George Orwell

I have undertaken to read all of George Orwell, and I do mean all. A hard-working scholar named Peter Davison worked for 17 years collecting 20 volumes of Orwells letters and book reviews, essays and other publications, as well as reconstructing his novels and other books as he intended them. Fortunately, Orwell's publisher was Victor Gollancz and the company archives contain all of the correspondence between the author and his editor detailing every change and deletion the lawyers required before his books could be published. So far I've read five volumes.

 A Kind of Compulsion, 1903-1936 by George Orwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This first volume of Orwell's letters and other writings begins with a note written to his mother from school when he was six years old and continues until he leaves for Spain to fight in the civil war. To read every scrap of writing Orwell put to paper for so many years impresses on the reader his immense skill with the English language and the strongly held opinions he formed very early in his school years.

2011  No 142

Burmese Days by George Orwell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 are very good novels; the same cannot be said of his other attempts at fiction. Burmese Days was based on his years in the Burmese police force. His hatred of colonialism came from those years within the disfunctional bureaucracy of a country he came to love but could not live in. The characters are not three-dimensional and the plot is not believeable.

2011  No 143

A Clergyman's Daughter by George Orwell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Orwell's novel about a young woman whose world is compressed into caring for her selfish father and doing good works in her village suffers from the same unrealistic scenes, plot, and characters as many of his other books. When the woman finds herself in London suffering from amnesia she goes into the country with some other people who are homeless. Her days and nights in the city are much like those of characters in his other down-and-out books.

2011  No 144

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The peculiar title of this novel comes from the main character's observation that lower middle class boarding houses all have an aspidistra in the parlor. The ugly and virtually unkillable plant becomes a symbol of all that is wrong with the social system that keeps young men from accomplishing anything in their empty lives.

2011  No 145

Comments

[Barbara]

That's very ambitious! On the whole I prefer Orwell's non-fiction. My favourite of his novels is Coming Up for Air.

[Mary]

I'm with you, Barbara, the nonfiction is much more readable than the fiction. I have not yet read Coming Up for Air as I'm reading more or less chronologically. Reading this edition is fascinating because there are notes in the back showing every change the publisher demanded. We have in many cases been reading a book quite different from the one Orwell intended.