Burning Down George Orwell's House

By: Andrew Ervin

Narrated by: Donald Corren

A darkly comic debut novel about advertising, truth, single malt, Scottish hospitality - or lack thereof - and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Ray Welter, who was until recently a high-flying advertising executive in Chicago, has left the world of newspeak behind. He decamps to the isolated Scottish Isle of Jura in order to spend a few months in the cottage where George Orwell wrote most of his seminal novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ray is miserable and quite prepared to make his troubles go away with the help of copious quantities of excellent scotch.

But a few of the local islanders take a decidedly shallow view of a foreigner coming to visit in order to sort himself out, and Ray quickly finds himself having to deal with not only his own issues but also a community whose eccentricities are at times amusing and at others downright dangerous. Also the locals believe - or claim to believe - that there's a werewolf about, and against his better judgment Ray's misadventures build to the night of a traditional boozy werewolf hunt on the Isle of Jura on the summer solstice.

©2015 Andrew Ervin (P)2015 Recorded Books

Thoroughly enjoyed, beginning to end

If you could sum up Burning Down George Orwell's House in three words, what would they be?

Drunken Scottish Isolation

Any additional comments?

Who hasn't fantasized about dropping everything and getting of the grid? I know I do, often! This was a very entertaining story about that, placed so well in an interesting setting I could feel like I was there. Also, I love scotch too so there's that.

1984 ...

Very imaginative story of a disenchanted burned out ad exec going to extremes to search for major changes in his life.

Loved 99% of the book!

Loved the book had to put down. I wished it ended differently. The last 10 minutes were tough.

CULTURAL INTEGRITY

“Burning Down George Orwell’s House” seems a reification of John Ford’s “The Sports Writer”. Ervin’s main character, Ray Welter, is like Ford’s Frank Bascombe, but Welter is an alcoholic with a particular taste for aged whiskey. Both Welter and Bascombe tend to look at women as sex objects, but Ervin characterizes women as equally capable of treating men as sex objects.

A story of culture is woven into “Burning Down George Orwell’s House” by Welter’s decision to leave America and spend several months on a Scottish Island where Orwell wrote “1984”. This is a well written story that resonates with life as it is rather than how life should be. Alcoholism and wanton sexual relations are two of many sources of human weakness and conflict in society; neither are likely to disappear, regardless of whether cultures remain distinct or unified.