Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Author: George Orwell 1936 248 pp
My rating: 3*
Started July 5 2008, Finished July 5 2008

This volume continues Orwell’s chronicle of poverty in English society, examining the lot of a member of the working poor. The protagonist, Gordon Comstock, attempts to as fully as possible, reject participation in the “money society”, forsaking a promising job as an advertising copy writer for a much lower paying, dead end one as the sales clerk at a used book store which, in theory, will pay him just enough to subsist while he focuses his energies on writing poetry. What happens though is that Gordon loses his muse, writes virtually nothing and become obsessed with his sense that money controls everything in society and that a person who lacks it is nothing, developing an Underground Man like hostility to the world around him and a paranoid sense that all the interactions in his life are determined by the contempt people have for him as a person without money.
The book had several flaws as a novel, primarily because most of its characters do not ring true as human beings. The book gets off to a bad start in this respect in chapter one’s description of a typical day in the bookstore where all the customers all caricatures in action, speech and book preference. Further, the adoration Gordon’s sweetheart, Rosemary, has for him is never really plausible given that we see him offer her little but rudeness and complaint. The support Gordon receives from Rosemary, his spinster sister and his friend/champion, the well-to-do Ravelston, stretch credibility in the face of Gordon’s endlessly self-defeating actions and self pity which make him a thoroughly unlikable anti-hero, whatever the reader feels about Gordon’s anti-capitalist principles.
The book’s centerpiece is memorably excruciating chapter in which Gordon manages to in the course of a few hours to convert an unexpected windfall into an appalling, completely abasing catastrophe after which he develops a Bartleby-like indifference to his own existence and appears headed straight for the gutter. Given Gordon’s negative trajectory in the rest of the book, its relatively happy, nearly Hollywoodesque ending jars a bit, though offering everyone, the reader included, substantial relief from the grinding spectacle of Gordon’s self destruction.
Eliot’s take on the modern world, one of the many things Gordon scoffs at, casts a shadow over this novel of “lonely clerks in shirt sleeves” who conduct degrading assignations with their equally unmoored female contemporaries. Also of note is the degree to which the materialism of the “dying capitalist society” portrayed in the book resembles that in our own; the copywriting for which Gordon has such unlimited contempt is for things which sound all too familiar to the reader seventy years after: “Whiterose Pills for Female Disorders, Your Horoscope Cast by Professor Raratongo, The Seven Secrets of Venus, New Hope for the Ruptured, Earn Five Pounds a Week in your Spare Time, and Cyprolax Hair Lotion Banishes all Unpleasant Intruders.” (51)
Another plus for me was the nasty comic relief provided by Mr Cheeseman, the owner of a for profit lending library where Gordon finds better-than-nothing employment after the windfall catastrophe, a feisty dwarf who “was not a bad person to work for, so long as you understood that if you worked till the Day of Judgement you would never get a rise of wages” and who despite owning a mini-empire of book stores “had never in his life read a book himself, nor could he conceive why anyone should want to do so.” (204-5)

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“It was the lack of money, simply the lack of money, that robbed him of the power to 'write'. He clung to that as to an article of faith. Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm--they've all got to be paid for in hard cash.” (9)

“Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success.” (43)

“The prospect of searching for another job bored him even more than the prospect of poverty. Besides, he would never find another job. There are no jobs to be had nowadays. He was going down, down into the sub-world of the unemployed--down, down into God knew what workhouse depths of dirt and hunger and futility. And chiefly he was anxious to get it over with as little fuss and effort as possible.” (189)