[AnotherCat]

With a lot of reading time available I had intended to read this straight through in a few days but by the time I got to the end of Chapter 5 I had the feeling that Blair was trying to sell me something that I did not want. From then on I just picked at it in between other reading and activities in order to eventually finish it a few days ago.

First, I felt for me that it had a strong and interesting story line, well developed characters, etc. But, for me, its style came across quite extravagant, likely as a result Blair's over-egging of the aspect of book I did not like.

I have never read a full biography of Blair's but have read various commentaries of his life; I had read all his novels except Burmese Days and A Clergyman's Daughter. I had read many of his essays including ones, such as All Art is Propaganda and Why I Write, that are of relevance to my reaction to the book. I knew that little was known of his time in Burma and that Burmese Days is relied an as being semi-autobiographical to fill in some gaps, and that he was indeed a loner and misfit to the place just as Flory was.

I felt that much of the narration in the book was pretty much Blair speaking and outed many of his hang-ups. Much of the time the narration is presented as if the thoughts of Flory (such as the polemic in Chapter 5) but at other times one has to wonder whose thoughts he is, in fact, relating because the narrations frequently become statements, not reading as being related directly to what Flory's beliefs or thoughts were. Such as when Verral is described in Chapter 18, the likes of:

It did not even make any difference whether you were rich or poor, for in the social sense he was not more than normally a snob. Of course, like all sons of rich families, he thought poverty disgusting and that poor people are poor because they prefer disgusting habits.


Now such statements are, in my understanding, representative of what Blair likely thought himself. Such as those within much of the character dialogue also represent to me Blair's own beliefs. Perhaps the visibility that I felt, of Blair's own thoughts, was due to this being Blair's first novel and followed personal memoirs, so he did not have the knack of putting his propaganda into the voices of his characters?

In the end the flavour I got was that this was the writing of a disaffected man on the outskirts of rationality heading towards the man he became, at least by his later years, as a Democratic Socialist with its anarchistic objectives of non-revolutionary dismantling of the capitalist system and nationalising all means of production and services (for example, in Why I Write he states: Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, AGAINST totalitarianism and FOR democratic socialism (Burmese Days was published in 1934 but, it is claimed, much was drafted years before that).

So I enjoyed the story, exaggerated as it was, but disliked being drawn into what I thought was a lightly disguised polemic.