Book Review: Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
Keeping the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell, written in
My immediate confession comes first. This wasn’t an easy read. The internality of the main character is strikingly deplorable and bitter. Oft times it resonates too closely to parts of my own character. And seeing cause and effect is a damning solicitude for ones own well being. There is a lot of damning truth in this novel, for me at least.
Gordon Comstock, a literary poet of sorts, has absconded from modern life and sort refuge in a life of despondency. He gives up a well paid job. He gives up a secure life. Set when the division between the classes was much more striking, he lives in a constant state of poverty. He loathes money. Money is the root of suffering:
“It must be pretty bloody when you haven’t the money to take your girl out.”
“Never stay too long with those you love- another commandment of the moneyless.”
“Money is what God used to be. Good and Evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success.”
This single minded monomaniacal deprivation does wear the reader down. There are times when salvage, and hope flutter, tapping at the exterior. But at the slightest incongruence between his will and circumstance, an unconsidered remark by a friend for instance, his caprice nature takes him back to a his bitter despondency. It always comes back to money and the consequence of not having any. His longing for correspondence from publishers is full of hope and despair. Having sent his poems out, the reader knows it is only a matter of time before one of them gets accepted. The reader waits with him, hopefully and patiently. They often don’t come. And when they do, they come with rejection. At this point Gordon is on reflux filled with contempt for his work. How can one write poetry when the mind is fixated with more urgent matters as food and shelter. Upon receiving the bad news, his caprice takes him to write a deplorable short note to the one ray of hope in his retched life. His innocent love interest. The reason? She refuses to have sex with him.
“You have broken my heart.”
The book is full of these heartbreaking ridiculous grandeur moments of weakness.
Despite his stubbornness, there is much good in his life. His selfless sister Julia, whom has tolled a life of hard work and subjection of being the spinster daughter in the family destined to live a life of solitude and devotion to her brother, again and again provides stipend for his recoveries. Always bailing him out for food, dates, and necessities. He has the option of returning to a somewhat respectable job, albeit one he loathes. However, he not only fails to render this comfort as good fortune, but doubles back on his loathing.
Gordon’s scruples, noble or not, are harming him and the ones he loves. As the final chapters begin to close, resolution in the form of an unexpected pregnancy with his one love Rosemary comes. The resolution is fast, and for the reader much relieving. The demands of parenthood smack him hard. With a grown up mindset, he surmises:
“The lower middle classes … and their scams of furniture… lived by the money-code, sure enough, they contrived to keep their decency.. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honor… They ‘kept themselves respectable’… kept the aspidistra flying”
The aspidistra, a houseplant, with a capacity for survival in tumult. They stubbornly won’t die. Fed or unfed. Watered or not. As is the human endeavor, when in the face of cruelty and monotony. Gordon chooses the stable life, but the reader is left feeling confused. Is this the ending we want for Gordon? Is this the ending we want for ourselves?
George Orwell himself had been in states of depravity and joblessness prior to writing the novel. Much may have been borrowed from his own experiences. This book will ask much of what you need and want from your life. Perhaps there’s an answer or two in here too.