Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air - Introduction by John Carey

Informationen zum Autor George Orwell; Introduction by John Carey Klappentext For the first time in one hardcover volume-three classic novels by the author of Nineteen Eighty- Four and Animal Farm. The lushly descriptive and tragic Burmese Days, a devastating indictment of British colonial rule, is based on Orwell's own experience while serving in the Indian Imperial Police. His beloved satirical classic, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, features a young idealist whose attempt to rebel against middle-class respectability-by working in a bookshop and trying to be a writer-goes terribly and comically awry. The hero of Coming Up for Air tries to escape the bleakness of suburbia by returning to the idyllic rural village of his childhood-only to find that the simpler England he remembers so nostalgically is gone forever. These three novels share Orwell's unsparing vision of the dark side of modern capitalist society in combination with his comic brilliance and his unerring compassion for humanity. From the Introduction by John Carey The fame of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four has eclipsed Orwell's novels of the 1930s. They tend to be though of, if at all, as false starts — attempts at a kind of fiction that he outgrew once he got into his stride. This is a mistake, and one that diminishes Orwell. For the 1930s novels are unique and compelling, and they have scenes and incidents striking enough to ensure he would be remembered had he written nothing else. (This is true even of the weakest, A Clergyman's Daughter , which is omitted from this volume because Orwell did not wish it to be reprinted.) What's more, these novels show his capacity for something that his later works lack — namely, doubt. Each of them is a study in ambivalence. They subvert their own certainties and have room for alternative angles. In this respect they belong to the rich central tradition of European imaginative literature that upsets dogmas and questions fixed positions. By comparison, Orwell's later voice is characterized by assertive confidence, which generates its own kind of thrill, but does not encourage other ways of thinking. * Burmese Days was written while he was still almost entirely unknown. It was his first novel and only his second book. Down and Out in Paris and London , his first, had come out in 1933. The American edition of Burmese Days appeared the following year, but his London publisher, Gollancz, needlessly fearing libel actions, delayed publication in Britain until 1935. Anyone who wants to know what the British Empire was like for those who ran it must read Burmese Days . It is far more informative in that regard than E. M. Forster's A Passage to India , because Forster was largely ignorant of what he wrote about, whereas Orwell's knowledge was extensive and firsthand. After leaving Eton he had joined the Indian Imperial Police and was sent to Burma, arriving there in November 1922. He passed the obligatory exams in Burmese and Hindustani with ease — colleagues reported that he could converse 'in very high-flown Burmese' with the priests in local monasteries. By 1924, aged twenty-one, he was in charge of a police force covering a population of 200,000 (the Twante sub-division, not far from Rangoon), and two years later he was promoted to command the police in Moulmein, Burma's third largest city. His last posting was to Katha, a remote town in Upper Burma, on which Kyauktada in Burmese Days is very loosely based. Flory, the novel's central character, is stationed in Kyauktada, but he is by no means an Orwell self-portrait. His background is different ('a cheap, third-rate public school') and he is a timber-merchant, not a police officer. The 'hideous birthmark' on his face, which he is so ashamed of, asserts his difference. Like Orwell he feels trapped by imperialism, but he is incapable of breaking f...

About the author

GEORGE ORWELL (1903–1950) served with the Imperial Police in Burma, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and was a member of the Home Guard and a writer for the BBC during World War II. He is the author of many works of non-fiction and fiction.

JOHN CAREY is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Product details

• Authors: John Carey, George Orwell, George/ Carey Orwell
• Publisher: Everyman s Library PRH USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 05.04.2011
• EAN: 9780307595041
• ISBN: 978-0-307-59504-1
• No. of pages: 712
• Dimensions: 137 mm x 211 mm x 27 mm
• Series: Contemporary Classics Series; Everyman's Library Contemporar; Contemporary Classics Series
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature