A History of Britain Through Books – Reviewed
Christopher Tugendhat’s short piece on Orwell in his new book A History of Britain Through Books shows that he is very much an Orwell enthusiast and appreciates the finer points that he makes in not only Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four but also in Homage To Catalonia, where Christopher very quickly understands Orwell’s interpretation of the events in Barcelona. I would hope that he would realise the importance of how Orwell saw events and would be proved right, in spite of being put down by others over that he didn’t understand the broader issues of the Spanish Civil War. Something that Orwell never tried to hide. “I can only write about what I saw” says Orwell at the beginning of Homage To Catalonia.
Christopher quite rightly identifies the problems with getting Animal Farm published given the mood in Great Britain and its relationship with the Soviet Union and Stalin at the time. Churchill presenting Stalin with a bejewelled sword inscribed by King George VI didn’t help and Orwell was fighting publishers (and the public?) on all sides. Perseverance prevailed with the help of Fred Warburg and it was published to critical acclaim. Here Christopher understands full well the nuances of Animal Farm. With Nineteen Eighty-Four Christopher seems to sympathise with Warburg as being “one of the most terrifying books I have ever read”. Christopher goes into detail of his understanding of Orwell’s final book. The lessons learnt in Animal Farm are rammed home in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This is a pleasant and well observed, if short précis of three of Orwell’s important books and if the rest of the previous chapters are of the same standard then it is a book well worth reading
*
Richard Blair is the son of George Orwell, and Patron of The Orwell Society.
A History of Britain Through Books: 1900 – 1964
By Christopher Tugendhat
(Whitefox Publishing, 2019, ISBN13: 9781912892341)
Richard does well to highlight the references to Orwell in this intriguing history. Tugendhat is also interesting when he writes about the ways in which the representations of the Second World War have changed over the years. These days, he says, the conflict is always presented in heroic terms. Not so in the 1950s. In John Braine’s Room at the Top, Joe Lampton, the central character, explains how lucky he was to have been out of harm’s way in a German Prisoner of War camp where he was able to pass his accountancy exams under the auspices of the Red Cross. In Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Arthur Seaton admires those of his cousins who were deserters during the war: ‘Let them start (another) war,’ he thought, ‘and see what a bad soldier I can be.’ Tugendhat comments: ‘Minority views, no doubt, and, as I recall, not widely expressed, but it is still a shock to find them expressed in two of the most iconic novels of the decade.’