Keep the Aspidistra Flying
by George Orwell

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Book Reviews of Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Book Review: 'Slumming'
Summary: 2 Stars

It is a simply written and rather pointless novel littered with transparent metaphors; weak analogies; self-contradictions; blatant leftist doctrines; a whopping tautology; and a visible conclusion. George Orwell didn't seem to pay much attention to his own advice found in 'Politics and the English Language'.

The main character, Gordon Comstock, a struggling poet, lived in self-inflicted exile of poverty and decay to flee from the 'Money-God' and to rub elbows with his fellow working class heroes. Living in hovels, eating swill, falling into debt, dressing in tatters, working minimum wage jobs, allowing himself to become slightly malnutrishined, Gordon Comstock had romanticized the proletariat to the detriment of his health, social life, and career. He didn't seem to understand that these conditions are a dibilitating and not a fortifying aspect of working class life. Conditions despised by the very people he tried to emulate.

The simple Aspidistra, a potted plant, is Gordon's symbol of the middle class value system he detested. But the plant appears to be ubiquitous as it is found on every window sill of middle class family homes in England, from which Gordon is trying to flee. Then Gordon had a revelation that the middle class were the working class who had kept themselves respectable - had kept the Aspidistra flying. (This is a theme that occurs in later Orwell writings.)

Anyone with a college course in psychology would recognize that the character Gordon Comstock displayed symptoms of chronic depression; latent homosexuality; anxiety neurosis; bi-polar mood disorder; and obsessive guilt.

If, as some critics have suggested, this work is autobiographical of George Orwell, then the observation made by one of his biographers that, "The British are the only people who spend a lot of money to send their children to school to become emotionally damaged", was a process that afflicted George Orwell.

But who was this book written for? It would seem the author's fellow socialists. The author had to communicate his proletariat values somehow to his international fellow travelers! It always appears that socialists try to out-do each other's counter-bourgeois experiences. And KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING came across as a chronicle of leftist one-upmanship: the - I'm more working class than you are - attitude, by living shoulder to shoulder with the poor, then leaving when bored. (We call this 'slumming' in my working class neighborhood, and its annoying!). What is so original or novel about a struggling youth living his dream? KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING is more of a socialist polemic than an original story with a moral.

A good book to compare with 'KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING' is: 'WANDERER' by Sterling Hayden. Schooner captain Sterling Hayden gave a similar account of working class privation as he fled from a middle class background, then tramped around the U.S. following his nautical dream during the great depression, and was deeply influenced by American socialists of the time. Yet Sterling Hayden's poverty was real, not self imposed as Orwell's.

I found 'KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING' somewhat disappointing, but required reading as a fan of George Orwell.

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