Rebecca Solnit's ORWELL'S ROSES

Thinking about Orwell's roses and where they led was a meandering process and perhaps a rhizomatic one, to deploy a word that describes plants such as strawberries that send out roots or runners to spread in many directions. The word was adopted by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to describe a decentralized or nonhierarchical model of knowledge. "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be," they declared. "This is very different from the tree or root which plots a point, fixes an order."

The above passage from Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses could serve as a thesis statement for the book as a whole, for while I've seen this book described as a sort of biography of George Orwell, it's really only a tiny bit that, as I'll discuss below. 

Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, is a foundational writer for me, for all that the only fiction of his that I had ever read until unusually late in life for a lit major was Animal Farm*. For me, what I've always loved him for the most has been his essays, many of which I can quote almost word for word. I've enjoyed pseudo-biographies of him before, especially Emma Larkin's hyper-focused and fascinating Finding George Orwell in Burma, which does just what it says on the tin: locates important experiences and settings from Orwell's well-known years as a member of the British government's Indian Imperial Force as inspirations for a lot more of his work than just his first novel. Among its more interesting insights came from Larkin's conversation with a local on a visit to what is now Myanmar in which at first her conversation partner didn't know who she was talking about when she mentioned Orwell by either his pen or actual names, but then realized she was talking about "the prophet."

Orwell's name is on every tongue in this dumb century of ours, usually as a shorthand way of demonizing one's political opponents. Wearing masks to contain the spread of a killer virus is somehow Orwellian (though I really doubt he'd agree). Insisting that counterfactual insanity is still somehow true despite mountains of actual evidence that the crowd wasn't that big, and that your guy is in photographs with Jeff and Ghislaine, too, is Orwellian. Vaccine requirements are Orwellian? People wishing it was maybe a little harder for unhinged teenagers or mentally ill spouse-abusers to get access to automatic weapons is Orwellian? Insisting that you can't trust anything you hear in the press is pretty Orwellian. Orwellian, Orwellian, Orwellian.**

So while I still think everybody who uses his pen name in vain should have to read Larkin's book if not re-read Orwell directly***, it's a pretty interesting time for something like Orwell's Roses to make an appearance.

Right as I started reading it, I was brought back to one of my favorite reads from last year (you know, 2020 And Some Months), Dean King's Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed, a biography of another of my favorite writers of all time that focused quite a lot on O'Brian's cozy-sounding yet strenuously laborious domestic arrangements over the years. Here, too, quite a lot of attention is paid to its subject writer's housing, focusing on his house in Wallington, Hertfordshire, England, where he lived from 1936 to 1940 when he wasn't off at the Spanish Civil War, and where he planted the roses that first captured Solni'ts imagination.

Even more attention, though, is paid to what it means to plant roses in the first place, and Orwell's Roses turns into something much more interesting than another Orwell biography could be; Solnit has let her curiosity, her knowledge and her understanding of the writer's life, the life of the politically aware, and of what industrialization has done to all life on earth, lead her to all sorts of interesting ideas and connections between the man and his roses -- and each of us. The result is a book that makes me think of W.G. Sebald more than of anyone else, except Solnit isn't content to just show us fragments; she wants to pull them together into something, if not whole, at least whole enough for us to see how the fragments might fit together, and how there might be more than one way to fit them. This is pure black magic to me, making Orwell's Roses the best example of "the kind of book I wish I could write" that I've yet found.

Orwell's Roses take Solnit to some unexpected places, such as Bogota, Columbia, a city that is now surrounded by vast greenhouses and the infrastructure to process, package and ship their sole product: scentless, immature roses on an industrial scale, destined for supermarkets, airport booths and florist's shops in the United States. The roses we give one another for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day to celebrate love and beauty are grown by overworked, underpaid, exploited workers in their thousands, who are, Solnit discovers, made into walking billboards for Orwellian slogans by the text printed on their coveralls: "Effort and passion make us feel satisfied in our work", "The attitude depends on you. The rest we want you to learn here" are some choice examples, printed in Spanish on the actual garments, of course.

And, while she doesn't travel there, her musings also lead her to Russia and the Soviet Union under Stalin, and especially to the stories of Nikolai Vavilov and Trofim Lysenko, respectively the pioneering geneticist who strove to save the world from hunger through slow and careful plant breeding and seed saving, and the Lamarckian pseudoscientist who convinced Stalin that all that plodding around with the scientific method was a waste of time and they could fake it until they made it when it came to improving crops and crop yields, which lead to years of famine and death while Stalin bragged about how well his plans were working and even famously exported grain while the people growing it starved.

But it's not just to the grim in Orwell's world or ours that Solnit points us; the man, Eric Blair, had a great love for the simple beauty of the mundane, the close at hand, the homely, and especially the English -- the countryside, the junk shops, the soil in which so much could be grown that he and his first wife, Eileen, could often feed themselves from their garden, and Solnit celebrates this side of Orwell and of life right alongside his and her accounts of his experiences in miserable coal mines, on the battle fronts in the Spanish Civil War, and suffering in tuberculosis wards as his hard, active, risk-taking way of life caught up with him and took him young. 

The result is a book that I didn't expect but also didn't know I needed: a good beginning for what's sure to be another Orwellian year. 

*A first American edition of which is still one of my most cherished possessions, one of those things they'll have to pry from my cold dead fingers.

**Late in the book one of Solnit's companions in travel and exploration for the book wonderis "whether the word Orwellian should perhaps mean something other than ominous, corrupt, sinister, deceitful, a hypocrisy or dishonesty so destructive that it is an assault on truth and thought and rights" because Orwell, the actual man, was as concerned with beauty and pleasure (Solnit embarked on a re-reading of 1984 for this project and found, to her surprise that even in his totalitarian horror story there is beauty and pleasure throughout, for Winston's entire rebellion is an effort to hold on to these, and one can't depict something being clutched at without describing what is being clutched) as with brutality and deceit, but they ultimately conclude that Orwellian has become too useful a word, and too embedded in our culture, to try to change now.

***Except even back when Animal Farm first appeared, to say nothing of 1984, right-wingers were already misunderstanding the point so hard that Orwell felt he had to issue a declaration more or less from his deathbed that no, dummies, "My novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is notintended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labour party, but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable, and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism."

John le Carre's A MURDER OF QUALITY

Quite possibly my favorite George Orwell essay is "Such, Such Were the Joys" in which our man Eric Blair recalls his days as a sort of charity case at a posh English boarding school that thought it was even posher than it actually was. He was miserable there, of course; one can see the beginnings of the great man whose every work is in some way or another a crie de couer against the banal (and not so banal) evils of collectivism. It's also, because Orwell was a prose stylist and a storyteller so close to perfect as makes no odds, a fascinating read, descriptive and honest and sort of bleakly lovely. His Crossgates was a place one survived, rather than graduated from.

It's hard, then, for someone like me, so in love with that essay, not to keep thinking of it as our man George Smiley, ex-intelligence man whose life is still very much shaped by his experiences plying his then still unofficial trade during World War II, finds himself in the role of cozy mystery detective again as he comes to a posh English boarding school, Carnes, to help figure out who killed a schoolmaster's wife in a bloody, gruesome and bizarre fashion. I always thought Bingo and Sim had more going on than poor little Eric Blair realized, don't you know, and I feel the little boy who would be come my hero sort of peeking around corners and watching Smiley at work throughout the book.* I wish he could have seen someone like Smiley, at any rate, to see that not all grown-ups are perfidious jerks. But of course, he wouldn't have grown up to be the hero he was if he'd had an easy, trusting childhood, would he?

But that's neither here nor there. Except in that it takes place at an English public school (like so many other novels and plays and films and whatnot, hmm? But as Orwell observed, for many people, their school days were the most eventful and dramatic and interesting of all their days. Poor benighted souls, they, hmm?) at which Secrets Are Being Kept. But of course, where in Orwell's essay, those secrets are largely socio-economic and class-based, in A Murder of Quality, well, there are elements of socio-economic and class struggle there, too, no doubt, and these elements are thwarting the murder investigation in true Town vs. Gown fashion, but... this is Smiley, dammit. Smiley! Come on, bust out the spy stuff!

News flash: there isn't much spy stuff, except in Smiley's back story and insomuch as it has formed his character as a careful thinker and observer and analyst -- who has a tremendous loyalty to his circle of colleagues from the War. One of whom edits and writes an advice column for a journal, and who received an alarming letter from the murder victim just before her death, a letter that may be a Giant Freaking Clue or an equally Giant Red Herring. And since the victim is very much Gown and the police are very much Town, the investigation could use someone like George, sometime academic, mild-mannered, unpretentious but trustworthy and obviously intelligent, to cut through the bulldung and figure out what happened.

Look, murder mysteries really aren't my thing. I always get a little depressed about how a person can be and usually is regarded as Only Interesting After She's Dead and only because someone Did A Bad Thing by killing her (or him). And yes, I know, a life only really takes shape when it's complete, i.e. over, and all that, but mostly I like watching lives in progress, decisions being made, actions taken or not taken, conversations had or suppressed, etc. There is plenty of this in a murder mystery, of course, but it's generally on the part of the detective, to whom the victim is usually a stranger; the detective is not, therefore, showing us the victim/stranger so much as leading us through a careful examination of the hole she has left and who might have wanted to make that hole happen. We're not really interested in the victim, but in the detective; the victim is just a means to the detective's end. See? Depressing. But lots of people like that stuff, and they're free to. It's just not usually for me.

But every once in a while, I like to take a look at a genre that I usually avoid, just to make sure that I'm avoiding it for good reasons and not just out of habit or of intellectual (or pretend anti-intellectual) posturing. And sometimes I do find that I've been unfair; witness my great enjoyment of Louis L'Amour's Sackett novels, "frontier tales" which, while not precisely westerns, are still more like westerns than most other kinds of stories, and thus are generally chucked into my mental "avoid" bin. I'm terribly, terribly glad I grew up to give those another chance.**

And so, A Murder of Quality, which basically seduced me into reading a straight up mystery novel, just out of love for its hero. Tsk tsk, Mr. le Carre. Now my guard is up, you!

That being said, there's still a lot to recommend this novel. As one could expect from a novel taking place largely at an upper-class school, there are a lot of moments in which the class-consciousness of certain elements of the community gets wickedly skewered. The best bits of these happen whenever a minor character, a teacher's wife named Shane, speaks, to wit:

"I'm never quite sure about funerals, are you? I have a suspicion that they are largely a lower-class recreation; cherry brandy and seed cake in the parlor."

And:

"Baptists are the people who don't like private pews, aren't they?"

Oh, is she ever quotable, is Mrs. Shane Hecht. And everything that comes out of her mouth will make you want to slap her.

Strangely enough, Shane is not the murder victim, or really anyone of any importance at all, except as a mouthpiece for the gentry, struggling to reassert their dominance over English life after the great social leveling of two world wars and not coming off well at all. No apologia for the ruling class, here (another quality, one might say, that this book shares a bit with Orwell's work, no?)! No, the murder victim is another teacher's wife, who comes off as a bit of a paragon of humility and independent thought for most of the novel, until [REDACTED] is discovered.

Through it all, Smiley is Smiley. Utterly forgettable, unprepossessing, mild, hard even to notice, but with a mind tuned by years of unglamorous spy work for uncovering secrets that makes him a perfect amateur detective. We only occasionally get a hint of what he's thinking, which I appreciate, not being a fan of the omni-omniscient narrator who knows all characters' thoughts anyway. Even when a nasty so-and-so like Shane teases him about his "unfortunate" marriage to a woman far above his social station (and who just happened to have grown up in the neighborhood of the Posh School in Question), he keeps his cool and just calmly lets her think she's gotten the better of him. She can sneer all she wants; in the end she has to keep being nasty old Shane Hecht (who, now that I think of it, reminds me rather a lot of Bingo from "Such, Such Were the Joys") and Smiley gets to keep being Smiley, knower of things he doesn't tell, friend of people of actual quality versus upper-crust Quality.

I know with whom I'd choose to pass an evening, at any rate.

*This is of course odd because Orwell/Blair was a little student many, many years before the period in which this novel is set, but those English Public Schools do have a sort of timeless quality to them, don't they? One would almost think it an effect for which they strive deliberately!

**I still avoid romance novels, though. Like the plague. Unless they're written by close and dear friends to whom I can't say no and find entertaining no matter what they're doing.