Review of George Orwell's 'Keep The Aspidistra Flying'

Written in 1934 and 1935, ‘Keep The Aspidistra Flying’ is a scathing satire on the 1930s society. George Orwell demonstrates his disillusionment with his surroundings, and his caustic wit is present throughout the novel, as he seeks to challenge the conventional lifestyle of aspiration to financial stability and corporate success.

The book is chiefly concerned with Gordon Comstock, who abandons a ‘good job’ in advertising to work part-time in a bookstore, and the subsequent poverty that it brings him. ‘The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket’; this is how Gordon perceives the job from which he has escaped, for he has vowed to resist the ‘money-god’ that those around him worship so ardently, and feels that such reverence ‘has been elevated into a religion… Money is what God used to be.’ Through his protagonist, Orwell excoriates the society in which he was living.

At first, Gordon sees himself as a ‘poet starving in a garret - but starving, somehow, not uncomfortably.’ Unfortunately, this quixotic view is soon expunged by reality, and he finds the first consequence of poverty to be the extinguishing of his imagination and creativity, and his life is soon dreary and insalubrious. He works in the bookstore with the ambition of establishing himself as a writer, but falls instead into self-loathing, seeing his poems as ‘forty or fifty drab, dead little poems, each like a little abortion in its jar.’ Orwell himself was also subjected to poverty, though wilfully, as is recorded in his account ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’. He drew on many of his own experiences to write this book: in 1934, he was employed as a bookstore’s assistant, and documented in his essay, ‘Bookshop Memories’ the ‘decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books’; in ‘Keep The Aspidistra Flying’, this ubiquitous figure is recycled in the form of an ‘old woman’ who smells of ‘very, very old breadcrusts.’

To him, the eponymous aspidistra embodies tedious, middle-class righteousness. These household plants become ‘a sort of symbol for Gordon’; he despises all they represent, and denounces them in the sarcastic lines, ‘The aspidistra, flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.’

Whilst abhorring those who aspire to wealth, Gordon harbours a fanatical obsession with money, and in his eyes, it oozes into every crevice of life, especially social relationships. He feels that women in particular find only financially stable men desirous: ‘serve the money-god, or do without women - those are the only alternatives. And both were equally impossible.’

When he comes into 10 pounds unexpectedly, Orwell does not afford any sympathy to his character; instead, Gordon promptly spends the whole amount in one alcohol-fuelled evening of profligate decadence, and wryly observes that: ‘if you have no money you don’t even know how to spend it when you get it. You just splurge it frantically away, like a sailor in a bawdy-house his first night ashore.’ It takes the unexpected pregnancy of his girlfriend, Rosemary, to persuade him to relinquish his beliefs, raise himself from his abject poverty and take up his job again at the advertising firm in order to provide for his family; ‘his long and lonely war had ended in ignominious defeat.’ Remarkably, however, he experiences only relief upon finally submitting himself to the way of life that he resents, having nurtured a secret longing, he admits, to leave his ‘moneyless existence to which he had condemned himself.’ It is as though an epiphany has occurred: he goes on to hypothesize that ‘to abjure money is to abjure life.’

What Orwell presents as a happy ending could perhaps be interpreted as containing less positive undertones; from having detested the aspidistra, the final scene depicts Gordon demanding the presence of one in their new flat, a representation of his dramatic change of opinion. He reflects that, actually, ‘the aspidistra is the tree of life’; this ending is redolent of 1984, where, having waged a secret battle against the totalitarian regime, Winston Smith finally accepts their policies and declares his love for The Party, after being brutally tortured. Orwell is a concise and economic writer, who possesses a sharp and conscious wit, and his prose strides fluently and purposefully; as there is no linguistic surplus, he is able to hone to his core messages concerning society. There is no need for superfluous vocabulary, for the meaning of his phrases is clearly communicated to the reader, while the tone creates a potent sense of atmosphere and place. The narrative style captures the essence of Gordon’s opinions, leading the reader to question the lifestyle with which they may be familiar: Orwell encourages his audience both to associate with Gordon and to despair of his extreme views. The plot of the story is refined into the following quote: ‘You can be rich, or you can deliberately refuse to be rich. You can be possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it.’