Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Rating:
Summary: Orwell's depiction of middle-class stupidity.
Review:

"Keep the Aspidistra Flying" is a wonderful, yet frustrating book. It tells the story of Gordon Comstock, a middle-aged man who refuses to be corrupted by the world around him. He nobly lives below his ability, by taking simple, low-paying jobs. He wishes not to have his every thought occupied by money.

However, what he does not ever seem to realize, is that the poorer classes think of money much more often than the wealthy. While the poor man worries about where his next meal is coming from, and how he will ever pay the rent, the rich man walks about without a thought to the price of cigarettes or whiskey.

So, while Gordon's motives for his poverty were noble, his ideas were flawed. His unnecessary and self-destructive actions were infuriating. Watching him hurting his lover, Rosemary, again and again grew depressing.

And finally, even the ending was confusing. Gordon eventually marries Rosemary, and takes a "good" job. He gives in to decadent "aspidistra" society, but he is neither happy nor particularly unhappy. He has left his beliefs behind, but does not seem very saddened by the years wasted on his foolishness.

Rating:
Summary: 10 stars
Review: A triumphant book that warns one of the "money-gods." One of the best books every written, especially if read by someone who is in poverty and loaths the greed of humanity.

Rating:
Summary: The ending makes the book worthwhile!
Review: Contrary to some of the reviewers, when Gordon comes to his senses and ceases from the stupidity (evidenced, e.g., by how he handled $50 he received for a poem--do those reviewers really prefer that kind of behavior on Gordon's part?), he rose in my regard and the whole book in retrospect attained a classic status. The ending makes the book. Read it and see if you don't agree. I felt this is a much better book than Down and Out in Paris and London, which I read just before reading this.

Rating:
Summary: Wiser then "1984"!
Review: Evrybody think that "1984" is The prophesy-book while "Keep the aspidistra flying" described mor then 60 years ago - our life today! Do read it!

Rating:
Summary: A Good Man Cornered
Review: Fine read, full of Orwell's clear, precise prose. This absorbing novel depicts with harrowing clarity the main character's descent from struggling poet to a man stripped of his delusions, wallowing in a Dickensian dead-end job with weird, freakish people around him (brilliant evocation of pre-war, pre-bombed backstreet London) and finally to a kind of redemption, of the kind that that comes with age and experience; a stoical acceptance of life. Some of the supporting characters in this book are fantastic: the used book store dealer with long legs and short torso who resembles a pair of scissors when he walks, for example. There are many excellent flourishes, like the numerous advertizing slogans the main character constantly glimpses ("The Food That Is Shot Out Of A Gun!"), and his subsequent observation that advertizing is "the rattle of the stick in the swill-bucket.".

Orwell's 1930's novels, like this one, Burmese Days, and Coming Up for Air, are far better literature than the cold war cautionary tales Animal Farm and 1984. If you like the latter (and more importantly, if you don't), try Keep the Aspidistra Flying and the others. Orwell has a wonderful way of telling a hard tale and yet, through the sheer power of his solid prose, and unmystifying outlook on life, managing to uplift the reader, leaving him stronger and more positive (if less rosy-eyed) than before.

Lastly, if you've ever had any employment, paid or volunteer, involving dealing with the public, this is your book. Orwell's ongoing description of the strange shapes the public takes when you're forced to observe and serve them is one of the most wryly understated comic depictions in 20th century literature. Oh, the humanity...

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book, well written and interesting
Review: George Comstock, living in 1930s London, wants to gain the benefits of a good life without working hard for them. So, with his own peculiar philosophies and ideas in his head, he rebels from the conditions of life he finds himself in, tries to pursue an easier life, becomes lazy whilst perceiving himself clever doing so, finds himself falling, broke each week, having to count his pennies, his life deteriorating; and eventually comes round - full circle - to accept the limitations that modern life generally forces onto most of us, whether we like the nature of the concrete jungles we live in or not...

This is an excellent book about life and the forces in life we are subject to - the fact that most of us have to be compliant cogs in a huge wheel of industry of some sort if we want to get on in life, whether we want to be or not, and if we try to step off the treadmill and leave the rat-race, it doesn't work well and we won't like where it puts us.

The book is a very good read, and well worth reading. It should be handed to any child who wants to be a rebel and thinks he can get by without working hard, to make him understand better some of the things that modern life involves and requires of us.

Rating:
Summary: My Favourite Orwell Book
Review: Gordon and Rosemary are charming, thoughtful characters you'll enjoy reading about in this highly amusing, money-centred novel.

Rating:
Summary: tree of life
Review: Gordon Comstock is a very good advertising copywriter and a pretty bad poet. But if he indulges his delusion that he can write poetry, he gets to
live a bohemian life of chic poverty, easy morality, and reflexive socialism. Admitting he's really meant to write advertising jingles would require
him to settle into a respectable, but dreaded, middle class existence of comfort, family, and an aspidistra in the window. The horror, the horror....

You can judge who the three most important writers of the last three centuries were by the attempts of both Left and Right to co-opt them and claim
them as their own : Adam Smith (18th Century); Alexis de Tocqueville (19th Century); and George Orwell (20th Century). With the exception of
people telling me I'm swinish for not thinking that James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and the James brothers (Henry and William) are geniuses, I'd
guess that no topic has generated more hostile email to Brothers Judd than our classifying Orwell as a conservative. These hostile correspondents
though never offer any more evidence than the mere fact that Orwell called himself a socialist and fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
It goes almost without saying that they don't refer to his writings, because it is there that their argument falls apart. Nowhere is this more evident
than in the semi-autobiographical--indeed, Orwell later thought it overly autobiographical--Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

The title of the book is awkward and maybe even off-putting, but necessary. Meanwhile, the filmmakers chose an equally appropriate, but
misleading title, for Gordon Comstock is at war on two fronts. The first is with his long-suffering girlfriend, Rosemary, who he hopes to coerce
into bed without marrying :

Each laughed with delight at the other's absurdities. There was a merry war between them.

The second front is Gordon's war against the money god :

What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only
real religion--the only really felt religion--that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer
except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two
commandments. One for the employers--the elect, the money-priesthood as it were--'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the
employed--the slaves and underlings--'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra, flower of England!
It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras
in windows.

By God! That sounds like a ringing enough call to arms doesn't it? Except, that is, for the inconvenient title of the novel : Keep the Aspidistra
Flying. This story, like nearly all of Orwell's, is anti-revolutionary and possessed of both a deep love of middle-class England and a good-natured
contempt for wealthy socialists (like Comstock's publisher, Ravelston) and all of those (like Gordon himself) who romanticize poverty and the
poor. And so, when Gordon, who by then has been reduced to rather dire straits, finally abandons his life of destitution and the half-written book
of inane poems that he'd been writing to resume his advertising job and marry Rosemary, who he's gotten in the family way, it is in no wise a
defeat, but a triumph :

Now that the thing was done he felt nothing but relief; relief that now at last he had finished with dirt, cold, hunger and loneliness and could get
back to decent, fully human life. His resolutions, now that he had broken them, seemed nothing but a frightful weight that he had cast off.
Moreover, he was aware that he was only fulfilling his destiny. In some corner of his mind he had always known that this would happen. He
thought of the day when he had given them notice at New Albion; and Mr. Erskine's kind, red, beefish face, gently counselling him not to chuck up
a 'good' job for nothing. How bitterly he had sworn, then, that he was done with 'good' jobs for ever! Yet it was foredoomed that he should come
back, and he had known it even then. And it was not merely because of Rosemary and the baby that he had done it. That was the obvious cause,
the precipitating cause, but even without it the end would have been the same ; if there had been no baby to think about, something else would have
forced his hand. For it was what, in his secret heart, he had desired.

And if that doesn't convince you that the story represents a whole-hearted embrace of bourgeois existence, try this :

Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into
something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture
and their aspidistras--they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they
interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They 'kept themselves
respectable'--kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children,
which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do.

The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.

Orwell offers up this wisdom with a light touch. He also has the characteristically brutal honesty to portray Comstock (his younger self) as quite a
horse's arse during his bohemian phase. This comes through even more clearly in the film, where Comstock (as played by Richard E. Grant) is
nearly difficult to like, prior to his epiphany. It is only when he accepts his own responsibility for the life growing in Rosemary that he comes to be
"fully human" and likable.

Now, if you can reconcile all of that with a belief that Orwell should be considered a man of the Left and not essentially a conservative, kindly drop
us a line and explain. Meanwhile, we'll keep the aspidistra flying.

GRADE : A

Rating:
Summary: conforming a non-comformist
Review: Having completed "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", I have now read all of the novels of George Orwell. I can say with such authority that this one may be his best. George Orwell was, first and foremost, a Socialist and this book is his examination of being a Socialist in a Capitalist world. His hero, Gordon Comstock, is mired in a dead-end job that is just middle-class enough to require proper dress and behavior but not enough to enable him to afford any but the most essential living expenses. We sympathize with him. Or at least we do until we realize that his disdain for the pursuit of money has pointed him in the opposite direction. He is so anti-capitalist that he purposely keeps himself in his lower state. He quit a previous job because it paid too much. He won't strive beyond his current status because then he would enter a higher social status. He is convinced of the righteousness of his beliefs even though he has bled his sister dry "borrowing" money from her over the years. She "lends" him the money because the family always had such high hopes for this erudite young man. Gordon complains, to those that listen, that money is the root of all evil yet he is so ready to be victimized by it. He complains to his girl-friend that she measures him by his net-worth. This isn't true but he can't see that the problem is that HE is measuring himself by his own net-worth. He talks the talk but can't walk the walk. Well, money leads to one disaster of his own making and ends up as the solution to another "disaster" of his own making. I'm sure the prospective reader would prefer to read the book to see how his story ends so I won't go into any more details here.

This novel is enjoyable on many levels. I found myself, like most, getting upset with Gordon Comstock for his self-destructive "nobility". I was ready to rant and rave about it until I remembered my post-college Bohemian days and realized that I went through such a stage myself. I'm sure many of us have and so I think there is a personal connection that will appeal to a lot of readers. For pure literary merit, this is a hard 20th Century satire to top. Orwell scared a lot of people with his futuristic novels "Animal Farm" and "1984". He tried to indoctrinate many a reader with his Socialistic essays including his half-novel/half-essay; "The Road to Wigan Pier". I have a feeling that he was poking fun at himself in "Keep the Aspidistras Flying". Maybe that's why it works so well.

Rating:
Summary: conforming a non-comformist
Review: Having completed "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", I have now read all of the novels of George Orwell. I can say with such authority that this one may be his best. George Orwell was, first and foremost, a Socialist and this book is his examination of being a Socialist in a Capitalist world. His hero, Gordon Comstock, is mired in a dead-end job that is just middle-class enough to require proper dress and behavior but not enough to enable him to afford any but the most essential living expenses. We sympathize with him. Or at least we do until we realize that his disdain for the pursuit of money has pointed him in the opposite direction. He is so anti-capitalist that he purposely keeps himself in his lower state. He quit a previous job because it paid too much. He won't strive beyond his current status because then he would enter a higher social status. He is convinced of the righteousness of his beliefs even though he has bled his sister dry "borrowing" money from her over the years. She "lends" him the money because the family always had such high hopes for this erudite young man. Gordon complains, to those that listen, that money is the root of all evil yet he is so ready to be victimized by it. He complains to his girl-friend that she measures him by his net-worth. This isn't true but he can't see that the problem is that HE is measuring himself by his own net-worth. He talks the talk but can't walk the walk. Well, money leads to one disaster of his own making and ends up as the solution to another "disaster" of his own making. I'm sure the prospective reader would prefer to read the book to see how his story ends so I won't go into any more details here.

This novel is enjoyable on many levels. I found myself, like most, getting upset with Gordon Comstock for his self-destructive "nobility". I was ready to rant and rave about it until I remembered my post-college Bohemian days and realized that I went through such a stage myself. I'm sure many of us have and so I think there is a personal connection that will appeal to a lot of readers. For pure literary merit, this is a hard 20th Century satire to top. Orwell scared a lot of people with his futuristic novels "Animal Farm" and "1984". He tried to indoctrinate many a reader with his Socialistic essays including his half-novel/half-essay; "The Road to Wigan Pier". I have a feeling that he was poking fun at himself in "Keep the Aspidistras Flying". Maybe that's why it works so well.