In This Life We Lead: George Orwell's Coming Up for Air

Orwell’s classic was on the syllabus in one of my grad school courses, where we were assigned one novel a week to read. I don’t think I even cracked its cover that term. But I’m thankful I bought it and had it on my shelf to rediscover, years later. Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I’ve learned from Coming Up for Air?

There are so many strengths to this work, but an obvious one is Orwell’s first-person narrator. George Bowling has an engaging and nerdy sort of self-awareness, and slips from one quirky commentary to another. He is a born storyteller, kind of a Cliff Claven, but with more depth. George spends the novel unspooling the tale of his own middle-age, wondering how he (and the rest of society) ended up where it is. This is London, 1938. An ominous time, and one that we think of now as quaint and innocent, positioned as it is before the bloodiest war in human history.

And yet the things that George Bowling misses and can never get back are the same sorts of things that any of us might long for from our childhoods. Simple, unadorned pleasures and the feeling of unbounded time. A world that made sense to us. A life where we were not enslaved to the “rat race”, a scheduled day, a repetitive commute, or the social expectations of a “progressive” lifestyle. A time when we had a waistline.

But let’s let Bowling speak for himself for a little. He’s just spent two chapters ruminating about fishing. Which you’d think would shade into boring, especially for someone like me who has no interest in it. Instead, I’ve been rapt. And then he takes his treasured experiences fishing and pitches them in the trash:

..[T]he other confession is that after I was sixteen I never fished again.

Why? Because that's how things happen. Because 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 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's time for everything except the things worth doing. Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and 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 from on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers.

We might substitute a traffic light for a railway junction, or social media for a newspaper, but these words hit home. As a reader you’ve been patiently, pleasantly fishing along the shore of Bowling’s verdant memories. Then suddenly, dangling on your hook, is a truth about yourself and your own life and you’ve tugged it up and reeled it in before realizing that you now have to unhook the wriggling thing and put it out of its mercy. There is no way to throw any of this stuff back in the lake.

As you can read from the excerpt, the sentences Orwell uses (in the voice of George Bowling) are flat out powerful. They are not caught up in conveying, they simply convey. All use of wording, metaphor, and detail is precise and useful. Orwell’s writing as a journalist seems to impact this novel.

Personally, I also love that Orwell has tackled this subject matter. To be able to say something meaningful about the suburbs and the “ordinary” middle-class lifestyle is a talent. He does it by way of contrasting the world in which Bowling finds himself as an adult with the world in Bowling’s memory, the days of his life which had colour, and promise. When it had been possible to be a better person.

Journeying with Cormac McCarthy on The Road

I must admit I’d already watched the movie before cracking open this brilliant novel. I was horrified by the movie, in a good way; it’s a stunning film. The effect of McCarthy’s book on me was less chilling, more haunting. Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I learned from The Road?

Sometimes it’s better to leave important things unexplained and unspoken. McCarthy has the confidence to leave certain major questions unanswered. Why is the Earth dead? What happened? How and why did human society descend into the anarchy that rules this vision and storyworld? These questions, which are immediate and pressing to the reader, are simply never answered here. This backstory is left undetermined. Though it seems by the physical details presented to us, (e.g., the ash, the lack of living species), that McCarthy knew that backstory for himself. In other words, he didn’t just cop out of telling it, he quite precisely left it off the table.

Why? Maybe because it’s not his business here to care about what happened, only to tell the story of those left after, of those who are trying to survive. It is unnecessary for us to know the catastrophe that caused this conflict, this fight for survival. It would distract us and occupy our time. And isn’t it even a little more unnerving to not know?

Make the most of structure. It’s not only in poetry that the structure and rhythm of a work impacts its meaning. In this novel McCarthy builds the plot and the storyline brick by brick. Rather than chapters, there are typically short sections of text—sometimes one line, sometimes a paragraph or two, sometimes several pages—interrupted by whitespace, that lead us onward.

These snippets of storytelling can read as aphorisms, condensed lessons, or even snapshots of lives in this precarious wilderness. The physical pattern the sections alternating with section breaks resembles footsteps, stages, or steps along a long road, mimicking and emphasizing the journey and the plot of The Road.

The effect is to draw the reader along bit by bit, chunk by chunk. The reader experiences fragments and makes associations to connect those fragments and experience an unfolding temporality. This is something readers do within any novel, it seems to me, yet here the abnormally large number of formal and physical caesurae emphasize the reader’s work of building associations, taking steps, forging ahead when one is invited to pause or break off. Quite cunningly, the reader is made to feel alone and thrown back upon herself.

Notice how the gaps also serve as transitions. When I began writing fiction I’d written argumentative essays for many years, and I was bedevilled by I what I felt as the difficulty of connecting events and aspects of the unfolding story I was writing. (When laying out an argument the connections are of course crucial to the overall plausibility of your thesis. I was still operating in essay mode.) Eventually I learned to give up on trying to forge connections for readers; readers will make them.

A writing instructor and novelist once told our class that he’d “spent all morning trying to figure out how to have a character recall something about his son,” eventually concocting something about the guy noticing a stain on his shirt and thereby having his memory jogged. Ridiculous! Just have the character think of his son. Just write that recollection where the work requires it to emerge.

If you have a huge vocabulary, wield it carefully. McCarthy is known for his enormous vocabulary and the precision of wording he employs. If there is a word for “that level of of wet sand under which the swell of the waves reaches”, and apparently there is, McCarthy will use it. (I forget the word, unfortunately! Suggestions?)

For someone like me, who enjoys words for words’ sake, it’s pleasing to encounter new and esoteric ones. It can feel jarring, though, to encounter such gems when they remove me temporarily from the storyworld. Who is the character who would choose the word “palimpsest” in a sentence while fleeing for his life? There may well be such a person, of course, but is he the character I know here? Or is the author hiding behind his character, egging him on, a thesaurus in hand?

I suppose there are different approaches to vocabulary in relation to voice and the merging and blending of author/narrator/character points of view. I tend to want to filter storyworld through the voices of particular, rooted, limited characters and be as plausible as possible in this effort. I want the reader to experience the storyworld as those characters do. How does it work for you? How do you make your vocabulary decisions?