Who Is Big Brother?: A Reader's Guide to George Orwell by D. J. Taylor

Author:D. J. Taylor [Taylor, D. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Modern, 20th Century, Subjects & Themes, Politics
ISBN: 9780300277746
Google: J-D8EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2024-03-26T08:14:10.186654+00:00

The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It’s all going to happen. Or isn’t it?

But the Left Book Club meeting is not simply a means for Orwell to rehearse some of the material that will eventually take formal shape in Nineteen Eighty-Four; it also offers a chance for Bowling to declare his – and his creator’s – pacifism. Asked by a young man if he would fight in a war that offered the chance to ‘smash Fascism’ once and for all, Bowling shakes his head: ‘You bet I wouldn’t.’ He goes on to explain that his questioner has ‘got it all wrong. In 1914 we thought it was going to be a glorious business. Well, it wasn’t. It was just a bloody mess. If it comes again, you keep out of it.’

The second scene, which takes place half an hour later, is more prophetic still. Leaving the meeting, Bowling decides to drop in on a friend of his, a retired public school classics master named Porteous, a man who lives his life in a state of almost complete detachment from the modern world. What is Porteous, whose presence in Bowling’s life is never explained – he is simply ‘a pal of mine’ – doing in the novel? Like the Left Book Club lecture, he is there to provide Bowling (and Orwell) with an opportunity to pronounce on the nature of contemporary despotism. Informed by Porteous that tyrants such as Hitler and Stalin are ‘purely ephemeral’ and matched in their depravity by some of the rulers of the ancient world, Bowling dis-agrees. Porteous is wrong about the modern-day dictators: ‘They aren’t like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off, just for fun. They’re after something quite new – something that’s never been heard of before.’ And then comes another twitch on the thread that simultaneously takes us back to Gordon Comstock’s laments about his poems and forward to Winston Smith: ‘He’s dead,’ Bowling decides, as Porteous starts reading ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ to him. ‘He’s a ghost. All people like that are dead.’

Having failed to convince his friend that ‘Hitler matters’, Bowling walks home turning over in his mind his worries about the international situation and the mundane irritations of his domestic life: ‘At that moment the destiny of Europe seemed to me more important than the rent and the kids’ school-bills and the work I’d have to do tomorrow.’ All the same, his final thought before falling asleep is ‘why the hell a chap like me should care’. Coming Up for Air was published in June 1939, three months before the Second World War broke out.

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