Book Review of The Orwell Tour by Oliver Lewis

 

Image copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 1999, all rights reserved

 

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Travels through the life and work of George Orwell

This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.

 

This is a good and useful book which I will give a four-star recommendation: it’s actually a lot more interesting than it would have been as a five-star flawless treatise with no flaws to set me thinking. Some of the episodes in Orwell’s life and travels I knew something about. About others, especially the extended visit to Morocco, I knew only that it had happened.

When the story comes to Orwell’s time in Wallington, North Hertfordshire, the author repeats the error most others have made and assumes that the tiny village of Wallington and the (then quite small) neighbouring market town of Baldock was the whole story of George Orwell in what used to be known pre-1974 as “The Hitchin Region”. His friendship with E.M. Forster, who would contribute much to Orwell’s wartime radio broadcasts, was strengthened by their ability to easily meet each other halfway in Hitchin, which was where many Hertfordshire buses ran on livestock market days.

But that’s not a major complaint, because the author has indeed toured the whole of George Orwell’s world and visited places a lot more remote than Wallington or the village of Orwell, just across the Cambridgeshire border from Wallington. These locations (as they are and as they might have been) are well-described in a manner not unworthy of Orwell and the author gives us quite a lot of insight into how well, or otherwise, Orwell is remembered.

Spain is the nicest example, because Orwell appears to be remembered widely and warmly and this is interesting. Yes, Orwell fought in the civil war, but so did other, more macho and flamboyant, literary figures. The key here is to remember a point once well made by the former British Railways Minister and Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, that most families in Spain had members who fought on both sides of the civil war and many of those families had members who fell fighting for both sides, too. Orwell never really articulated, let alone supported, the Nationalist side of the argument, but his writings were sufficiently observational and objective for it to be evident to any thinking person that there might have been compelling reasons why people fought against, as well as for, the Republicans.

In Spain, to see the civil war too much from EITHER side’s point of view is to risk alienating any or perhaps every Spanish family, because they all had members on both sides.

In the city of Huesca, there is a campaign to erect a statue of George Orwell drinking a cup of coffee, because, when he was taking part in the siege of Huesca, he expressed a wish to find out what the coffee there tasted like in peacetime. If I were a resident of Huesca, I’d find that a much more palatable goal than most of those formed during the siege.

Mention is made of the ferocious attacks on George Orwell by many on the left: by comparison with Laurie Lee, Orwell has (so far) been well-defended against “cancelling” but Lee was vilified all his life and his diaries stolen by those who claimed his memoirs of Spain to be “false.” Students and fans of George Orwell need to remain alert, because if the hard left could do what they did to the rustic, gentle and innocuous Laurie Lee, it’s not hard to imagine them one day doing worse to a more dangerous foe, such as Orwell.

The Orwell Tour by Oliver Lewis is published by Icon Books on the 26^th of September 2023.