Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (audiobook)

[4.5] I listened to the UK audiobook read by Jeremy Northam.

How else could this have been written? The central narrative of Homage to Catalonia was like glimpsing a platonic ideal of non-fiction reportage: the definitive, the default - which must be because Orwell has become an (the?) exemplar of good English style, filtered into countless other things I've read, from books to below-the-line newspaper comments. (Sometimes I can see the lineage: a friend whose writing sometimes sounds like Hitchens, and Hitchens was inspired by Orwell - but mostly it's just everywhere.) I hadn't read a full book of Orwell's since my teens, either, so in that way too, it was revisiting something so familiar it must have been resident, quiescent in my subconscious.

It seemed to have the perfect balance between being about the writer, and about the 'important things' the book is supposed to be about. And of course he is a first-hand participant, by actually fighting in the war, in a way that few modern non-fiction writers are - and he was an experienced writer before he set out, unlike most memoirists. He mucks in, yet mentions human frailties: a dislike of mountains and a sensitivity to cold (linked?), and a loathing of rats that grows and, as millions will have realised before me, must have inspired Room 101. (A term which unfortunately makes me think of Paul Merton and the TV series first, and 1984 second.) He is sometimes very thoughtful - making an apology to readers who'd written to him about his last book, and whose letters had been taken during a raid on his hotel in Spain before he could reply - yet no paragon. He occasionally enjoys writing graffiti like a teenager, not a man of 33. His account of being hospitalised with a 'poisoned hand' is intriguing in its reflection of another time's attitudes and processes, in the way he doesn't consider it terribly serious, although it does require hospital, and is in outcome, a correction to those who assume that the death toll before antibiotics was 100%.

Political analysis is mostly in the long appendices at the end, about 25% of the book, which even Orwell advises skipping if you are not interested. These appendices have not stood the test of time, as explained here by a contemporary historian - and the level of detail is beyond what most readers will need now if they are not taking a course about the historiography of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, I found it impossible not to respect Orwell's intention to explain, and to be loyal to the group he had fought with. (And his negative experiences of the Spanish communist party also help make sense of his writing Animal Farm at a time when many British socialists were still enamoured of the Soviets.) Even if the analysis of the Barcelona fighting has its problems, his intimations of international war turned out to be right. His sense that Spain could only have a dictatorship after the civil war, even if the republicans won, cannot be tested, but it’s eerie to read now.

The main book was more of a narrative memoir than I had assumed, with most analysis left to the end. And there was unexpected dry humour - although such may be the way of war stories, humour as coping mechanism - and Northam's reading brought this out without ever overplaying it.
They impounded all papers, including the contents of the waste-paper basket, and all our books into the bargain. They were thrown into ecstasies of suspicion by finding that we possessed a French translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf. If that had been the only book they found our doom would have been sealed. It is obvious that a person who reads Mein Kampf must be a Fascist. The next moment, however, they came upon a copy of Stalin's pamphlet, Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and other Double Dealers, which reassured them somewhat.
During the same episode, among the driest, darkest sentences of humour I've ever encountered: This was not a round-up of criminals; it was merely a reign of terror.
Another favourite subtly gave a fascinating picture of British political alignments of 1936:
the News Chronicle-New Statesman version of the war as the defence of civilization against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler.
That harks back to a time when appeasement policy was forseeable (and in effect was already being used towards Spain, under the guise of neutrality) - but less so Winston Churchill as PM and war leader, and Powell & Pressburger's refashioning of the Colonel Blimp stereotype into a patriotic wartime drama, no longer just the military Gammon of his day.

Orwell’s first-hand experience gives the potential for humour alongside serious coverage in a way that a political book of the day, or a history book, would not. And it also means more emotional involvement. His accounts of life in the trenches were occasionally harrowing to an extent for which I was not prepared. For the first time I understood what this - admittedly sponsored – study about audiobooks and emotion was getting at. I’ve also been listening to long audiobooks about Russians under Stalin, and British women in the Second World War, both of which quote individual testimonies, but here the duration of involvement with one account gave it a different dimension. (It was good to have experienced this, but I am not looking for such an emotive experience with audiobooks, so I will be careful about whole-book first-person narratives in future.) His bursts of anger, about men he knew who had died, didn’t always flow perfectly with the rest of the narrative, but they made it all the more human, and even better for it.

Being there on the ground, and writing in book form months later rather than a news reporter’s regular dispatches, meant he could give a medium-term overview of a type rarely heard by the general public about events this long ago. Of, for instance, the changes in manners and atmosphere in Barcelona in the months either side of his frontline service: he arrives to a remarkable experiment in socialism in which formal forms of address have been dropped and the attitudes of waiters are not deferential; and only months later, in a city that had been surprisingly comfortable and insulated away from the front, more traditional ways have begun to reassert themselves. Six months earlier, looking like a proletarian was what made you respectable and kept you safe; later it could be a risk.

The contrast between England and Spain - and especially that between the life a ‘lower upper-middle class’ Englishman (as Orwell elsewhere described his social standing) had been prepared for, and the conditions of the Spanish Civil War – is a recurring theme explored with a greater self-awareness and openness than plenty of contemporary popular travel writers would manage, who wouldn’t explicitly warn: beware of my partisanship, ... and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. I wondered if to some foreign readers he seemed to go on about England and Englishness too much, but to me it seems a necessary part of his exploration of why he finds things different, and of how he works out how to behave and survive under these conditions. He refers more than once to grappling with, and learning to disregard, an underlying belief that “they couldn’t arrest you unless you broke the law”, as happened in England. (Or perhaps as applied to men like him in England. It reminded me a little of a sheltered posh student discovering that drunk and disorderly was something that could actually apply to him too – although Orwell, being rather older and wiser, twigs well before it’s too late.) This being the 1930s, one can’t entirely escape essentialism and the idea of national characteristics, but what there is of it is based on real experience and observation, explained in detail. And any disgust at ‘backwardness’ is about the conditions people have to endure, for example in jails whose conditions were, he considers, last seen in Britain in the 18th century, or for peasants having to make do with a harrow made of wooden boards and flint, like something out of the later stone age, and which makes him look more kindly on industrialism.

Something in Homage to Catalonia, perhaps this observation of conditions and necessary behaviour, and awareness of one’s own position without spending excess time on deprecating it, gave me the sense that this would have been a good book to have absorbed before going on a student gap year to some troubled part of the world. (Perhaps more so before the social media boom where one hears about everything anyway.) There is some deep sense of how to cope and how to think in here, and immersion in a book narrating thought processes can inculcate them in a way a couple of sentences of direct advice can’t - a book about things that are almost certainly far worse than what you’d ever encounter, but which, similar to Ivan Denisovich could seem like a sort of toolkit for surviving things that seem difficult after a sheltered early life. I suppose the way I keep referring to students reflect my feelings that this is a book that should have been read earlier in life. Not that it doesn’t still have a lot to interest someone older as a memoir of immersion in historic events, and of another time, 80 years ago, when it was even more the case that “You could not, as before, 'agree to differ' and have drinks with a man who was supposedly your political opponent”, but the adventure and bravado, and realism and dumb luck of it all seem not merely interesting, but actually potentially illustrative and useful for teenagers and twentysomethings.

But what a thing this is to read in autumn 2018:
And then England - southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way… to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface … all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by…
There are different concerns now about what is looming, but loom it does, and the safe, ensconced plushness, the feeling it's impossible bad things could happen, is part of why.


The reading, too, worked excellently. Northam was a recognisable name, an actor whom, in my teens, I saw in a stage play and, to stave off potential boredom rather because of any overwhelming interest, decided to fancy for the duration and a few weeks afterwards. In the past ten years or so, I'd noticed that he had been in various things on TV, but I was never interested enough to watch them. Here, like, or perhaps because of, Orwell's words, he seemed to be nothing at all to do with that actor from my teens, but a definitive/default male Radio 4 voice. (An anonymous one, rather than a recognisable classic like Brian Perkins.) A voice that could have been on there 20 or 30 years ago announcing the time and imminent programming, rather than someone you'd notice for their accent and as a mark of modernisation. It is an RP accent which does not tend towards the distractingly old-fashioned (now heard as affected) Mr Cholmondley-Warner type (which the real Orwell, for all I know, may have had, what with being born in colonial India in 1903) but which is classic and un-modern enough that it fused with the narrative until I felt I was hearing a story told by an Englishman who'd actually been in Spain the 1930s. (Really, though a voice of an actor who, when I was growing up, might have played a young man in some drama set in the 1930s.) The reading was practically faultless and strangely believeable as the voice of someone who'd written the words; the only slip I noticed was one of emphasis in mentioning Penguin Library books: the stress fell as if they had been borrowed library books, rather than purchased paperbacks, published by a particular imprint. I only really remembered I was listening to an actor when the Irish accent put on for brief conversation with a comrade was better than I think the average author would have done, and in the highly entertaining shifts of tone and volume in one scene in which a succession of people whisper to, and outright tell, Orwell that he must "get out" of a hotel where he has been staying, due to a raid. I must try and listen to Northam's reading of The Road to Wigan Pier as this is now what George Orwell sounds like in my head, and there is no good reason I never finished that book.


(listened and reviewed Sept 2018; the review on Goodreads.)