Burmese Days by George Orwell

With his very first novel, Orwell earned an honorable position on the crowded shelves of Raj Lit. It was a kind of self-liberation, so he could drop the subject henceforth.
He had spent 5 years in Burma as a police officer. Why had he done that? His family was of the shabby genteel class, and his father’s pension from the imperial service in India was barely enough to carry him through school. So he skipped university and did what the people in his novel do: sign up for the colonies in the hope of reasonable wealth and career.
When he quit after 5 years, he had some explaining to do. He did it with this novel.
Most first novels are autobiographic to some extent, but Orwell did something different: he figured out what he himself would have become had he stayed. His ‘hero’ Flory is an alter ego under the hypothical assumption of having stayed for 15 years instead of quitting after 5.
Flory has a different job, but that doesn’t matter much. He is a deeply lonely and frustrated man without prospects. He is disgusted with himself and with his social crowd, the sahiblog, who enforce conformism in the most primitive way. They are generally a disgusting group of people.
Flory meets a young woman who seems the answer to his loneliness problem. For her, he might be the solution to her problem, which is the expectation of spinsterhood in poverty. They misunderstand each other thouroughly and make a huge mess of it.
The personal tragedy of Flory is framed by stories of imperial intrigues, by local officials playing Machiavelli and by the sahibs sinking into delirium tremens.
I read it first when I was working and living in other parts of the by then former Raj. I think everything would have been different if the poorpeople, the sahiblog, had had airconditioning. They might have been able to use their brains more.

1984 by George Orwell Animal Farm by George Orwell

The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War by David Lebedoff

Wow! Lebedoff’s best work yet, and it is so great to see him allowed to express his dry sense of humor. Orwell has been an idol of mine for a long time, but I did not know much about Waugh before reading this. Now that I have, I am even more fascinated by Orwell’s accomplishments and complex character, and I am going to read Brideshead revisited as soon as possible. The book is an in depth character study of two apparent opposites with suprising connections, and a common bond of deep moral indignation and strength. A wonderful, amusing, and compelling read.

Coming Up For Air by George Orwell

Oddly, the pocket book cover quotes the NYT that this book is a ‘charming … minor masterpiece’. It took me a while to realize that this is exactly the case.
The novel is set in London in 1938, with WW2 looming. It was Orwell’s first novel after risking his life in Catalonia. It was his last novel before Animal Farm. He still had ambitions to play in James Joyce’s league as a novelist. He greatly admired Ulysses. In a way, his George Fatty Bowling is Orwell’s Leo Bloom in London. But not quite. As charming as the novel is, it is also the final proof that Orwell was not the great novelist that he would have wished to be. He was a great essayist. Even his two later masterpieces, Animal Farm and 1984, essentially demonstrate that he was in first place an essayist and a man with a message.
Coming up for Air is the monologue of a middle aged middle class man who takes a break from his oppressive family and job life. He is the antisocial character who paints his front door green, where all others are blue. He escapes for an outing and ‘comes up for air’.
The story is told by the hero in an odd mixture of stream of consciousness and autobiography. One might say, Orwell told parts of his own life story. And that is the crux of the matter: he remains the intellectual who sympathizes with the proles and despises the upward ambitions of the lower middle classes.
The book is a failure insofar as Orwell never manages to let Bowling speak. Bowling is just a pretext for Orwell’s own words.
The book is not a failure, because what Orwell has to tell us of England between 1893 and 1938 is well worth knowing. Bowling should be an uninteresting man, by all criteria, but Orwell fails to let him bore us.

George Orwell: Battling Big Brother by Tanya Agathocleous

Although it is written for younger readers, this is an excellent, short introduction to George Orwell’s life and works. I am an adult, but I appreciate relatively brief, clear biographies like this. With this background, one is better prepared to read Orwell’s own writings, or even fuller biographies about him. I must say that I was amazed by the facts of his life story and by his determined pursuit of experiences that would help him become a writer.

This book is especially useful for students who need concise background information about Orwell for writing term papers.

The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell by Stephen Ingle

This book provides a systematic and critical treatment of George Orwell’s thought, from his days as an imperial policeman up to his death.

With a detailed and thorough analysis of Orwell’s writing, the author explores topics such as:

- The myth of working-class socialism.
- Patriotism
- Revolution
- Power and the Intellectuals
- Socialism and Family Values
- Christianity
- Knowledge

Finally the author asks whether Orwell’s thinking constitutes a consistent strand of socialism and does it have any value today?

This book will be of interest to students of political history, political theory and literature, as well keen readers of George Orwell’s writing.

George Orwell, Doubleness and the Value of Decency by Anthony Stewart

In its analysis of Animal Farm, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this book argues that George Orwell’s fiction and non-fiction weigh the benefits and costs of adopting a doubled perspective - in other words, seeing one’s own interests in relation to those of others - and illustrate how decency follows from such a perspective. Establishing this relationship within Orwell’s work, Anthony Stewart demonstrates how Orwell’s characters’ ability to treat others decently depends upon the characters’ relative capacities for doubleness.

Title: 1984
Author: George Orwell
Read By: Frank Muller
Run Time: 9 hour 20 minute
1984 by George Orwell, is an English novel about life in an authoritarian regime as lived by Winston Smith, an intellectual worker at the Ministry of Truth, and his degradation when he runs afoul of the totalitarian government of Oceania, the state in which he lives in the year that he presumes is 1984.

About the book:

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949 and has been translated to sixty-two languages. The novel’s title, its terms and its language (Newspeak), and its author’s surname are bywords for personal privacy lost to national state security. The adjective “Orwellian” denotes totalitarian action and organisation; the phrase: Big Brother is Watching You connotes pervasive, invasive surveillance. The following quotation from the novel has become famous:

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

Although the novel has been banned or challenged in some countries, it, along with Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, is among literature’s most famous dystopia. In 2005, Time magazine listed it among the hundred best English-language novels published since 1923.