‘This life we live nowadays. It’s not life, it’s stagnation…’
Long term readers of this blog will know that I’m no stranger to misery. To quote Weezer, all my favourite songs are slow and sad. The dark side of life holds nothing but comfort to me. And yet… with George Orwell’s lesser known novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, I have finally encountered something that is too miserable even for me – the Ebenezer Scrooge of pop culture writers…
Gordon Comstock is obsessed with money. The great tragedy is that he doesn’t have any. After making a vow never to succumb to the ‘money-god’, he instead resigns himself to a life of poverty and torment. He can’t afford to smoke. He can’t afford to drink. He can’t afford to take his woman to the countryside… what he can afford to do is to complain about how poor he is. And he does. At great length.
With Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell has created a protagonist more depressing than anything dreamt up by Jean Rhys or Sylvia Plath. Sure, the sheer extent of Comstock’s misery does eventually become amusing, but it’s so relentless that a full novel of it is difficult to stomach. Even for a man who owns every Bright Eyes album. That being said, Orwell’s razor sharp prose is always enjoyable, and despite the fact this is one of his less renowned novels, I enjoyed it. Or at least I endured it. Both? Maybe both.