Imagination was not George Orwell’s forte. The protagonist in each novel is to some extent an Orwell surrogate doing the same things that Orwell did in the places where Orwell lived. Here, somewhat unconvincingly, the author’s representative is a repressed young woman, Dorothy Heyer, who loses her memory, identity, and faith. Orwell considered it “absurd”, except for the dream-like, polyphonic chapter where Dorothy sleeps delirious in Trafalgar Square – a fascinating legacy of her youthful infatuation with James Joyce.
Sample line: “There is a lot of evil in the world without even finding it.”
A kind of exorcism remedy. Orwell left university to become a colonial policeman in Burma and spent the next few years shaking off the stench of his complicity in imperialism. The sticky atmosphere of corruption and guilt is vividly expressed in the story of weary teak trader John Flory’s desperate struggle to survive honestly. Orwell’s debut is unusually brilliant, but establishes his lifelong interest in disillusioned, self-loathing people who stage destructive rebellions against systems they can no longer support.
Sample line: “To live one’s real life in secret is a corrupt thing. One must live with the flow of life, not against it.”
When Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air, he was a pacifist, not from a lack of anti-fascist enthusiasm, but because he feared that the conditions of war would turn Britain into a fascist, so clearly this was a frightening vision of the world descending into madness. Orwell’s narrator is George Bowling, an apolitical middle-aged insurance salesman who takes a nostalgic trip to his childhood home and finds his memories filled with progress. Written while Orwell was recuperating in Morocco, longing for England, it is most interesting when he breaks character and vents.
Sample line: “Fishing is the opposite of war.”
When Victor Gollancz published The Road to Wigan Pier through his Left Book Club, he had to apologize to readers for the second part. It is basically two books. The first is an apparently well-observed and justifiably angry report about working-class life in northern England. The second is a controversial demand for a better socialism, free from “cynicism, machine-worship and the idiotic cult of Russia”, containing many funny but mean-spirited satires on existing socialists. iPart One still stands.
Sample line: “We spend our lives abusing England, but get very angry when we hear a foreigner say exactly the same things.”
Eric Blair became George Orwell on the cover of his first book, because he felt his memoir of washing dishes in Paris and tramping in England might embarrass his middle-class parents. His expeditions into the demimonde were driven less by necessity than by a compulsion to shed his skin and find some good material. The book is a little unbalanced (Paris wins) but his tragic eye for detail and talent for the provocative formula are already evident, as is his honest sympathy for the underdog.
Sample line: “Looking hungry is deadly. It makes people want to kick you.”
Gordon Comstock is Orwell’s finest comic creation: an extremely misanthropic poet driven mad by his love-hate relationship with money. OK, Orwell claimed he wrote the novel simply because he was in a tight spot, but that diminishes the entertainment value of its bitter howls and howls against 1930s capitalism, which was heavily influenced by George Gissing. Comstock is a pioneering prototype of John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter or Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon and a vivid embodiment of Orwell’s fear of failure.
Sample line: “How can you be attractive to a girl when you don’t have money?”
Much of Orwell’s output, including many of his most quoted lines, was in the form of hand-to-mouth freelance journalism. There’s no such thing as a definitive collection, but it’s a great introduction to his extraordinary range, which includes political essays (Anti-Semitism in Britain), autobiographical parables (Shooting the Elephant), cutting-edge cultural studies (Boys’ Weeklies), comedy riffs (Confessions of a Book Reviewer), nature writing (Some Thoughts on the Common Toad), literary criticism (Charles Dickens) and an ever-present take on separating the art from the artist. (The Benefit of the Pastor: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí).
Sample line: “It feels like truth becomes untruth when your enemy speaks it.”
Orwell’s three best books emerged from six months he spent fighting for a small, impotent Marxist militia in the Spanish Civil War, where he discovered that there were more similarities between Stalin-backed communists and Franco’s fascists than anyone could admit. Catalonia’s tribute is a wonderful combination of experience and insight: the horrors of war, the spread of murderous lies, narrowly escaping the Stalinists with his wife Aline. A daring and thrilling book that embodies Orwell’s determination to tell inconvenient truths.
Sample line: “The whole experience of being shot is very interesting and I think it is worth describing it in detail.”
First sketched in 1943, its ideas previewed in several articles, Orwell’s final book was a summary of his career, pitting everything he loved against everything he hated. With apologies to Yevgeny Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley, this is the first truly satisfying dystopian novel because it combines political argument and satire with the genre pleasures of spy thrillers and love stories. The novel’s pervasive influence on imagination, language, and thought obscures its strangeness. Its contradictions and illusions give Winston Smith’s struggle against Big Brother the texture of a nightmare, where reality is always slipping away.
Sample line: “Nothing was yours except a few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”
With Eileen’s editorial assistance, Orwell wrote a brilliant book and it was almost never published because it was considered politically explosive. Subtitled “A Fairy Tale,” Animal Farm is a tight, elegant allegory of the Soviet Union’s journey from revolution to tyranny, yet it might still impress a 10-year-old who doesn’t know his Kronstadt from his Kerensky. Whether a scene is funny, sad or shocking, the clarity of the prose never wanes. It can also be read as a prelude to Nineteen Eighty-Four, with similar ideas about language, memory, and parody ideals. Furthermore, an unpublished preface, not seen until 1971, is a classic defense of freedom of speech.
Sample line: “And also remember that when fighting against man, we must not become like him.”
