The Immersion Library

Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air.

We depend on Orwell for his scintillating social commentary and unapologetic prophecies. We’ve read poignant allegory, frightening dystopian fiction, and autobiographical illustrations. In Coming Up For Air, we read what feels like a journal, an intimate first-person narration of scathing honesty rather than zealous lecturing. George Bowling illuminates his experience with his own world perspective and, in doing so, touches many within the social masses of the modern machine. Not only does Bowling directly respond to our reactions – at times, quite literally saying, “I know what you’re thinking” – with astouding precision – but readers will likely remember when they themselves said that, or heard their parents complain about that, or worried about their children laboring through that.

Orwell’s narrative choices work in their functionality as well as in their clarity. In most cases, a great writer will show rather than tell. In this case, I feel the “telling” works wonderfully! While it takes little effort to uncover the themes, in thinking about them, one feels as excited as if they had discovered them for themselves. I attribute this to Bowling’s ability to step out of the book, sit in a chair opposite me, and talk about his mid-life crisis; rather than play through his story on a screen.

George Bowling lives a typical working middle-class life, as Orwell defines it. In his narrative, the reader learns that he accepts his 45-year-old body, though he mentions his own fatness and false teeth with an odd regularity. While he appears to accept himself, he also spends a great deal of time thinking about how others see him. His thoughts race through his mind as he himself races through his routine. In one moment, he loses himself in a diatribe about how financial institutions buy us with our own money, then processed street food distracts him from news stories about murders, and boy’s club stooges and their shop talk distract him from visions of German bombers overhead. Despite his apparent ability to see through the modern economic farce of his generation, he continues to play his part in it, causing me to ask if he feels genuine frustration or seeks a way to tolerate his complicity by adopting a sense of antipathy. Orwell brilliantly symbolizes the reason for our systemic complicity during the episode of the store clerk and her manager.

Orwell then explores competing senses of nostalgia – a yearning to recover feelings from one’s past – and anxiety – the fearful predelection of the future. In Bowling’s case, that anxiety has a real face and it looks like Hitler. When processing the simultaneous coexitence of these sensations, he describes his childhood and understands the cause of the social contrast through his now adult perspective.

It was simply that they didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of. It isn’t that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher…And yet what was it that people had in those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure. More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they’d got to die, and I suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn’t know was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things would go on as they’d known them.

George does not pine for an objectively better life. He pines for a feeling, one that counters the current collective anxiety for the future; a feeling, not of having money, but the absense of financial responsibility. A feeling without past or future; fishing on the banks of a pool. Orwell symbolizes this nostalgia with a specific pool, hidden from others, containing massive black carp. A place to which he longs to return but hasn’t; like a deep well in his own heart.

1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir! It’ll never come again. I don’t mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not frightened, the feeling you’ve either had and don’t need to be told about, or haven’t had and won’t ever have the chance to learn.

A much more efficient way of describing nostalgia. And yet, ironically, the physical place associated with the feeling cannot create the feeling. The place cannot bring it back because its counterpart no longer exists. Its counterpart ages, changes, and develops into someone else.

Interestingly, Orwell conducts a prelude to 1984 by casually including post-war predictions alongside pre-war nostalgia and present anxiety for the near war. Because the actual events in Coming Up For Air take place before WWII, but after WWI, the reader understands the pre-war dialectic and also the coming war anxiety of the present. Yet Orwell, through an episode with liberal stumpists denouncing Hitler and stoking people’s anger into a cry for the soldier’s life, contrasted against a visit with an old classicist living in an ancient world of books, Orwell cautions against a post-war dystopia reminiscent of 1984. However, though Orwell does not necessarily develop this idea, the reader may question why post-war fears did not manifest themselves after WWI. Why can’t we avoid the post-war fears after this next war as we did after the first? Not that we did…

One gets the sense from Bowling that life is designed to ensnare a person, drown them, requiring them to, at some point, come up for air. Bowling attempts to physically come up for air only to find that there is none.

By God! I thought, if I’m as ghost, I’ll BE a ghost! I’ll walk. I’ll haunt the old places. And maybe I can work a bit of black magic on some of these bastards who’ve stolen my home town from me.

Again, we can explore concepts of nostalgia, anxiety, and categorized life periods deeper. As Bowling discovers, the world progresses with complete disregard for his need to come up for air. The wars will happen. And as the world changes, so do we. Our relationship to past events can never be experienced the same way because we are not the same. Just as we remember what we did, more importantly, we remember what we felt. Our hope for the future lies in our individual and collective memory of a feeling and our ability to ressurect that feeling in the future, like a smell or taste.