Orwell: The Road to Airstrip One

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Writer and activist Eric Arthur Blair was born in England in 1903, and
chose his writer’s name, “Orwell,” at the age of 29. Ian Slater
covers the astonishingly wide range of Orwell’s books, essays, and
newspaper columns on social and political affairs with the aim of
capturing the very complicated life of this brilliant man. Nineteen
Eighty-Four, which remains Orwell’s most popular and influential work,
targets the endless struggle between the state and the individual, a
theme that runs throughout Orwell’s work. The book makes dismal
reading, but Orwell was a vibrant and passionate man who lived life to
the full, and who, despite his encounters with poverty, unemployment,
and war, never lost his sense of humour.

For five years, in his early 20s, Eric Blair was a policeman in the
service of the British Empire in Burma. This was his first personal
exposure to what he came to view as the “master–slave”
relationship. It was one that filled him with guilt and with the desire
to play no part in what he viewed as an “evil despotism.” After
Burma, his chosen path involved what he called “getting right down
among the oppressed.” Orwell’s political consciousness grew stronger
during his military service in Spain during the civil war of the 1930s,
a hideous war with atrocities on both sides. Before Spain, Orwell had
focused on unemployment and poverty. After Spain, he began to
concentrate on state interference. His military service in Catalonia led
to tuberculosis and depression. Writings on this wretched experience
included “Coming Up for Air,” but the pervasive theme of the horrors
of totalitarianism would be dealt with more thoroughly in Animal Farm
and 1984

Near the end of his life, Orwell wrote that the twin nightmares that
beset nearly every modern man are those of unemployment and of state
interference. He fought both in Spain and later with his pen.
Tuberculosis and financial shortages bedeviled his life, and depression
was a constant foe. Orwell believed that the world was heading toward a
precipice, yet one had to put up “some sort of fight.” During World
War II, he joined a Home Guard battalion as a sergeant while continuing
to write. At the BBC, he was hired as Talks Assistant and, later, Talks
Producer. He remained surprisingly prolific as a writer of reviews on
films, books, and theatre. In his imaginary conversation with Jonathan
Swift, broadcast on the BBC in 1942, Orwell tells his fictional Swift
that he, Orwell, believes that human society and therefore human nature
can change, but Swift does not.

Tuberculosis claimed Orwell in 1950 at the age of 46. Slater’s
portrait of the man is thorough and very detailed. At times, the reader
may feel that he is sinking in detail, fact after fact, but his
subject’s personal energy and vision carry the day. Orwell: The Road
to Airstrip One is a work to read slowly and reread.