Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

Orwell keeps both of his edges sharp to the very end-a 'happy' ending that poses tough questions about just how happy it really is. In the course of his misadventures, we become grindingly aware that his radical solution to the problem of the money-world is no solution at all-that in his desperate reaction against a monstrous system, he has become something of a monster himself.

He etches the ugly insanity of what Gordon calls 'the money-world' in unflinching detail, but the satire has a second edge, too, and Gordon himself is scarcely heroic. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell has created a darkly compassionate satire to which anyone who has ever been oppressed by the lack of brass, or by the need to make it, will all too easily relate. women won't love you.' On the windowsill of Gordon's shabby rooming-house room is a sickly but unkillable aspidistra-a plant he abhors as the banner of the sort of 'mingy, lower-middle-class decency' he is fleeing in his downward flight. Always broke, but too proud to accept charity, he rarely sees his few friends and cannot get the virginal Rosemary to bed because (or so he believes), 'If you have no money. Nearly 30 and 'rather moth-eaten already,' a poet whose one small book of verse has fallen 'flatter than any pancake,' Gordon has given up a 'good' job and gone to work in a bookshop at half his former salary. Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god and Gordon is losing the war.

Through the character of Gordon Comstock, Orwell reveals his own disaffection with the society he once himself renounced.Įnlivened with vivid autobiographical detail, George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a tragically witty account of the struggle to escape from a materialistic existence.London, 1936. Only Rosemary, ever-faithful Rosemary, has the strength to challenge his commitment to his chosen way of life. But he slides instead into a self-induced poverty that destroys his creativity and his spirit. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell