Orwell - the man and his output

[Fambo Number Mive]

Having been reading the comments about Orwell in the Glinner thread, I thought it would be interesting to discuss Orwell as a person and his writing. It's been a long time since I reread any Orwell other than 1984, which is still a fascinating book. It's interesting how the proles

Spoiler alert

are much freer but also face the risk of "steamer" bombs

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. Or am I misremembering it? I don't have a copy of 1984 currently.

I read all of Orwell's novels when I was younger and enjoyed all of them but with my concentration span and motivation a lot lower I think I'd struggle to get through them again. Studied Animal Farm at school, it's still very powerful writing.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

The only novel that's been co-opted by cunts more than 1984 is Atlas Shrugged. At least 1984 is actually a good book I suppose.

[Pranet]

If your attention span is the problem it might be worth trying some of his essays and journalism. Recently picked up "Seeing things as they are" a recentish collection which can be bought up cheaply second hand. I've got the 1968 4 volume collection as well but this has some stuff which isn't in that.

[Shaxberd]

There's a lot of legitimate criticism of Orwell as a person, but I find him a very enjoyable writer.

I think I prefer his non-fiction to his fiction, as snapshots of certain places and times. His scathing article on the "boy's magazines" of his era is highly entertaining as well as a vivid description of a style of popular entertainment that's since disappeared: http://friardale.co.uk/Ephemera/Newspapers/George%20Orwell_Horizon.pdf

[Pranet]

Yeah, I liked his fiction when I was younger, but a bit ago I re-read Coming Up for Air, which is probably his best novel, and it didn't hold up that well. It wasn't terrible, there were good bits, but it wasn't great. His essays and journalism remain interesting and very readable.

[Petey Pate]

I enjoyed reading Homage to Catalonia but it's not very good as a history of the Spanish Civil War - being limited to one person's (admittedly well written) account of only two fronts of a complex conflict. The historian Paul Preston, author of The Spanish Holocaust (and recent guest on Alexei Sayle's podcast) has been particularly keen to point this out.

Like Orwell's most famous novels, it became weaponised to further anti-communist Cold War narratives, namely that the victory of Franco happened primarily due to the Stalinist repression of the Republicans, glossing over the role played by other parties including the supposedly 'neutral' British government.

Interestingly enough, Orwell later reassessed this view in a 1942 essay. He also wanted to publish a 'corrected' second edition of the book, which never came to light due to his death.

The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps and what not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface. [...] The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin—at any rate not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realised that the Government could not win the war unless there was some profound change in the international set-up. [...] The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalise factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestos would not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn't. No political strategy could offset that.

[Mr Vegetables]

I've somehow never read 1984 but read almost all the essays Orwell ever published, and I am secretly a very big fan of the man.

What I really admired about his non-fiction writing when I was younger is that he would sometimes just be brutally honest about the cruelty and horror that had gone into the comfortable life he lived, in a way very few people are. It's something I try to do myself— look at difficult things unflinchingly, because when Orwell did it I'd sit up and really take notice.

[buttgammon]

The only novel that's been co-opted by cunts more than 1984 is Atlas Shrugged. At least 1984 is actually a good book I suppose.

I mentioned his name as a dog whistle in the Glinner thread and this is what I was getting at (didn't want to derail that thread by getting further into it there so thanks for starting this thread, Fambo!)

[Petey Pate]

There was a recent Mic Wright Substack where he proposed that all newspapers columnists should be banned from referencing 1984, or at least alternate it with Homage To Catalonia or Down and Out in Paris and London. Though banning mentioning 1984 in newspaper columns is exactly what Big Brother would do ahhhhh.

Truth be told, Big Brother and Newspeak are usually the only reference points - there's rarely articles making allusions to how the proles could overthrow the party if they became conscious of their power or Oceania being in a permanent state of war. Funny that.

[idunnosomename]

It's funny how he has distinctive prose but "Orwellian" means THIS IS LIKE THE 1984 BOOK WHERE EVERYTHING IS BAD!!!!

[Pranet]

People who adopt the name Winston Smith on the internet are always bellends.

[Rizla]

I really like Coming Up For Air, it's just the inner monologue of a basic defeated man. It's a CaB thread in book form! Similarly, Aspidistra -  a look at a self obsessed pretentious wanker that just wants his hole and feels he deserves better in life for some unknown  reason. It's basically about me. Burmese Days might be my favourite. Don't know why as reading it is like picking at a wound. The leopard hunt and the whole aftermath with the spoiled hide just the height of pathos.

Spoiler alert

The first time I read it I went "NO!" out loud when I realised he was going to shoot the dog on the next page, before he did himself in.

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I like Orwell. Essays is an essential bog book.

[Midas]

Within Very Online liberal circles, there's a Very Irritating tendency to decry Orwell so as to try and one-up people on the right who misquote his work. It's not worth lobotomizing your exposure to literature to distance yourself from people you shall never meet.

Love how he renders the desolation that lies within the outskirts of English mining towns in The Road to Wigan Pier:

The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that 'It isn't the same for them as it would be for us,' and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her - understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.

[Pranet]

I really like Coming Up For Air, it's just the inner monologue of a basic defeated man. It's a CaB thread in book form! Similarly, Aspidistra -  a look at a self obsessed pretentious wanker that just wants his hole and feels he deserves better in life for some unknown  reason. It's basically about me. Burmese Days might be my favourite. Don't know why as reading it is like picking at a wound. The leopard hunt and the whole aftermath with the spoiled hide just the height of pathos. 

I used to like books about depressed men going through a bad time more when I was younger. Now it just seems too much like real life I suppose. Don't think I could put myself through Burmese Days again.

[bgmnts]

I quite like 1984 just due to how relentlessly bleak it is. Haven't read any of his essays but I do have homage to catalonia on my audible but have a mountain of stuff to get through on that first.

[All Surrogate]

I'm a fan of Orwell. I'm so glad I read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was young and I re-read it every so often to this day. I share the standard opinion that his other novels are less successful. The essays are great. Some are lighthearted, but as you would expect, most are political, with the thread of the fight against stalinism weaving through most of them. I really must read the non-fiction books; shockingly overdue.

[Glebe]

I've never actually read any Orwell. Didn't know about his anti-Irish sentiments (mentioned in the Glinner thread). There was a repeat of a programme about art and culture in Barcelona on BBC4 recently in which they discussed Orwell's time in the city during the Spanish Civil War.

My brother used to be in a punk band who had a song called 'Homage to Catalonia'.

[Midas]

Another passage from The Road to Wigan Pier that has also remained lodged in my mind:

...in the industrial areas one always feels that the smoke and filth must go on for ever and that no part of the earth's surface can escape them. In a crowded, dirty little country like ours one takes defilement almost for granted. Slag-heaps and chimneys seem a more normal, probable landscape than grass and trees, and even in the depths of the country when you drive your fork into the ground you half expect to lever up a broken bottle or a rusty can.

Rot all around us.

[Midas]

It's not worth lobotomizing your exposure to literature to distance yourself from people you shall never meet.

@Midas I find this remark quite patronising, actually.

It's supposed to be to show my contempt for the amyloid plaques that flood the social media trough

@Midas If you say so...

[Midas]

Does anyone else like that essay he wrote where he slags off Rudyard Kipling

[Pink Gregory]

can't remember which book but he makes a comment about villages in england in which you can throw a brick up in the air and it be guaranteed to come down on a well-connected vicar's daughter

[Kankurette]

Does anyone else like that essay he wrote where he slags off Rudyard Kipling

This one?

[Midas]

Aye, that's the stuff

[Virgo76]

Yeah, I liked his fiction when I was younger, but a bit ago I re-read Coming Up for Air, which is probably his best novel, and it didn't hold up that well. It wasn't terrible, there were good bits, but it wasn't great. His essays and journalism remain interesting and very readable.

I liked it. It's definitely not his best novel though. Goes on about fishing too much for one thing.
1984 is the best (in my view).

[Vodkafone]

I really like Keep the Aspidistra Flying, I've read it twice. Such a virulent attack on keeping up appearances and the efforts to maintain middle class 'decency', as well as a heartfelt tirade against the way society marginalises people who never have enough money. Lots of situations are described as 'beastly' and 'bloody', you can almost see his spit on the page.

The section where he tries to have a nice day out at Burnham Beeches with a woman is one of the standout passages of toe curling, fist-biting literature I've read. It's compelling in its awfulness, yet you desperately want it to stop.

[Catalogue Trousers]

People who adopt the name Winston Smith on the internet are always bellends.

See also 'V', especially if they've only seen the film, but I digress.

[idunnosomename]

People who have that one photo of George Orwell as their avatar are even worse

[gilbertharding]

I really like Keep the Aspidistra Flying, I've read it twice. Such a virulent attack on keeping up appearances and the efforts to maintain middle class 'decency', as well as a heartfelt tirade against the way society marginalises people who never have enough money. Lots of situations are described as 'beastly' and 'bloody', you can almost see his spit on the page.

The section where he tries to have a nice day out at Burnham Beeches with a woman is one of the standout passages of toe curling, fist-biting literature I've read. It's compelling in its awfulness, yet you desperately want it to stop.

People who like that kind of thing also like Patrick Hamilton and/or Julian McLaren Ross.

[Pavlov`s Dog`s Dad`s Dead]

My brother used to be in a punk band who had a song called 'Homage to Catalonia'.

Back in the Oughties, there was a certain blog devoted to Welsh politics. I don't actually remember ever reading it, but the title has stuck with me: 'Homage to Catatonia".

[Glebe]

Back in the Oughties, there was a certain blog devoted to Welsh politics. I don't actually remember ever reading it, but the title has stuck with me: 'Homage to Catatonia".

Chuckle!