Dog Evals: Book Review: Orwell's Roses (OT)(George Orwell's world, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and roses)

Orwell's Roses, by Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2021, $27, 308 pp)

"In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses."

George Orwell, ne Eric Blair, born in India and schooled at Eton, essayist and author of Animal Farm* (Burmese Days and Nineteen Eighty-Four), was a man of war, being born right after a war, growing up during WW1, being wounded in the Spanish Civil War, and adulting during WW2, coining the term Cold War and then succumbing himself from TB in 1950 at age 46. But he also loved green things and growing things, planting things.

The very British Orwell, a political pragmatist and writer, planted seven rose bushes in 1936 that are still blooming today. Our author, Rebecca Solnit, setting out to find trees that are still living contemporaries of Orwell, instead, discovered the roses, an almost accidental error of nature and time, at the little cottage leased by Orwell. She goes on to compare the goodness and badness of roses (and coal) throughout.

A Short History of the World, or, "Bread and Roses"

Not only prose about the man George Orwell and his short life, Orwell's Roses is also about his other profession, that of a gardener - of roses, of vegetables, of trees and chickens and goats. And primarily about the comparison and contrast between the imaginary solitary world of the writer and the pragmatic earthy rustic world of the farmer. Both are in balance, in Orwell's world.

Bread refers to tangible things and roses refers to the intangible: the pragmatic and the idealistic person or society. The phrase Bread and Roses was adopted by the Bolsheviks and by the Suffragettes and by the South Americans in their fight for independence.

Solnit manages to bring in authors and events from all over the world, as only a liberal arts person can. And she manages to tie them all into the life and times of Orwell. Case in point: 2 + 2 = 5** or "Wheat can become rye" as said by the Russian anti-geneticist Lysenko, not the geneticist Bateson.

Writing Style

Author Rebecca Solnit writes as if you and she are friends and you already know who is who, therefore, very conversationally and in long convoluted sentences that illustrate her excitement. As a result, you race through the book and look forward to the first sentence of each chapter - sort of like a theme with variations.

Literary Themes

Orwell's Roses is not a strict biography: rather, it mentions the famous people he knew, the famous people of the times, the roses that keep cropping up in his life - in bouquets, in gardens, on walks, and in the words of his voluminous essays, no matter what the main topic of said essay. Plenty of quotes from his various essays, nearly going from one to another, yet conversationally so. And plenty of quotes from his letters and from others' essays, sometimes making the book seem to be a collection of quotes, connected by prose.

We get to know the man, his illnesses and his refusal to let them keep him down.

Orwell's Roses makes me want to reread Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four and to purchase Burmese Days. I encourage you to do the same and, if you don't have the time to read a whole book, refresh yourself with the Cliff's Notes versions!

And a Film (Or Two)

After Cliff''s Notes, watch either film version - or both: the first, in 1956 with Edmond O'Brien and Michael Redgrave