Coming Up for Air
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Coming Up for Air
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Oliver
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By:
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George Orwell
About this listen
Coming Up for Air is a moving account of one man's attempt to recapture the innocence of childhood as war gravitates on the horizon.
George Bowling is 45, married with children, working as a suburban insurance salesman and desperate to escape London. It’s 1939, and the Second World War is imminent. Foreseeing the chaos it will bring, George decides to escape to the smaller life of his childhood, to the village of Lower Binfield where everything is quiet and peaceful. But his journey may bring nothing more than chaos, confusion and disillusionment.
Published in 1939, Coming Up for Air captures anxiety of a population awaiting war, the tension between tradition and progress, and is seen by many as the thematic precursor to both 1984 and Animal Farm.
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Although there are interesting, even charming descriptions of a country childhood and life at the time of WW1, the sneering, coldhearted way he writes about people in general, and especially women, was a disagreeable surprise: even his family is not spared. The protagonist detests his wife, says not a kind word about his children, and is a cynical, serial deceiver. The writing, of course, is good, but one does wonder a good deal about the unhappy, angry man behind it.
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