I was looking for another book by George Orwell but this was all that the library had.  However, it turned out to be a lucky find as I have not enjoyed a novel as much for a long time.

 

The hero of our story, George, is a 45 year old man who is married with two children and who is rather overweight.  He is a typical suburban Englishman of 1939 and he is about everything that the author was not. 

 

He finds himself in the position of having a day off work and seventeen pounds in his pocket that his wife does not know about.  He then reminisces about his life, his childhood at the turn of the century and his youth just before the First World War.  Although he did not know it at the time, it was an idyllic life in the countryside just outside London.  His father had been a reasonably prosperous corn merchant.  Horses were the principal means of transport at the time.  He later recalls how his father was saved from bankruptcy by death as his business gradually declined as the horse was replaced by the motor car and motor lorries.

 

Then we go forward again to 1939.  George, our hero has devised a malicious scheme.  He has managed to procure a whole week off work.  He tells his wife he is being sent to Birmingham for a week to sell insurance.  He arranges for a colleague in Birmingham to telephone his wife just to lay a false trail.

 

George takes his car and head for the village where he used to live with his parents. 

As George drives over the hill, he cannot believe his eyes.  Where his village once was are houses as far as the eye can see.

 

George takes a room at the local pub.  Its interior decor has changed to a medieval theme.  George's parents, their relative, friends, and neighbours, have all passed away.  Their headstones are in the churchyard.  Their businesses have been replaced by new businesses.  The old world has gone and George does not like what he sees.  While he was gone, he did not realise that this place has changed just like everywhere else.

 

George just manages to catch the emergency message over the radio requesting George to return home as his wife has been taken seriously ill.  George decides to act as if he did not hear the message as he suspects that it is just a ploy by his wife to get him to go home.

 

In the street he spots a woman who he vaguely recognises.  It is a woman with whom he had an affair.  She has change so much that she is barely recognisable.  George is shocked.  He follows her into a shop; her own shop.  George pretends to be interested in buying a pipe.  George does not let on.  George is even more shocked that the woman does not recognise him for he has changed even more than she has.

 

At the end of the week it is time for George to return home.  He has spent his seventeen pounds and has nothing to show for it except a few extra pounds in weight. from drinking at the bar.  Now he is worried about his wife.  What if she really is seriously ill?  When George enters the house there is no sign of his wife.  Now George really is worried.   I will leave the rest for the reader.

The author was born in India but comes to England as a child to go to school.  He does not go to university but goes to Burma where he becomes a policeman in the colonial regime.  Burma is the setting for his first novel, "Burmese Days".  He becomes disillusioned with colonialism.  He goes on to write more works of fiction and non-fiction until his premature death in 1950 from tuberculosis at the age of 47.  It was his last book, "Nineteen Eighty-Four that was to become his most famous.  In it he warns us of the totalitarian society we are heading for.  I don't think that by 1984 we had the society that Orwell predicted, but we are still heading towards it.