Coming up for Air

By: George Orwell

Narrated by: Richard Brown

George Bowling, an insurance salesman, hits middle age and feels impelled to “come up for air” from his life of quiet desperation. With seventeen pounds he has won at a race, he steals a vacation from his wife and family and pays a visit to Lower Binfield, the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. But the pool is gone, Lower Binfield has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of Bowling’s holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.

Bowling’s everyman life provides a sort of cavalcade of England from 1893 to 1938. Written when the clouds of World War II were already gathering, this story of Bowling’s journey into his own and his country’s past is told with humor, warmth, and nostalgia that will surprise and delight George Orwell’s many readers.

George Orwell (1903–1950), the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. He was born in India and educated at Eton. After service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he returned to Europe to earn his living by writing and became notable for his simplicity of style and his journalistic or documentary approach to fiction.

©1950 The Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell (P)1991 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“By any standards, a work of rare vigor and imagination…Confirms one’s estimate of Mr. Orwell as a major prophet among the world’s still lively minority of thinking men.” ( NewYork Herald Tribune Book Review)

Reading is passable

I have others read Orwell that I preferred. For me, the narrator was a little too nasal. Having read Animal Farm and 1984, this was a slow read. It was not able to sustain my attention and as a result I found the reading a bit tedious.

A slice of life

This is a very human story. Nothing fantastic happens, and that's the point. The main character is a jolly old English chap named George Bowling. Or, is he? A jolly old Chap I mean. He's certainly old and fat and knows his place, and he's got a good bit of English wit left in him. But is that ALL there is? Who is the real George Bowling?

ORWELL!! His best.

Would you listen to Coming up for Air again? Why?

again and again and again. This has been regarded by serious critics as Orwell's best work, and I agree.

Who was your favorite character and why?

George

What about Richard Brown’s performance did you like?

His overall somewhat cynical tone and characterization fit the work perfectly.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

no

Any additional comments?

no

Orwell Flirts and Fishes w/ Nostalgia & Modernity.

A novel that explores the pastoral life and experiences of youth in Edwardian England before the First World War as a memory of a man who is anxious about his own existence and pessimistic about his nation's inevitable progress towards another world war.

I think John Wain was right when he said, "What makes _Coming Up For Air_ so peculiarly bitter to the taste is that, in addition to calling up the twin spectres of totalitarianism and workless poverty, it also declares the impossibility of 'retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies' - because it postulates a world in which these things are simply not there any more."

This is a pessimistic novel that deals with sevearl paired themes:
- nostalgia for the past vs fear of the future
- memory vs truth
- memento mori vs inevitable change
- the individual/internal vs the universal/external
- liberty vs loss
- poverty vs wealth

As with Orwell's other work, 'Coming Up for Air' has some amazing prose and is definitely worth the effort. Brown does a great job reading this novel in a way that evokes both the pre-World War I and pre-World War II eras.

really interesting story.

worth checking out. I've been on an Orwell kick lately and a friend recommended I check this out. I would recommended the same.

Coming up for air

In chapter 6 his commentary on parenting were well ahead of his time.

I also enjoyed the part about fishing and spending time alone,

Then in the war years how the term fascist would be used as a personal attack without knowing what that person actually believed.

I’m the end it’s a book about lovea

Good story, not the best production

Where does Coming up for Air rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Great story, and is definitely captures the best of the Orwell style. An entertaining read and amazing pictures that the author draws

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?

Not the best quality - hard to listen to in a noisy place, such as a car. From time to time, there's some kind of echo in the background and frequencies are not adjusted, so at the beginning, narrators high pitches just slam you on the head.

The exact right book for this week in my life.

I started listening to this on a trip to the town I grew up in. It was the perfect soundtrack.

My only criticism is of the narrator or the editor. quite often the end of a sentence would drop off before the word was finished. This was particularly annoying when the final word was British slang from the 1930s that I was not familiar with.

Orwell's best?

OK. Orwell is one of the most important writers in the English language. 1984 is probably the book that saved us from living entirely in the society it describes. And all of 1984 is here, in embryo, disguised as a book about going back to your youth and it's environs.

Orwell is always at his most fluid when he is describing politics or nature and here he goes full pelt at both of them. The Two Minutes Hate is here. Duckspeak is here. And so is the Golden Country. And here the description of the Golden Country is given full reign. And runs to cover quite a bit of the first few chapters.

I allow myself the conceit that George Bowling, the main protagonist, is actually the father of the Winston Smith of 1984. The timeline is nearly right and there are aspects of Bowling's story that make it just about possible. I'm pretty sure that Orwell had no intention to make it so but the two stories definitely flow into each other in a way that this idea enhances.

The story is however mainly about the coarseness of progress and the loss of rural life to commercialism, speculation and "airy fairynesss" for lack of a better phrase. This novel was published during the period where totalitarian states were taking actions that Orwell recognised as leading to inevitable war but before the actual outbreak of conflict for Britain. As such it is an important window onto that period of history.

The narration is very good and the overall production is excellent.

If you only ever read one Orwell it should be this one, but shame on you if it is.

Kinda depressing + bad recording

You can hear voices in the background of the recording. The story was interesting but obviously pretty depressing.