Book Description:
This compelling story of a middle aged man's journey back to the longgone village of his youth is told with humor, warmth and nostalgia which will surprise and delight Orwell's large audience. 6 cassettes. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon.com Review /Source Content Insurance salesman George 'Fatty' Bowling lives with his humorless wife and their two irritating children in a dull house in a tract development in the historyless London suburb of West Bletchley. The year is 1938; doomsayers are declaring that England will be at war again by 1941.<p> When George bets on an unlikely horse and wins, he finds himself with a little extra cash on his hands. What should he spend it on? 'The alternatives, it seemed to me, were either a week end with a woman or dribbling it quietly away on odds and ends such as cigars and double whiskeys.' But a chance encounter with a poster in Charing Cross sets him off on a tremendous journey into his own memories memories, especially, of a boyhood spent in Lower Binfield, the country village where he grew up. His recollections are pungent and detailed. Touch by touch, he paints for us a whole world that is already nearly lost: a world not yet ruled by the fear of war and not yet blighted by war's aftermath: <blockquote> 1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir! It'll never come again. I don't mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling you've either had and don't need to be told about, or haven't had and won't ever have the chance to learn. </blockquote> Alas, George finds that even Lower Binfield has been darkened by the bomber's shadow. <p> Readers of <I>1984</I> will recognize Orwell's desperate insistence on the importance of the individual, of memory, of history, and of language; and they will find in Fatty Bowling one of Orwell's most engaging creations a warm, witty, thinking, remembering Everyman in a world that is fast learning not to think and not to remember, and thus swiftly losing its mind. <I> Daniel Hintzsche</I>
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