Coming Up for Air George Orwell (1939)GEORGE BOWLING, fat, 45, and far from stupid, pauses to consider his suburban London existence: "The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth." He wants a brief escape from his dreary wife Hilda and their two whining children, to revisit Lower Binfield, the Oxfordshire village where he grew up. From the opening line, Orwell, that most underestimated of 1930s novelists, establishes in Bowling a likeable, Everyman narrator who tells his story with candour and a great deal of humour.
Bowling sells insurance and has few illusions about anything, least of all himself. "I was trying to shave with a bluntish razor-blade while the water ran into the bath. My face looked back at me out of the mirror, and underneath, in a tumbler of water on the little shelf over the washbasin, the teeth that belonged in the face."
Coming Up for Air, Orwell's strangely buoyant fourth novel, was written in the shadow of the threat of another war. Bowling is also aware of this; after all he had served in the Great War. He is conscious of the smallness of his life, his garden, the rooms in his house. A chance win concealed from his wife encourages him to do something different.
Orwell is best known as a fine journalist, a polemicist, essayist and social commentator as committed as Swift or Dickens. His fiction is dominated by his political satires, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four, yet he is a gifted novelist able to evoke the defeated atmosphere of 1930s Britain. Bowling is wry, not quite depressed and whatever about the grim reality of his marriage and dull job, he is sustained by nostalgia. He is also an optimist: "In almost all circumstances I'd manage to make a living - always a living and never a fortune - and even in war, revolution, plague and famine, I'd back myself to stay alive longer than most people."
Bowling does his fair share of thinking. "The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time, I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book." Walking through London's Strand to fetch his new dentures he recalls his childhood, the son of a struggling seed merchant with a mother who was always rolling pastry. He had an elder brother as well, a wild fellow who eventually ran off leaving a trail of misdeeds. George was clever but had to leave school early.
There is no bitterness. Instead, his memories recall days spent fishing, particularly the magical ones spent at a pool "ringed completely round by the enormous beech trees, which in one place came down to the edge and were reflected in the water" swarming with bream and pike. Bowling's conversational tone and easy humour ensure that his anecdotal narrative draws the reader into the world of a man who is almost philosophical.
"Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop.
"Why did you marry her? You say . . . I wonder whether you'll believe that during the first two or three years I had serious thoughts of killing Hilda . . . One gets used to everything in time." He becomes engagingly vulnerable on returning to a village he barely recognises. Noting that the vicar is about 65, he realises that 20 years earlier when he considered Betterton old, "he'd have been forty-five - my own present age". War is coming closer as a rogue bomb makes clear.
Admirers of Orwell's more famous writing will be well-rewarded by turning to this understated and surprisingly less-widely read novel by a writer who consistently proves his versatility.
• This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revists titles from the literary canon
