January 2021: Orwellian

Books read this month: George Orwell: A Life (Bernard Crick, Penguin, 1992 edition); Orwell's Victory (Christopher Hitchens, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2002); The Search For The Perfect Pub (Paul Moody & Robin Turner, Orion, 2013 edition).

It's been an Orwellian kinda' time, really. So, no more apt way of kicking off 2021 than by getting stuck into a couple of books about one of my favourite writers. Both books about Orwell have been on my shelves for a while. I can't remember picking up Bernard Crick's 'George Orwell: A Life'... but an Oxfam receipt inside the pages from 2014 presented a clue! At nearly 700 pages, it's thorough and a claim on the jacket states it's 'the definitive biography' on Orwell so I'd been looking forward to it every time I pulled the book off the shelf, before deciding on something lighter.

'Definitive' is a word and a half when it comes to a subject as big as George Orwell, but the book delivers. One of the first things that put me in the mood to enjoy it was the author's admissions that his words weren't definitive at all. How could they be? As Bernard Crick states early on, this is not the book to speculate on what Orwell was thinking as he stared out from his desk, settled down to sleep on concrete in Paris or felt a bullet in this throat in Catalonia. I loved that security-in-its-flaws immediately and loved knowing that the book would only speculate when necessary, the rest would be built from primary sources. Crick's matter-of-factness occasionally comes off like the middle class male heroes or 'Coming Up For Air' or 'Keep The Aspidistra Flying' funnily enough, but the pertinence of the people quoted or the fatality of the facts found more than make up for any stiffness in the storytelling.

What do you think of Orwell? Your answer will colour in the black and white of these pages, the lack of speculation leaving little room for shade. The times when Crick best places pictures in your mind are when describing Orwell's times in Catalonia or on the Island of Jura in Scotland. The chapters on Orwell's end times on Jura are particularly vivid and leave lots of whimsical 'what might have been', whereas the descriptions of his Catalonian adventures zip along like a bullet. The revelations for me include the fact Orwell was offered the opportunity to observe civil war as a journalist, but instead chose to fight. I never knew he had the option... nor did he, it would seem.

Crick's deliberate style leaves you in no doubt of Orwell's socialist credentials, despite some of the things that came later; how many comrades do you know who have chosen a rifle over Twitter? The 'later' I'm talking about is tackled in the late Christopher Hitchens' cultured and concise 'Orwell's Victory'. Neatly compartmentalised into chapters filled with short, sharp shocks ('Orwell and Empire', 'Orwell and the Right' etc.), Hitchens plays the perfect policeman of Orwell's legacy. Occasionally, he's too defensive, but on the whole his praise of Orwell's best bits is right and proper while the defence of his daft declarations about feminism and homosexuality, for example, never comes across as crass; he just ties himself up in necessary and unnecessary knots trying to contextualise.

The startling surprise (to me) was a chapter dedicated to 'The List': 11 pages concerning Orwell compiling a blacklist of 'Stalinized intellectuals', first revealed in 1996. The document was handed over to the Government's Information Research Department (date unknown) and continues to be a sticking point for Orwell's socialist detractors. Hitchens' defence of his great hero isn't great - he spends a page defining what a blacklist really is - but his speculation, if not his coloured conclusion, helped me deal with the duality of a life less ordinary: George Orwell contained multitudes... imagine.

Surprisingly, Orwell also turned up at the start of a book I was given as a Christmas gift, that I finished early in the new year, Paul Moody & Robin Turner's 'The Search For The Perfect Pub'. A page-turner from the start, I'd recommend it to anyone who's missing a pint and a gab inside a boozer. The journey starts with a revisit of Orwell's 1946 article 'The Moon Under The Water', taken from his Evening Standard column of the time. The authors then take it in turn to travel around England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to locate the mythical local of Orwell's piece. They never get close, of course, but that's not the point... the book's best bits exist in the spaces between the search as they chat to old barmaids, muse on afternoon drinking sessions and look up at the buildings that we spend our time in on the ale.

If you like a bevvy, and have travelled a bit (football, gigs, CAMRA trips etc.), chances are you'll have visited a fair few of the places they chance upon: I was into double figures I think. The book lives or dies on the reader's ability to be able to quickly identify the styles of the two authors and get meandering Moody or his less loquacious mate Turner's voices in your head as each new chapter arrives. After all, one man's craft is another man's cask... or something.

Right, I'm off for a pint... oh. How's lockdown going for you? Let me know and thanks for reading. Al x.