Coming Up For Air - Critical Responses

Critical Responses

The novel sold three thousand copies, a thousand of which represented a second printing and thus bettered, "the dismal response in the bookshops which had met the publication of Homage to Catalonia." The reviews were among the best that Orwell had received for a novel. Margery Allingham, in Time and Tide, wrote that her only regret, "is that the story was written in the first person. This device, although it has the important virtue of making the narrative clear and easy to read, tends to falsify the character slightly since uncanny perception where his own feelings are concerned makes him a little less of the ordinary mortal which his behaviour would show him to be." A recent biographer, Michael Shelden, praised the "many passages of lyrical beauty, not unbecoming a novelist who once aspired to be a poet. The one serious defect in the novel is Orwell's attempt to be the voice of his narrator-protagonist. He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman, and the book is at its best when Orwell is 'out-of-character', speaking in a voice which is recognisably his rather than an imitation of 'Fatty' Bowling's. "

The writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, in their 1972 The Unknown Orwell, noted :" Eric Blair looked back unforgivingly on the world before 1914 - it was that world that had sent him to his prep school - while George Orwell could believe it was superior to what came after it, and looked back to it nostalgically in Coming Up for Air." The writer John Wain thought the book " not a success in novelistic terms", but saw, "vitality in its hinterland." He considered the novel - " a bleaker work than Keep the Aspidistra Flying; in Aspidistra everybody fears the sack, hankers for more money and security, cringes to the boss. But only to the boss at work, the economic boss. When Bowling thinks of the future, he fears not only the ever-present financial insecurity, the endless work, work, work with the gutter only a few steps away; he fears also the new breed of tyrants, the leader and his strong-arm boys." And Wain noted the third region of Bowling's nightmare - " what we have since learnt to call 'the environment'." He places Coming Up For Air alongside Orwell's 1946 essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad where he had written that, "retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and - toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable". "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."