Coming Up for Air

“Merely because of the illusion that we own our houses and have what’s called ‘a stake in the country,’ we poor saps in the Hesperides, and in all such places, are turned into Crum’s devoted slaves forever.”

Bowling’s remarks here come right after he has explained that Sir Herbert Crum has sold land adjoining the housing development where Bowling lives to the credit company to build more houses on. Since this land was supposed to be left as is—as a bit of countryside for recreation—the phrase a “stake in the country” is fraught with irony. Further, since the houses there aren’t sold—they’re leased—what the new residents are buying into is the upper-class conservative notion that property ownership brings with it loyalty to and responsibility for the country—an idea that serves Crum’s interests not theirs.

“A little below us you could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, the little red roofs where the bombs are going to drop, a bit lighted up at this moment because a ray of sunshine was catching them.”

The interjection about bombs in the middle of this sentence reflects the constant, intrusive anxieties about war that haunt Bowling, even as he seeks to hold them at a bay—and himself at a remove—from the scene “below.”

“Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually in the past.”

Nostalgia is a powerful motivator for Bowling; this passage suggests that memory and sensory experience are inextricable. The smell of church triggers Bowling’s nostalgia so significantly that he feels physically transported to his childhood in the country, as he will be later in the novel.

“Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round. I’m quite aware that that’s a delusion. I’m merely trying to tell you how things come back to me.”

Highlighting Bowling’s recognition that nostalgia can be delusional, this passage prefigures the disillusionment that following his nostalgic impulses will bring him.

“They were all true blue Englishmen and swore that Vicky was the best queen that ever lived and foreigners were dirt; but at the same time nobody ever thought of paying a tax, not even a dog license, if there was any way of dodging it.”

Although Bowling is nostalgic for the Britain of his bygone youth, he ridicules the nostalgia of those who look back to the bygone days of Queen Victoria. The discrepancy between their patriotism and their attempt to avoid social responsibility renders their values hollow.

“And it’s a wonderful thing to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can’t catch you, and to chase rats and kill birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words.”

That violence is central to Bowling’s recollections of his childhood may show that the pastoral past he imagines is delusional. But then it suggests even more that what made being a boy so wonderful was the freedom to give way to one’s baser impulses: that’s what makes the past so nostalgically appealing.

“And I couldn’t go on fishing any longer for the tiny bream. The sight of the big carp had given me a feeling in my stomach almost as if I was going to be sick.”

Throughout Part 2, fishing is a recurring motif representing Bowling’s unfulfilled wishes as he grows. In this instance, the sight of the giant, ancient fish in the hidden pool makes Bowling feel that catching smaller fish is pointless and underwhelming.

“You know the feeling you had when you came out of the line. A stiffened feeling in all your joints, and inside you a kind of emptiness, a feeling that you’d never again have any interest in anything.”

Through direct address, Bowling solicits the reader’s identification with him—an identification that for him involves a supplementing of his feeling of emptiness, even as it brings on that feeling in the reader.

“I’m watching the mouse and the mouse is watching me, and I can smell the dust and sainfoin and the cool plastery smell, and I’m up the Amazon, and it’s bliss, pure bliss.”

This passage is indicative of the temporal slipperiness that characterizes the novel. The adult Bowling is transported via sensory memories to this past moment, where his younger self is equally transported via literature to an imaginary adventure world. Bowling’s willingness to be transported away from his reality suggests that the dissatisfaction with life that he experiences as an adult also tinged his life as a boy.

“Either you remember before the war and don’t need to be told about it, or you don’t remember, and it’s no use telling you.”

This passage is indicative of the kind of self-contradictions that characterize Bowling, who spends much of the novel telling the reader not just about life before the war, but also about his desire to recapture that life. In effect, through this direct address, Bowling is saying to the reader, “Either you’re with me, or you’re not.” If “you” are, then “you” will concur with my understanding of the past.

“If the war didn’t happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking. After that unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and unquestionable, like a pyramid. You knew it was just a balls-up.”

Central to this novel is the idea that World War I fundamentally transformed the way people thought about society and the world at large partly by the way it stopped people from thinking at all. The new world that has emerged is chaotic, “balls-up,” upside-down, unthinkable.

“That feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, that next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird—that, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.”

Although it may be that the characteristics of work changed after the war, especially with the effects of the Great Depression, Bowling’s notion that the worker is now more helpless than ever is just more nostalgia—belied by his own personal history and the fact that a larger company “grabbed” his father’s business well before the war.

“I looked on them as my social and intellectual superiors, while they on the other hand mistook me for a rising young businessman who before long would be pulling down the big dough.”

Here, class assumptions are and are not very much in play. Ironically, Bowling’s lower-class origins leads him to see his wife’s family, with their military background, as inherently superior, as they had been considered in the past, while the upper-class family has dropped all pretensions to innate superiority in their desperation for money and wish to see Bowling as their savior.

“I can see the war that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.”

This passage, in which Bowling looks ahead to the coming war, suggests that, as early as 1939, George Orwell was thinking about the themes of surveillance and totalitarianism that feature in his most famous novel, 1984. Published after World War II, in 1949, it prominently features the secret police, loudspeakers, and thought police, described here.

“Poetry! What is it? Just a voice, a bit of an eddy in the air. And Gosh! What use would that be against machine guns?”

Throughout the novel, Bowling is critical of the reading habits and intellectual capacity of women, especially his mother and wife. This passage suggests that Bowling himself lacks the intellectual refinement necessary to understand poetry, or perhaps that the trauma of war has limited his ability to engage with art. In any case, he repeats the same ignorance he criticizes in his mother and Hilda.

“You can say we were like turnips, if you like. But turnips don’t live in terror of the boss, they don’t lie awake at night thinking about the next slump and the next war. We had peace inside us.”

Here, the “you” whom Bowling addresses is someone who would have looked down on country people like himself as lowly and dumb, but he still prefers the state of being an insensible root vegetable in the past to being a sentient human in the present, fraught as it is with existential dread.

“And all the soul-savers and Nosey Parkers, the people whom you’ve never seen but who rule your destiny all the same, the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the Temperance League, the Bank of England, Lord Beaverbrook, Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle, the bench of Bishops, Mussolini, the Pope—they were all of them after me.”

This passage depicts Bowling’s paranoia as he begins his journey to Lower Binfield. The variety of authorities listed here—personal and professional, foreign and domestic, sacred and secular, enemy and ally—indicates his feeling that the whole world is united in being after him.

“All the way down the hill I was seeing ghosts, chiefly the ghosts of hedges and trees and cows. It was as if I was looking at two worlds at once, a kind of thin bubble of the things that used to be, with the thing that actually existed shining through it.”

When Bowling arrives in Lower Binfield, he is shocked to find that his small country town has become a small industrial city. Central to his criticism of this change is the effect of modernization on the environment. The fact that Bowling sees ghosts of hedges, trees, and cows suggests that the non-human, natural elements of Lower Binfield were as important, if not more important, than its human elements.

“It was exactly to escape the thought of war that I’d come here. But how can you, anyway? It’s in the air you breathe.”

While drinking at the George, Bowling has a conversation about the war with people living in his old hometown. Some of the people Bowling meets are worried about the war; others are dismissive, or too anxious to engage. This passage suggests that, for Bowling at least, the war is an inescapable fact of life regardless of where he is or who he socializes with—that, although he wants to come up for air by revisiting the past, the air of the present is already tainted by the oncoming war.

“I knew, of course. Get the kids war-minded. Give us all the feeling that there’s no way out of it, the bombers are coming as sure as Christmas, so down to the cellar you go and don’t argue.”

In Lower Binfield, Bowling is disturbed to see a military-style parade of children holding a sign warning about the war. Here, he suggests that this kind of display is intended to subdue opposition to the war by presenting it as an inevitability.

“Who’d have thought the time would ever come when there would be just no feeling whatever between us? Here was I and here was she, our bodies might be a yard apart, and we were just as much strangers as though we’d never met.”

Elsie Wells is the first person Bowling sees in Lower Binfield who could recognize him as a part of the fabric of the city and affirm his memories of the past. The fact that she fails to recognize him heightens his sense of isolation.

“What’s the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don’t exist. Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches up to the stratosphere.”

Bowling’s isolation and misanthropy reaches its peak in Part 4, when he learns that his beloved fishing hole has been turned into a garbage dump. Here, he suggests that the very idea of trying to return to the past—breath of fresh air he longed for—is impossible because of the depth of degradation in the modern world.

“And down this little hill a herd of pigs was galloping, a sort of huge flood of pig-faces. The next moment, of course, I saw what it was. It wasn’t pigs at all, it was only the school-children in their gas masks.”

This passage is representative of the novel’s arguments about the dehumanizing nature of war. In this instance, the association of British school children with a herd of wild animals suggests that anxieties about the war are dehumanizing.