After listening to a terrific audio book version of Animal Farm on youtube, I found an even more delightful audio book version of this other Orwellian novel and enjoyed the heck out of it--an Australian actor reads it, I believe, judging from his pronunciation of the word "kids." Listening rather than reading may have caused me to pass over some of the more darkly ironic bits (judging from the other reviews here)--also the reader is just so convincing! (It's difficult to laugh at someone when you feel like they're in the room with you telling their story.) Still, I was unexpectedly drawn into this novel, having no expectations, and quickly became hooked on this bored, nostalgic, everyman character.

What struck me most was the charming wistfulness of our narrator, George Bowling, and his nostalgia for the miserable, poverty-ridden and unfair world in which he grew up, which is, however, completely understandable as he's now living in a newer, more boring (if perhaps more materially comfortable), tract-home, middle-class post WWI world. (The situation reminded me of the opening of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which the narrator comes across a book of Holocaust photos and experiences the shame of being prompted by the photos to feel nostalgic for his lost childhood, since it was of the same time period as WWII.) George's situation is as charming as it is tragic, as he pines for his youth although it's filled, to hear him tell it, with misery and uncertainty: the demise of his father's business, his parents' deaths, and the waywardness of his brother.

Then comes the absurdity of WWI, which wipes George's old word and personal past aside and sets both he and England on a whole new path...

The novel takes an even darker turn, then, when George attends an anti-fascist lecture and the specter of the coming second world war comes to threaten once again to destroy even the boring complacency of the narrator's nostalgia. While he tries to recapture his past with a clandestine trip back to the hometown we've heard so much about, the specter of both modernity and the coming war overshadow everything. Yet George is so irascible and pessimistic, he's hardly fazed. I feel like the novel is both a hymn to and a scathing attack on phlegmatic British stiff-upper-lipness. (A student told me the other day that the Japanese build such fragile paper houses because there are so many natural disasters in Japan, they've adapted to the impermanence in the construction of their dwellings. Seems like the English have adapted to misery and endless war through a combination of pessimism and stoicism, no? "Keep Calm and Carry On--you knew it would be a shit life from the start, Grahame.)

This is heavy stuff so winningly, lightly, and charmingly narrated it actually strikes home harder, in the end, than a lot of other more obviously between-the-wars potboilers and texts warning of the evils of fascism. I enjoyed the heck out of it, smiling and wincing by turns.