Keep The Aspidistra Flying — GEORGE ORWELL

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 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 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

Gordon Comstock has declared war on what he sees as an overarching dependence on money by leaving a promising job as a copywriter for an advertising company called New Albion at which he shows great dexterity and taking a low paying job instead ostensibly so he can write poetry Coming from a respectable family background in which the inherited wealth has now become dissipated Gordon resents having to work for a living The war and the poetry however aren t going particularly well and under the stress of his self imposed exile from affluence Gordon has become absurd petty and deeply neurotic Comstock lives without luxuries in a bedsit in London which he affords by working in a small bookshop owned by a Scot McKechnie He works intermittently at a magnum opus he plans to call London Pleasures describing a day in London meanwhile his only published work a slim volume of poetry entitled Mice collects dust on the remainder shelf He is simultaneously content with his meagre existence and also disdainful of it He lives without financial ambition and the need for a good job but his living conditions are uncomfortable and his job is boring