“The Road to Wigan Pier” by George Orwell
Talking Book Number: TB 7961
Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” was a book that interested me when I reviewed it in January 2007. I wanted to read another of his works and this one was suggested to me. It was published four years later and it seems to be rather more famous.
It’s a book of two parts. The first part describes the results of Orwell’s researches into social conditions in northern England in the thirties. I call them researches because that’s what we’d call them today. He visited the northern working class in their homes and workplaces and he presents his observations backed up with facts and figures from library research. It’s a noticeable improvement on the descriptions of his experiences in Paris and London. Perhaps they inspired him to approach his self-imposed task of social journalism in a more organised manner. The result is highly effective.
Orwell uses the same clear journalistic style writing style that he used in “Down and Out”. In some ways it resembles the sort of polemical documentary that we now get from the likes of Michael Moore. If you don’t know Moore his “Stupid White Men” (TB 13326) is available from the library. But Orwell’s descriptions of the squalid working and living conditions are also surprisingly poetic. His style demonstrates that even in a book like this he is first and foremost a novelist. There’s something very human about his presentation of the material, both in terms of the people he meets and the character of Orwell himself. There are eccentric characters who are as sympathetically-drawn as those in “Down and Out”. There are descriptions of the grim north which are at times rather quaint and quirky and at others outrage-inducing in their clarity. All of this has something rather Dickensian about it but in Orwell’s case the outrage-inducing descriptions of poverty aren’t melodramatic or mawkish. They don’t leave you with a sense of impotent rage in the face of a hostile world. Orwell’s anger is combined with his Socialist vision of how things could be put right. And in the end they were. The levels of poverty he describes were removed from Britain by various post-war governments. The disturbing thing is that some aspects of his descriptions are surprisingly contemporary. The culture of deprivation and the indifferent institutions he describes have their counterparts in modern Britain. I saw them first-hand when I worked for a few years in a British Jobcentre.
The second part of the book includes some autobiographical material. Orwell tells us about the social context of his life and explains how it caused him to arrive at his political beliefs. Such an exercise in the case of most writers would be unutterably dull, but in Orwell’s hands it becomes impressively confessional and easy to identify with. I found his descriptions of his schooling and his later work for the state both appealing in this manner. His feelings and reactions are quite recognisable to me. He also talks about the period when he was “Down and Out in Paris and London”, providing a little more context to the material in that book.
Orwell goes on to engage in political, social and literary criticism. His theme is the state of Socialism in Britain in the thirties. His politics are much clearer and better thought-out than in “Down and Out” but his independence of mind is still clear. He writes perceptively about the British class system and the human condition. He paints a cruel portrait of the Socialists around him and gives a rebuttal to reactionaries of the time. These are quite amusing if a little arrogant and acerbic. He manages to be quite entertaining on the whole. This is quite an achievement since the task that he’s undertaking is one that’s impossible to complete without at least some degree of dryness. His grestest weakness is a tendency towards repetition.
He ends the book with a clarion call against Fascism. His intention is clearly to produce a book which argues in support of Socialism and to suggest how it might be built in Britain. The intellectual content of his analysis is certainly good. In fact he is so successful at playing the Devil’s advocate in his arguments that it might be possible to see Socialism as a lost cause. There are a few flaws in his attempts to extrapolate his ideas and to predict the future. Futurology is a difficult and inexact science at the best of times. It makes his work a hostage to fortune and a victim of our dissecting hindsight. But his writing on this subject is certainly no worse than his contemporaries. His political predictions aren’t at all bad and his socio-scientific ones stand up reasonably. The irony is that he probably needs to make no predictions at all. His analysis of the state of British politics and society would probably be just as applicable today as it was seventy years ago.
This version of the book has a twenty-minute appendix. It’s made up of the original foreword which the publisher added to the first edition. This contains a disclaimer to the effect that Orwell’s views are not those of the publisher. It also contains an attempt to refute some of Orwell’s arguments. Its main interest is in contextualising the book and indicating the sort of reception that it originally received. Overall it is not very helpful and you might want to skip it.
The reader is Michael Tudor-Barnes. He makes an excellent job of it, even better than he did on “Remains of the Day”. His deep-voiced rendition is delivered in clear received tones. He injects into the reading all of the passion necessary for such a work. He even manages this in those passages which consist largely of facts and figures. His music-hall northern accents and his voices for sneering bourgeois critics are rather entertaining too.
Star Rating: five stars (out of five)
Original Book Text: five out of five.
RNIB Disc Recording: five out of five.
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