The Page Count

Tag: George Orwell

  • Homage to Catalonia

    George Orwell, 1938 

    Re-read December 2024–January 2025* 

    269 pages 

    Vintage Classics, 2021

    Non-fiction, Memoir

    Bill Bryson once described George Orwell as a middle-class milksop who changed his name for street cred (maybe not word-for-word, but it’s something along those lines).** Bill: I rate you, I like you, and oh how we’ve laughed, but here, you’re wrong. Originally travelling to Spain to report on its civil war, within a week Orwell had joined the republican forces to fight Franco’s fascist forces, considering it ‘the only conceivable thing to do’. When it came to standing up for democratic ideals, Orwell walked the walk as much as he, er, wrote the words, eventually taking a bullet in the neck for his troubles. 

    Homage to Catalonia is Orwell’s resulting, retrospective account of his time in Spain from late 1936 to the summer of 1937, commencing in media res in December 1936 when Orwell joined the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista – the Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification) – a socialist, anti-Stalinist militia. It covers his time fighting in trenches in various spots around Aragon, the rupture between anarchist/socialist and Stalinist factions, the internecine street fighting that erupted while he was ‘on leave’ in Barcelona and the following atmosphere of suspicion and denunciation.   

    There are two key components – Orwell’s observations and analysis of revolutionary politics and society, and descriptions of war. These elements often overlap, although in this edition the two chapters originally dedicated to purely political analysis have been turned into appendixes. Orwell manages the romantic clichés of revolution carefully, avoiding idealisation. Towns are described as shabby and in disrepair, there is rationing and shortages, and this is before he even reaches the trenches. Once he does arrive on the frontlines (‘the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns further up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountain’), he is surrounded by used food tins and excrement, with the biggest challenges not being fascist bullets and mortars, but the mud, the lice, finding firewood to stay warm in the mountains of Aragon during winter, and getting hold of a working weapon: 

    I remember the desolate look of everything, the morasses of mud, the weeping of poplar trees, the yellow water in the trench-bottoms; and men’s exhausted faces, unshaven, streaked with mud and blackened to the eye with smoke. 

    However, while Orwell does cover how the militias were disorganised, barely armed and sometimes a bit rudderless, he also affirms their importance in holding the line while the regular army was brought up to scratch, and how, for a brief window of time, the revolution achieved its aim of people feeling to be and acting as equals, both in the trenches and in civilian life.  

    He writes on behalf of socialism, but not blindly so: the journalist in him is ever present.*** He describes in detail how the fight against Franco’s fascists is undermined by left-wing infighting (or rather, the betrayal of the cause by Stalinist elements), and he makes his loathing of Stalin clear. He also expresses how he wishes he could have been of more use to his chosen cause somehow, and that he could’ve prevented it from becoming a losing battle. This is paired with a clear idealism: 

     If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: “To fight against Fascism”, and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: “Common decency”. 

    Although never a particularly ornate writer even in his fiction, here Orwell writes in an even more straightforward manner, and through it is able to both discuss Spanish politics and make apparent the muddle of war. This is not to say there are no great descriptive moments, such as when he describes a night-time raid on a fascist trench. Being a retrospective account, Orwell often makes it clear how vivid these memories – both good and bad – remained to him and expresses an appreciation for their intensity.   

    Worth reading? Yes – a fitting tribute to those who fought against Franco. 

    Worth re-reading? Yes – ninety years on, it’s unfortunate that the end once again feels prescient: 

    [S]outhern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way […] to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will still be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday […] Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood […] all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs. 

    *A watch of Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom, a close film adaptation of Homage to Catalonia, motivated me to re-read this from the summer of 2013. 

    **Notes From a Small Island, I think. 

    *** For anyone in doubt: in 1946, Orwell wrote ‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism’. 

  • Coming Up For Air

    George Orwell, 1939 

    Read: September 2025 

    Edition read: Penguin Classics, 2020, 276 pages 

    Inter-war Literature

    *Spoilers* 

    Flashbacks from a lower-middle class, middle-aged Englishman, on the eve of World War Two, to his childhood, World War One, his marriage, his working life, working his way up to his present day and an impulsive return to his hometown of Lower Binfield, inspired by a trip down memory lane (thankfully, Orwell kept it to 270 pages. Take note, Proust.) 

    An inter-war novel, the main themes are concurrent nostalgia and anxiety about the threat of forthcoming war. Written in the first person, what drives protagonist George Bowling is his oft-self-centred pursuit of happiness; he shows – and openly describes – his life since childhood as having been a dreary trudge. While recovering from an injury in the trenches, he is sent to a redundant, absurdist job posting for the remainder of the war. He got married and had children very much out of a sense of that was just what people do. He sees his family and house as a chore at best, taking no satisfaction in them. He dreads what he sees as another forthcoming war – primarily due to the shortages it will impose. He is overweight, middle-aged, newly equipped with false teeth, has already cheated on his wife and very much intends to continue doing so. 

    Even in what could be more considered his principled moments, such as when he attends a local Left Book Club meeting, he leaves both utterly apathetic and lamenting what he perceives to be the violence of contemporary politics, before visiting a friend who is stuck in the past (and not even his own past – in the age of antiquity). He is scathing about his wife and her penny-pinching ways. He goes on holiday with gambling wins he hides from his family. 

    This leads Bowling to become nostalgic about elements of a childhood that he knows he is misremembering: ‘I don’t idealise my childhood, and unlike many people I’ve no wish to be young again […] in a manner of speaking I am sentimental about my childhood – not my own particular childhood, but the civilisation which I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick.’ He has no qualms in detailing how he saw unfettered capitalism slowly kill off his father’s small businesses or how his ne’er-do-well brother suddenly disappeared. He constantly offsets his existence and his perception of society against his memories of fishing – one of those wonderful childhood memories which he knows he is misremembering (‘My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught. That’s usual enough, I suppose’). As such, fishing comes to serve as a metaphor for either the promises of life – or, in a slightly different reading, for the age in general.

    Whilst he doesn’t think particularly kindly of anyone, women get a decidedly harsh treatment. Even taking his wider observations as largely true to life, this is a reflection of Bowling’s character more so than anything else. This is at its most evident when his ex-girlfriend doesn’t recognise him and, in his ensuing critique of her appearance, fails to realise that this might have something to do with his own condition. 

    Whilst I’m not sure if it’s possible for Orwell to have any obscure books, this is one of his lesser-known ones. As such, whilst not quite a sleeper hit, it is well worth reading in addition to his heavyweights. He is remembered for the ideas he expressed in his writing, but what seems to sometimes go forgotten is how quietly impressive his actual writing is; he makes the semi-nostalgic reflections of a middle-aged insurance salesman a page turner. 

    ‘[…] in this life we lead – I don’t mean human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country – we don’t do the things we want to do. It isn’t because we’re always working. Even a farm-hand or a Jew tailor isn’t always working. It’s because there’s some devil in us that drives us to and fro on everlasting idiocies. There’d time for everything except the things worth doing. Think of something you really care about […] calculate the fraction of your life that you’ve actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you’ve spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers.’ 

    Worth reading? Yes – big ideas expressed through deceptively good writing.

    Worth re-reading? Yes – and I suspect a second reading will reveal further riches.