GEORGE ORWELL
Keep The Aspidistra Flying
For under £1 on Amazon.
If one is asked to think of a book written by George Orwell, his Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal Farm are usually what comes to mind. The ceaseless popularity and success of these two novels has greatly overshadowed his other works, and Keep The Aspidistra Flying is a prime example of what a great shame this is.
The opening chapter welcomes the reader into McKechnie’s bookshop, workplace of shop assistant and sometime poet Gordon Comstock, ‘aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten’. Tired by his failure as a poet, his lousy wage and the stale superficiality of late capitalism, Gordon wages his own private war on what he terms the ‘money-god’. Too cynical to be a socialist, he lets himself sink slowly towards the gutter, ignoring the pleas of his friends and family for him to pick himself up. Embedded within this account of his social decline are more profound social insights than you can shake a stick at, with as much relevance today as it had in 1936. The increasingly dismal condition of Gordon’s situation can get somewhat depressing in places, but nevertheless the author competently demonstrates his dexterity as a writer as well as a social commentator.
Although one might argue that Keep The Aspidistra Flying lacks the pure originality of Orwell’s more successful novels, its messages are, all the same, no less potent, and its storyline no less intriguing, than his most popular works. An overlooked classic.
Will Harris
Deputy Editor
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