May 31, 2023
A CONSERVATIVE CLASSIC:
Orwell's Rare Happy Ending (Susannah Pearce, May 1st, 2023, Imaginative Conservative)
Orwell's novels are not exactly where you turn when you are looking for uplifting reading with happy endings. The one lesser known exception is his short, bright novel, "Keep the Aspidistra Flying." I would go as far as to call it charming and delightful. It was published in 1936, following "Down and Out in London and Paris," "Burmese Days," and "The Clergyman's Daughter," and nine years before "Animal Farm." It may be fair to consider it the best of his fiction, as it is a marvelous story, unencumbered by analogy and didacticism. It is all sardonic humor and affection for all his characters.
Well, maybe not quite unencumbered:
Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into
something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture
and their aspidistras--they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they
interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They 'kept themselves
respectable'--kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children,
which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do.
The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 31, 2023 12:13 AM