Novel: Coming Up for Air

Overview
George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up for Air follows George Bowling, a 45-year-old insurance salesman and family man in a drab London suburb, as he snatches a brief escape from middle-aged routine. Narrated in Bowling’s blunt, conversational voice, the book marries comic observation to political dread. Its subject is not a grand adventure but the uneasy breathing-space before catastrophe: a man’s yearning for the lost England of his boyhood as Europe slides toward war.

Plot
Bowling’s life is comfortable but airless: a mortgage, two children, a nagging but not unloving wife, Hilda, and a job that rewards glibness more than conviction. A small windfall from a secret bet offers him a chance to slip the leash. He conceals the money, uses a dental appointment as cover, and decides to revisit Lower Binfield, the Thames-side market town where he grew up before 1914, convinced that one corner of his past still waits for him unchanged.

On the way, he drifts into old habits of memory. Lower Binfield, which he remembers as a place of horses, hedges, and slow afternoons, is inseparable from a private myth: a hidden carp pool on a nearby farm, a still, green place he never quite managed to exploit as a boy. That untouched water becomes his symbol for the England he believes once existed, solid, sane, and generous.

What he finds is a different country. The town has sprawled into ribbon development, petrol stations, tea shops, and bungalows. His childhood neighborhood is subdivided and standardized. He looks up Mr. Porteous, a prissy former teacher, and tags along to a Left Book Club meeting on the Etruscans, only to watch it collapse into jeers and a scuffle with hecklers, politics already curdling into street-level menace. When he finally reaches the old farm, the carp pool is gone, filled in and fouled by development and rubbish. The landscape has been leveled, privatized, or paved. His private sanctuary never existed in the way he imagined; if it did, history has bulldozed it.

He returns home chastened and no wiser to Hilda’s suspicions and to the drumbeat of war preparations. Air-raid drills begin; gas masks are issued; rumors multiply. In the dark comedy of the closing pages, Bowling bungles through a blackout, stumbles, and cracks his new dentures, a bathetic jolt that reduces his attempt at escape to broken porcelain and the taste of metal.

Themes
Nostalgia is both balm and trap. Bowling’s longing for prewar England is sincere, but Orwell shows how memory edits out poverty, ignorance, and cruelty. Against that flawed golden age stands the interwar present: ad-mad consumerism, cheapened landscapes, and mass politics hardening into ideologies prepared to sacrifice ordinary lives. The carp pool figures as a fantasy of permanence, and its obliteration reveals the novel’s bleak thesis: you cannot go back, and the future is coming anyway, loud and mechanized.

Style and Tone
The prose is breezy, sardonic, and unpretentious. Bowling’s voice, funny, self-deceiving, observant, lets Orwell thread social satire through reminiscence without sermonizing. Moments of comic deflation sit beside prophetic gloom, so that jokes about dentures and bungalow kits share space with the vision of cities flattened by bombs.

Significance
Coming Up for Air captures the hinge-moment of 1939: a last lungful before submersion. It is a novel about small comforts, ordinary cowardice, and the stubborn hope that somewhere there is still a quiet pool. The hope is not quite mocked, but it is not indulged. What remains is the clarity to see illusions for what they are, and the knowledge that even that clarity may not keep the water from closing over your head.