Chums, by Simon Kuper (Profile Books, 2022)
Orwell’s Island, by Les Wilson (Saraband, 2023)
I read these two books in quick succession this week. I’m always fascinated by the way that books read in parallel, or closely in series, seem to inform one another. Chums’ subtitle is How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, and Orwell’s Island’s surtitle is George, Jura and 1984. Although both books deal with politics in the widest sense, and indeed are concerned with the biographies of Old Etonians, they have very little in common in terms of the attitudes of the protagonists, if such they be, depicted, and the worlds they inhabit. Of Chums I will have little to say. I wonder what Orwell would have made of the world it describes. The dreamy spires. Brideshead Revisited. He would probably have been reminded of the reason why it was a world he chose to reject. Of course Orwell’s world and the world of Chums are seventy years, a whole lifetime, apart. Orwell published Animal Farm in 1945, and the seminal event of Chums, Brexit, was kicked off in 2016. There is a single point of intersection in the narratives of the books; it concerns Burma.
Orwell attended Eton, but instead of going up to Oxford, he joined the police service in Burma. It was the experience of imposing rule upon a subjugated people that helped formulate his attitude towards imperialism. Yet he could not but admire Kipling’s poetry, including Mandalay, and its lines:
For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,
‘Come you back, you British solider, come you back to Mandalay!’
Years later, the British ambassador to Myanmar had to stop Boris Johnson from quoting these lines while visiting the sacred Buddhist Shwedagon Pagoda.
“Not appropriate!”
This vignette appears in both books. And in a sense that single point of intersection sums up the glaring disparity between two world views, the nostalgia of the Oxford Tories for former imperial glory, and George Orwell’s gradual but complete disillusionment, expressed as it was experienced in real time, with Empire.
Orwell’s Island may be read as a short biography of the man born Eric Blair. Like Mr Johnson, and Mr Rees-Mogg, Lord Cameron et al, he attended Eton, but on a scholarship because his parents were poor. He belonged to the “lower upper middle classes” – of the nuances and niceties of social division he was all too acutely aware. He had already received an excruciating education in class distinction, and in snobbery, at his preparatory school, which he describes in the long essay Such, Such were the Joys. Perhaps it was a sense of social inferiority that led him to eschew Oxford and travel to Burma, essentially to protect a colonial authority he shortly came to loathe. You see the disillusionment setting in in such essays as A Hanging, and Shooting an Elephant. He quit the police, came home, and deliberately submerged himself in an underworld, the world of the destitute, as described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He wanted to understand poverty from within, so he deliberately became poor. The conscious decision to do this, and to carry it through, seems almost Christ-like. It was not the sort of life-style choice that your average Oxford Etonian would necessarily find attractive.
By this time, Mr Blair had resolved to become a full-time writer. He had to work very hard just to make ends meet, so he had to undertake a lot of “hack work” such as book reviewing, while simultaneously trying to write political articles, and novels. Then he volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he was shot in the neck and nearly died.
Apparently he disliked the surname Blair – felt it was too Scottish – and chose a nom de plume that was quintessentially English. He seems to have had a visceral dislike of Scotsmen. He called us “Scotchmen” because he knew it irritated us. He could be dismissive of Scottish Nationalism, and of the Gaelic language. Yet he mellowed. Doubtless this has to do with his final years, particularly the time he spent at Barnhill, the remote croft house at the north end of the island of Jura, where he wrote 1984. He came to like, and admire his neighbours, who were kind and helpful. And he must have needed some help. The wet, wild, and windy climate could hardly have been less suitable for a heavy smoker with advanced tuberculosis. To this day, Barnhill is without electricity, and sits remotely at the end of six miles of rugged track. Orwell had another narrow brush with death when out at sea one day he lost the motor of his boat, and nearly lost his adopted son, in the notorious Corryvreckan Whirlpool north of Jura. But it was TB that finally did for him, at the early age of 46. He had been admitted to Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride and treated with the experimental drug streptomycin to which, unfortunately, he was allergic. His chest consultant’s junior doctor was James Williamson. Professor Williamson taught me, at Edinburgh Medical School. It was during a subsequent admission to hospital in London that Orwell died.
I don’t think George Orwell would have the huge reputation he now has, without his last two significant works, Animal Farm, and 1984. Animal Farm was rejected by no less a figure than T. S. Eliot, a reader for Faber & Faber, it is said because it was critical of Britain’s old wartime ally, the Soviet Union. Anti-Soviet sentiment was not popular in the 1940s. Churchill received the same cold shoulder, at least at first, when he gave his Iron Curtain speech in Fulton Missouri. So it is quite possible that Animal Farm might never have seen the light of day. And it was also a possibility that Orwell might have died before he finished 1984. In that event, he had given instructions to destroy the manuscript. We might never have known about Big Brother, the Two Minutes Hate, Room 101, and Newspeak. The world is divided into three great superpowers – Eurasia, Oceania, and Eastasia. Information is so tightly controlled within these realms that there is no access from within, to the outside world. Everybody is forced to live within a bubble. That might have been written, to describe contemporary events, this week. Meanwhile the Westminster Bubble, and its occupants, prepared for high office by the elite educational system depicted in Chums, seems hopelessly inadequate to rise and meet the challenges of the contemporary world.
1984 is one of these books that changes everybody’s world view. But I don’t think I would care to read it again. Absolutely terrifying.
During his earlier life, Orwell gave himself an education that he judged would fit with his ambition to become a writer, and specifically to develop a unique style of political writing. Presumably the Oxford Etonians opted for PPE, the Union – a kind of training ground for the House of Commons – then perhaps a research position under the auspices of the Tory Party, while in search of a safe seat. I wonder who in the event received the better education.
jamescalumcampbell 