Inside the Whale and other essays, by George Orwell

Inside the Whale and other essays was first published in this format in 1957, but the individuals essays are drawn from across Orwell’s most productive journalistic years, 1936 to 1947. There are nine essays in this collection – first date of publication shown in brackets:

Inside the Whale (1940) starts as a discussion of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, but uses this topic as a springboard to roam far and wide across the literature of the first half of the twentieth century;

Down the Mine (1937) originally formed a chapter in The Road to Wigan Pier and is what is says it is, a description of the physical hardships involved in working down a coal mine;

England Your England (1941) is a discussion of nationalism in the context of the early years of the second World War;

Shooting an Elephant (1936) – in this well-known essay Orwell describes the possibly fictional experience of shooting an elephant while serving in Burma in the Indian Imperial Police, where he went immediately after Eton instead of the more traditional route of university;

Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947) is a discussion of Tolstoy’s essay on Shakespeare;

Politics in Literature (1946) is an extended review of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels;

Politics and the English Language (1946) is a surprisingly conservative discussion of how debased the English language has become due to the declining political situation;

The Prevention of Literature (1945) works well as a companion piece to the previous essay as it discusses the impact of totalitarianism on literature;

Boys’ Weeklies (1940) which is a more light-hearted review of the comics published for boys in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Each essay had previously been published elsewhere and had also been collected in different formats. They work well together in this collection, completing one another and giving a examples of some of Orwell’s best journalism of this his defining period.

Taking these essays as a whole, my first impression was how incredibly interesting Orwell must have been as a person to speak to. His mind jumps across so many different topics and he always has a contentious, well-framed position. He never sits on the fence. Some of the positions he sets out here, such as his arguments about the use of plain English in political writing, have stayed with me since I first read them in the 1970’s. You might not agree with what he says – and sometimes I think he is just adopting a position to be controversial for its own sake – but it’s always interesting. It’s also possible to open a page at random and find dozens of thoughtful comments on an important issues. Here are some examples – but the book is absolutely full of them, and choosing some representative examples was incredibly difficult:

It was an age of eagles and of crumpets, facile despairs, backyard Hamlets, cheap return tickets to the end of the night. Inside the Whale

“He (Henry Miller) is fiddling While Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, is fiddling with his face towards the flames“. Inside the Whale

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.” England Your England

(On the impact of imperialism on the ‘white man with his gun’) “He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it” Shooting an Elephant.

These essays are very specific to the time and place from which they were published – the end of Empire and the outbreak of the second World War; the rise of the dictators and for a while what looked like it might be the end of civilisation as we knew it. They are dominated by the oppressive political climate in which internationally things looked very bleak, the war loomed and then broke, and progressive ideas struggled to survive.

“While I have been writing this essay another European war has broken out. It will either last several years and tear Western civilisation to pieces, or it will end inconclusively and prepare the way for yet another war which will do the job once and for all.” Inside the Whale.

It is interesting how little Orwell seemed to have celebrated or been inspired by the election of the radical Labour Government at the end of the war. Although he obviously wrote about these events none of his great journalism touches upon the creation of the NHS, the nationalisation of swathes of British industry, and the introduction of the modern welfare state, even though these steps were an attempt to address many of the social injustices he had written about in, for example, The Road to Wigan Pier. His focus by then was the international situation, and in particular the spread of Soviet Communism. The extent to which Orwell was rehearsing themes that would come to dominate his last two great novels, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1950) comes across very strongly in these essays. For example in The Prevention of Literature he speculates on what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. “Perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum? It would not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.” This theme was brought more vividly to life in 1984 with the creation of the ‘ficdep’ and ‘pornosec’ departments. That’s one of the great strengths of these two masterpieces – they bring together complex political ideas that Orwell had been writing about for some time, and express them in a wonderfully clear way.

I think it’s appropriate that the collection ends with Boys’ Weeklies. This is a class based analysis of boys’ comics, with particular reference to the Billy Bunter Greyfriars stories. It was originally published in the monthly literary magazine Horizon, and argues that the rigid structure these stories employ was needed because “a series lasting thirty years could hardly be the work of the same person every week. Consequently they have to be written in a style that is easily imitated — an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style, quite different from anything else now existing in English literature.” While Orwell was unquestionably right about the repetitive style the stories used, he was completely wrong in his speculation that the author – Frank Richards – was a pseudonym used by a series of writers. The following month Horizon published one of the most devastating ripostes to an essay I have ever seen which includes a line by line reply to virtually every point made, plus this magnificently understated take down:

“Mr Orwell finds it difficult to believe that a series running for thirty years can possibly have been written by one and the same person. In the presence of such authority I speak with diffidence: and can only say that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, I am only one person, and have never been two or three people”

I highly recommend reading Richards’ reply in full (to be fair it was included in Orwell’s collected essays letters and journalism when they published by Penguin in four volumes a few years/decades back) as an example of how to write a dignified demolition of what to be fair was just an attempt to write something interesting about a light-hearted subject.

Finally, I wanted to close on Down a Mine. Orwell has rightly been condemned in recent times for his casual homophobia – he often used homophobic language to describe gay men in particular. But even he was not immune to the attractions of the male form:

“It is only when you see miners down the mine and naked that you realize what splendid men, they are. Most of them are small (big men are at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere. In the hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the clogs and knee-pads.” Down a Mine.

The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, 1992

The English Patient has given me doubts about my whole approach to reading. How can a novel so widely, almost universally praised, leave me so cold? What am I missing? Am I reading just for the sake of meeting some arbitrary blog-related target (bad) or for pleasure (good). Do I need to rethink how I read these novels? Sometimes it is interesting to spend time working out precisely why the novel in question missed the mark, but it would be nice from time to time to be able to write about what it did well. Perhaps I am just on a bad streak, missing the Terry Pratchett novels which were such a release from ‘literature’.

The novel is set in Italy at the end of the Second World War. The novel has a complex narrative structure in which events are told out of sequence. A severely burned “English” patient in the bomb-damaged Villa San Girolamo an Italian monastery, is being cared for by Hana, a Canadian nurse. He is the only patient left after the rest of the hospital has been evacuated at the end of the war in Europe. His only possession is a battered copy of Herodotus’s The Histories. Also in the villa/hospital is an Italian/Canadian/British thief and spy, Caravaggio. Of all the novel’s characters Caravaggio is the least well realised. The descriptions of him burgling various properties in the nude were bizarre, and when he has his thumbs cut off as a punishment for his thieving it seems a fairly light sentence in the circumstances. Eventually these disparate and troubled characters are joined by Kip, an Indian bomb disposal engineer working with the British Army in the area. 

The English patient is horrendously burnt and will almost certainly die, but is lucid and able to recall some of his experiences leading up to his accident. His memory comes back to him intermittently, although he can never remember his name nor confirm his nationality. (We eventually discover he is not English at all – one of the many instances in the novel where things are not what they seem). He seems to have been slowly dying for several years, although the little I know about severe burns cases suggests that would be highly unlikely if not impossible. Previously he was part of a group of explorers mapping the North African desert. His adventures and those of the other inhabitants of the villa are the focus of the novel – little happens in the villa itself until the very end of the war.

In The English Patient Ondaatje has constructed a complex, elusive novel. It has some finely drawn characters, plenty of incident, and a mystery which is slowly revealed. It was quickly translated into an award winning film. The director made some striking choices about the way the narrative is presented, which highlighted some of the weaknesses in the novel’s construction. Incidents which are central to the film and prove heart rending and dramatic are almost thrown away in the novel. The most obvious example of this is the scene which forms the climax of the movie. The English patient is involved in a plane crash in the middle of the desert. His lover is seriously injured and her husband who was piloting the plane, dies. It is suggested that the crash may have been a deliberate attempt by the husband to kill his wife, and possibly her lover, in revenge for her infidelity. The patient rescues the wife and carries her into a nearby cave. She is seriously wounded but might survive, although the nearest town is three day’s journey away, and without the plane the patient has no way of getting help any faster. He walks to the town where he is immediately taken into custody on suspicion of being a spy. No-one will listen to his pleas, that he has left an Englishwoman out in the desert without food or drink, and she will surely die if he doesn’t go back to her.

In the novel, instead of this scene being a heart-breaking climax to the patient and his lover’s affair, it is simply one of many fragmented recollections that surfaces during his morphine injections used to control his pain. It is not given any particular emphasis within the narrative structure. Of course I appreciate this was a deliberate choice by the author – war is full of tragedy – but the different choice made by the film director was clearly more impactful. The film also evens the novel’s timeline out to an extent, making the structure more straightforward while retaining the multiple flashbacks that are at its core.

Just to be clear, I appreciate that Ondaatje’s decisions to structure the novel in the way he did, to foreground some events and leave others in shadow, were obviously carefully thought through. They all add to the elusive nature of the novel in which the reader has to invest thoroughly in the narrative in order to construct the whole. Hence my feelings of guilt that I didn’t come to the novel prepared to do this work, put this effort in, and as a result didn’t benefit from the reward that would have brought. Putting it simply, I didn’t pay sufficient attention. And that’s entirely down to me.

Having offered that mea culpa, the novel is weakened, in my opinion, from the uneasy combination of different narratives. As well as the present day events in the villa, described in the present tense, there are the patient’s memories of time spent exploring the desert, Caraveggio and Hana’s personal reminiscences, and Kip’s training as an unexploded bomb disposal engineer in England. These last scenes in particular, full of technical bomb-making detail, for which Ondaatje obviously did a lot of research, seemed lifted from an entirely different novel and grafted onto this narrative. 

And finally there is the prose. Much praised for its lushness, its vibrancy, its – well, pick the adjective of choice. But I found much of it just pretentious. I know it is unfair to quote the novel and make fun of the empty sentences, having emptied them myself of context and meaning, but how else can I demonstrate the point? You will either enjoy this style of writing or not – and I found it vacuous and empty. Worse at times it descends into meaninglessness.

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.”

“I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.”

“There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.”

“Her hand touched me at the wrist. “If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?”

In most cases these are the author’s characters speaking rather than the narrator, so it is the characters who are being over the top, pompous, or plain ridiculous. But when everyone speaks like this, more or less (Kip is the primary exception) then I can be forgiven for finding it wearying. It certainly didn’t leave me wanting to read more of this author.