Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air by George OrwellThis book is a three novel collection of (to some) the lesser known novels of Orwell.
Burmese Days:
I found "Burmese Days" interesting for the attitude of the English, in the last part of their Empire phase, toward their subject peoples. If the reality in history was as bad as the characters portrayed in the novel, George was right to criticize and show us this, warts and all.
I liked the story for the poignant account of the protagonist's loneliness and desire for soul-mate companionship that he thinks can be fulfilled in Elizabeth. He is mistaken about the reciprocity of his love or desire, because Elizabeth just doesn't get it. Here is a passage that describes all this:
"'I said just now that I loved you. Love! The word's been used till it's meaningless. But let me try to explain. This afternoon when you were shooting with me, I thought, my God! here at last is somebody who can share my life with me, but really share it, really live it with me--do you see--'
He was going to ask her to marry him--indeed, he had intended to ask her without more delay. But the words were not spoken yet; instead, he found himself talking egoistically on and on. He could not help it. It was so important that she should understand something of what his life in this country had been; that she should grasp the nature of the loneliness that he wanted her to nullify. And it was so devilishly difficult to explain. It is devilish to suffer from a pain that is all but nameless. Blessed are they who are stricken only with classifiable diseases! Blessed are the poor, the sick, the crossed in love, for at least other people know what is the matter with them and will listen to their belly-achings with sympathy. But who that has not suffered it understands the pain of exile? Elizabeth watched him as he moved to and fro, in and out of the pool of moonlight that turned silk coat to silver. Her heart was still knocking from the kiss, and yet her thoughts wandered as he talked. Was he going to ask her to marry him? He was being slow about it! She was dimly aware that he was saying something about loneliness. Ah, of course! He was telling her about the loneliness she would have to put up with in the jungle, when they were married. He needn't have troubled. Perhaps you did get rather lonely in the jungle sometimes? Miles from everywhere, no cinemas, no dances, no one but each other to talk to, nothing to do in the evenings except read--rather a bore, that. Still, you could have a gramophone. What a difference it would make when those new portable radio sets got out to Burma! She was about to say this when he added:
'Have I made myself at all clear to you? Have you got some picture of the life we live here? The foreignness, the solitude, the melancholy! Foreign trees, foreign flowers, foreign landscapes, foreign faces. It's all as alien as a different planet. But do you see--and it's this that I so want you to understand--do you see, it mightn't be so bad living on a different planet, it might even be the most interesting thing imaginable, if you had even one person to share it with. One person who could see it with eyes something like your own. This country's been a kind of solitary hell to me--it's so to most of us--and yet I tell you it could be a paradise if one weren't alone. Does all this seem quite meaningless?'"
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (update 1):
I just finished the second novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and I give it four stars because of the unlikeable main character, but the whole critique of society (English, of the time) was brilliant. This novel is where Orwell is channeling Dickens and James Joyce at the same time. So far the volume still gets high marks for the interesting way that the author writes.
Coming Up for Air (update 2):
I didn't know what to expect when I began this novel. At first it came across as a critique of the petit bourgeoisie, but now that I have finished the story, as I write this update, I find it to be a poignant history of a typical Englishman (warts and all) during the rapid change in society from the Victorian era to the current (of the time-1930s) brutal, soulless age. It shows also how easily we are constrained and compromised in any thought of liberty by the banality and pettiness of life.
Even Orwell's unsavory characters still come across as truly human. I recommend this collection of novels not for the sake of some nice twisty plot or some such innovation, but for the character studies. As character studies, they come across as metaphors for the soul of England as a nation (and by extension, the soul all of us). There is something for everyone in these three novels. For all these reasons, it gets four stars.
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