WE ASSOCIATE George Orwell with big themes, such as individual liberty, totalitarianism, and the corruption of language. Some of the images and phrases from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have become part of our culture. The theme of this book, however, is very different. It shows how Orwell was a keen observer of the details of everyday life, and how these entered into and formed the fabric of his novels.
It begins with morning and the routine of rising, washing, and breakfast, continues through the day with seven sections on everything from work to hobbies, including two on walking, which was important to Orwell, as we know from the time when he sought to experience abject poverty. The evening includes pubs, dinner, sleep, and dreams.
The book reflects both Orwell’s early childhood as an unhappy schoolboy sent away to a harsh prep school and his time in Burma in the colonial police, when he knew the brutality of empire. But the book is not primarily about power and who wields it, but about the sense of wonder which can arise in response to the most ordinary details of everyday life.
Orwell had a very wide range of interests — animals, flowers, birds, even ice skating — together with a mind that liked to catalogue and make lists. He knew a lot about pubs and admired writers who could communicate their different feel. In response to a description of a woman who could make a feast of a crust of bread and a glass of beer, Orwell described it as a kind of poem. Waddell sums this up as “A beautiful thing, like the beer it commemorates. Beer could make beauty, and so could pubs, in the author’s mind. They were worth the trouble.”
It was, above all, the natural world that lifted Orwell’s heart, and there is a particularly fine section in one of his lesser-known novels, A Clergyman’s Daughter, in which Dorothy rubs a frond of fennel against her face and her heart swells with joy. Then there are 17 wonderful lines in which she hears everything in nature praising God in its own way and she herself feels lifted to pray with angels and archangels. It is the best example I know of the phrase in Eucharistic Prayer G of Common Worship “All your works echo the silent music of your praise.”
Nathan Waddell, Professor of English Literature at Birmingham University, has written an unusual book, but one that will enrich all lovers of Orwell.
The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford, and an Hon. Professor of Theology at King’s College, London. He is the author of Haunted by Christ: Modern writers and the struggle for faith (SPCK, 2018).
A Bright Cold Day: The wonder of George Orwell
Nathan Waddell
One World £22
(978-0-86154-976-4)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80