and he yearns to surface, to come up to the fresh air, by going home to Lower Binfield, where life had been simpler and sweeter.  In the end, he finds himself deeper in the dustbin with the realisation that the past is neither a cure nor an anodyne for the pain of the present. 

Far more rewarding than George Bowling's story of self-pity, frustration and nihilism - he could have found his cure in any book on Buddhism and Mindfulness - is the way the story is told.  Orwell has George tell his tale in the first-person.  For all his pessimism and jaundiced outlook on life, George Bowling is a great storyteller.  His evocation of his childhood, with all its excursions down the lanes and side-streets of family history, schooling and young love, is quite exquisite.  George lays it out in a pretty pattern for the reader, and in such sharp-relief with the dissatisfaction of his present life that we truly feel his existential pain.  

We can never go back, no matter much how we try.  The world changes, and not always for the better.  That's life.  The theme is universal.  You have been warned!