In the course of his misadventures, we become grindingly aware that his radical solution to the problem of the money-world is no solution at all-that in his desperate reaction against a monstrous system, he has become something of a monster himself. He etches the ugly insanity of what Gordon calls 'the money-world' in unflinching detail, but the satire has a second edge, too, and Gordon himself is scarcely heroic.

In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell has created a darkly compassionate satire to which anyone who has ever been oppressed by the lack of brass, or by the need to make it, will all too easily relate. women won't love you.' On the windowsill of Gordon's shabby rooming-house room is a sickly but unkillable aspidistra-a plant he abhors as the banner of the sort of 'mingy, lower-middle-class decency' he is fleeing in his downward flight. Always broke, but too proud to accept charity, he rarely sees his few friends and cannot get the virginal Rosemary to bed because (or so he believes), 'If you have no money.

Nearly 30 and 'rather moth-eaten already,' a poet whose one small book of verse has fallen 'flatter than any pancake,' Gordon has given up a 'good' job and gone to work in a bookshop at half his former salary. Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god and Gordon is losing the war. Of particular interest are the previously suppressed advertising slogans of the 1930s and, in light of the censorship he experienced, Orwell's ironic choice of surname for Gordon: Comstock.London, 1936. This new edition restores most of the material censored on first publication due to fears of action for libel, defamation and obscenity. The symbol of this is the potted aspidistra: the ugly, stubborn, organic emblem of social and biological survival. But above all he learns of the courage of keeping up appearances despite hardships. Ironically, Gordon’s voyage of discovery leads him back to commercial security, marriage, and the unexpected pleasures of domesticity. However, after some modest success in the world of letters he eventually slides into the abyss, to be rescued by the faithful Rosemary.

Gordon Comstock gives up a good job in an advertising agency to become a part-time bookshop assistant at a meagre wage, thereby gaining leisure for writing.

Originally published in 1936, before Orwell achieved fame, Keep the Aspidistra Flying takes Money as its theme. Volume 4 of The Complete Works of George Orwell

Keep the flying orwell