I would not usually refer to myself alongside a great writer like George Orwell, however, should you search for my second novel, ‘Coming Up For Air’, by title alone, if you do not pay attention, you might end up with George Orwell’s 1939 novel of the same name. I was not aware of this until after my novel was first published in paperback, when a friend almost bought Orwell’s novel when she intended to buy mine. This sent me into a panic. What if George Orwell’s literary estate sued me for stealing his title? How could I prove that I hadn’t read his novel or even knew of its existence? I have read ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ as well as others of his books, so how come I had never heard of this one and yet still call myself a writer?
As I steeled myself to be hauled through the courts and made bankrupt, another friend pointed out that there is no copyright on titles. A little research proved this to be correct – there is indeed, no copyright on titles. According to the UK Copyright Service: ‘names, titles, short phrases, (and also colours), are not considered unique or substantial enough to be awarded copyright protection in their own right’.
My sense of relief was quickly followed by a touch of pique. If a title does not spring out whilst you are writing a book, a good title can be notoriously difficult to come up with, and I had prided myself on coming up with a really original title, but someone had already thought of it. The only comfort I could take was that at least that someone was one of 20th century Britain’s most provocative and original writers.
So, when revising my novel to prepare it for publication as an ebook, I decided it was about time I read Orwell’s version of ‘Coming Up For Air’, and despite the occasional sharp intake of breath when the language verges on the misogynistic and anti-Semitic (not untypical of the time but that still does not make it right), I’m glad I did.
It is set in 1939 and war is fast approaching, but on the morning on which the novel opens, the middle-aged protagonist, George, or, as he is better known, Tubby Bowling, is more concerned about the new set of false teeth he is to collect that day. Born just before the turn of the century into a horse-drawn, semi-rural, Edwardian world, of lower middle-class poverty, George now owns his own house with an indoor bathroom and a car, a state unheard of for people of his class when he was born. His relative good fortune is the result of him serving in the First World War when he was promoted ‘above his station’ to be trained as an officer, not on merit, but because, unlike so many young men, he was lucky enough to survive the slaughter of the trenches.
George knows he is lucky. He is also lucky in that although he is not usually a betting man, he has just won seventeen pounds on a horse race. However, George is unhappy. He is married to a wife he doesn’t really love, has two children who drive him mad. His discontent with life crystallises into a plan to deceive his wife into thinking he is going away for a few days on a business trip for the insurance company for which he works, and instead spend his winnings on revisiting the small rural town of his birth and the haunts of his childhood which he remembers as a time of carefree, endless summers.
So George sets off, full of nostalgia for a past he believes was so much better than the present, only to find that everything has changed. The small town where he was born has become a huge urban sprawl of new-built housing estates; the magical pond where he fished as a boy has been filled in; but even more disappointingly, he meets no-one who remembers him. This last is particularly difficult because with his new set of teeth which make him look much younger, his car and his natty outfit – despite his expanded waistline, George still likes to think he cuts a fine figure – he had hoped to show off how far he had gone up in the world, but sadly, there is no-one to appreciate him.
George is an everyman/woman figure in that he, like many people, look back to their childhood and the past as a time when somehow, everything was better. Nostalgia is an easy suit of armour to don when the present makes us unhappy or fearful. When George looks with horror at how much the world – his world – has changed and not for the better, isn’t he echoed by many people who believe today’s world is changing both too fast and for the worse? Orwell’s novel is a powerful reminder that, even before the Second World War, peoples’ lives were changing at an incredible pace – the unimaginable becoming common place.
Set 60 years apart, one on the brink of the cataclysm of the Second World War, the other at the approach of the millennium, the two novels have little in common on first reading. Yet while George ‘Tubby’ Bowling and my protagonist, TV producer, Freddie Daniels, are worlds apart, they are both characters who have problems with commitment and attempt to run away from reality until life finally jolts them into making a choice. They also both revisit their childhood memories only to learn they were not quite as they remembered. For Freddie, turning 40 does not mean automatically getting false teeth as it did for many of George’s generation. However, despite many medical breakthroughs, there are still some biological facts of life that women must face once they pass 30, whilst the social attitudes to women who are childless show little sign of changing.
If I dare, one more similarity with George Orwell – he wrote ‘Coming Up For Air’ in Morocco, having been advised to go to a warm climate for his health. I wrote a good part of my novel during a 6-month stay on a Greek island, a place which also provided the inspiration for my next novel: ‘Mothers, Sisters and Other Lovers’ which will be out this summer.
As I steeled myself to be hauled through the courts and made bankrupt, another friend pointed out that there is no copyright on titles. A little research proved this to be correct – there is indeed, no copyright on titles. According to the UK Copyright Service: ‘names, titles, short phrases, (and also colours), are not considered unique or substantial enough to be awarded copyright protection in their own right’.
My sense of relief was quickly followed by a touch of pique. If a title does not spring out whilst you are writing a book, a good title can be notoriously difficult to come up with, and I had prided myself on coming up with a really original title, but someone had already thought of it. The only comfort I could take was that at least that someone was one of 20th century Britain’s most provocative and original writers.
So, when revising my novel to prepare it for publication as an ebook, I decided it was about time I read Orwell’s version of ‘Coming Up For Air’, and despite the occasional sharp intake of breath when the language verges on the misogynistic and anti-Semitic (not untypical of the time but that still does not make it right), I’m glad I did.
It is set in 1939 and war is fast approaching, but on the morning on which the novel opens, the middle-aged protagonist, George, or, as he is better known, Tubby Bowling, is more concerned about the new set of false teeth he is to collect that day. Born just before the turn of the century into a horse-drawn, semi-rural, Edwardian world, of lower middle-class poverty, George now owns his own house with an indoor bathroom and a car, a state unheard of for people of his class when he was born. His relative good fortune is the result of him serving in the First World War when he was promoted ‘above his station’ to be trained as an officer, not on merit, but because, unlike so many young men, he was lucky enough to survive the slaughter of the trenches.
George knows he is lucky. He is also lucky in that although he is not usually a betting man, he has just won seventeen pounds on a horse race. However, George is unhappy. He is married to a wife he doesn’t really love, has two children who drive him mad. His discontent with life crystallises into a plan to deceive his wife into thinking he is going away for a few days on a business trip for the insurance company for which he works, and instead spend his winnings on revisiting the small rural town of his birth and the haunts of his childhood which he remembers as a time of carefree, endless summers.
So George sets off, full of nostalgia for a past he believes was so much better than the present, only to find that everything has changed. The small town where he was born has become a huge urban sprawl of new-built housing estates; the magical pond where he fished as a boy has been filled in; but even more disappointingly, he meets no-one who remembers him. This last is particularly difficult because with his new set of teeth which make him look much younger, his car and his natty outfit – despite his expanded waistline, George still likes to think he cuts a fine figure – he had hoped to show off how far he had gone up in the world, but sadly, there is no-one to appreciate him.
George is an everyman/woman figure in that he, like many people, look back to their childhood and the past as a time when somehow, everything was better. Nostalgia is an easy suit of armour to don when the present makes us unhappy or fearful. When George looks with horror at how much the world – his world – has changed and not for the better, isn’t he echoed by many people who believe today’s world is changing both too fast and for the worse? Orwell’s novel is a powerful reminder that, even before the Second World War, peoples’ lives were changing at an incredible pace – the unimaginable becoming common place.
Set 60 years apart, one on the brink of the cataclysm of the Second World War, the other at the approach of the millennium, the two novels have little in common on first reading. Yet while George ‘Tubby’ Bowling and my protagonist, TV producer, Freddie Daniels, are worlds apart, they are both characters who have problems with commitment and attempt to run away from reality until life finally jolts them into making a choice. They also both revisit their childhood memories only to learn they were not quite as they remembered. For Freddie, turning 40 does not mean automatically getting false teeth as it did for many of George’s generation. However, despite many medical breakthroughs, there are still some biological facts of life that women must face once they pass 30, whilst the social attitudes to women who are childless show little sign of changing.
If I dare, one more similarity with George Orwell – he wrote ‘Coming Up For Air’ in Morocco, having been advised to go to a warm climate for his health. I wrote a good part of my novel during a 6-month stay on a Greek island, a place which also provided the inspiration for my next novel: ‘Mothers, Sisters and Other Lovers’ which will be out this summer.
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