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Imagination was not George Orwell’s forte. In each novel the protagonist is to some extent a follower of Orwell doing the same things Orwell did in the same places Orwell lived. Here, somewhere in uncertainty, the representative of the writer is a repressed girl, Dorothy Hare, who gives up memory, knowledge and faith. Orwell considered it “triple” except for the dreamlike, polyphonic theme where Dorothy sleeps rough in Trafalgar Square – a happy legacy of his youthful James Joyce obsession.
Example line: “There is enough evil in the world without seeking it.”
A release of some kind. Orwell defected from university to become a colonial policeman in Burma and spent the next few years trying to shake off the stench of his involvement in imperialism. The complex nature of corruption and guilt is vividly portrayed in the story of jaded teak merchant John Flory’s struggle to be honest. Orwell’s opening is very interesting but establishes his lifelong interest in frustrated, self-centered people who attack criminals they cannot accept.
Example line: “To live a real life in secret is to destroy life, a person should live a life that follows his life and not against it.”
Orwell was a pacifist when he wrote Coming Up for Air, not because he wanted to hate fascism but because he was afraid that the events of the war could turn Britain fascist, so this clear idea of the world is shaking into madness. Orwell’s narrator is George Bowling, a middle-aged political insurance salesman who makes an unpleasant journey back to his childhood home and finds his memories multiplying. It was written when Orwell was recuperating in Morocco, longing for England, it is very interesting when he breaks character and breath.
Example line: “Fishing is different from war.”
After Victor Gollancz published The Road to Wigan Pier through his Left Book Club, he felt he had to apologize to readers for the second half. It is actually two books. The first is a well-observed and well-tempered account of working-class life in the north of England. The second is the pressing need for a better socialism, free of “stupidity, mechanism and stupid Russian religion”, and the many abominations but worrisome of the existing society. Part one continues.
Example line: “We treat England badly but we get really angry when we hear a foreigner say the same thing.”
Eric Blair became George Orwell on the cover of his first novel, because he thought his memoir about washing dishes in Paris and oppression in England might embarrass his middle-aged parents. His forays into the demimonde were driven less by necessity than by a compulsion to shed his skin and find good things. The book is a little uneven (Paris wins) but his poignant eye for detail and skill at the evocative aphorism are already evident, as is his genuine compassion for the downtrodden.
Example line: Looking hungry is dangerous.
Gordon Comstock is Orwell’s best poet: the worst poet frustrated by his romantic relationship with money. Rightly so, Orwell said that he only wrote the book because he was in a strong position, but this diminishes the joy of his bitter and anti-1930s capitalism, led by George Gissing. Comstock is the next example of John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter or Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon and Orwell’s fear of failure.
Example line: “How can you love a girl when you have no money?”
Much of Orwell’s output, including many of his quoted lines, was largely oral journalism. There is no such thing as a definitive collection but this is a great introduction to his extraordinary collection, including political essays (Antisemitism in Britain), historical illustrations (Shooting Elephants), pioneering cultural studies (Weeks of Boys), humorous humor (Confessions of a Book Reviewer), environmental writing (Somecantic Thoughts on the Common Thoughts) on the separation of art from the artist (The Benefit of Leaders: Some Writings on Salvador Dalí).
Example line: “The truth, it sounds, is a lie when your enemy speaks it.”
Orwell’s three best novels are all based on the six months he spent fighting for a small, weak Marxist army in the Spanish Civil War, where he discovered that Stalin-backed communists and Franco’s fascists had more in common than anyone would admit. Honoring Catalonia is a combination of horror and insight: the abhorrence of war, the mass of murderous propaganda, its narrow escape from Stalin and his wife, Eileen. A bold and thought-provoking novel that demonstrates Orwell’s determination to tell disturbing truths.
Example line: “The whole incident of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is important to explain it in detail.”
First published in 1943, his thoughts expressed in many articles, Orwell’s last book was his epitome, listing everything he liked and everything he hated. With apologies to Yevgeny Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley, it is the first truly satisfying dystopian novel because it combines political conflict with fairy tales and thrillers in the genre of thrillers and romance. The book’s great influence on fiction, language and thought hides its strangeness. Its paradoxes and contrasts give Winston Smith’s struggle against Big Brother the appearance of a nightmare, from which reality is constantly slipping away.
Example line: “Nothing was yours except a few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”
With Eileen’s editorial help, Orwell wrote one of his best novels and it was never published because it was considered politically explosive. Called “Fairy Tale”, Animal Farm is a hard-hitting, beautiful portrait of the Soviet Union’s journey from revolution to tyranny, yet it can move a 10-year-old who doesn’t know their Kronstadt to Kerensky. Whether the scene is funny, sad or dramatic, the clarity of the prose is constant. It can also be read as a preface to Nineteen Eighty-Four, with similar ideas about language, memory and distorted thinking. In addition, the unpublished introduction, which did not appear until 1971, is an important defense of freedom of expression.
Example line: “And remember also that in fighting a Man, we must not come to match him.”
