Down and Out in Paris and London

(Free with the Times)

I am an Orwell virgin. I've heard of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four but haven't got round to reading them as I thought, so close to the state am I, that I might find them depressing.

Down and Out in Paris and London is my first foray into Orwellian literature. Were it not free, I would not read this for a while either but reader, if you are an Orwell virgin, I highly recommend it!

His expose of poverty isn't as grimly depressing as this blog; the man does humour! The man does humour well!!

He regales us with descriptions of the people he meets in Paris, even the bugs are personified; as soldiers emigrating to other rooms. The life of a washer upper is no fun (having been one myself) but we get a look into the workings of hotels, the shere cacaphony of having to cook four or five separate meals for two hundred or so people in the space of two hours.The dirt, the hierarchies, the treacherous hours for such little money where sleep becomes the luxury beyond anything else and the bistro at weekends. As a reader, you're swept along with him, smiling as you go.

The feel and mood of London is altogether different. He comes back to look after an 'imbecile' but the job doesn't start for a month. We follow his journeys with 'tramps' and the vicious cycles they are caught in and the lodging houses that will only keep them for a night, so they are forced to keep moving. In Paris the homeless can kip on park benches, in London no. I wondered whether with the council auctioning off hostels to private developers, life for the homeless will return as it was in the 1930's. Hope not....

Their diet of 'tea and two slices', the coffee houses that will rob them if they're paying by meal ticket not cash, Orwell gives it all. He says these people are 'ordinary'. I know this, but I also know that today society still carries huge assumptions about the underbelly of society. That society still thinks these people are 'work shy', druggies, alcholics oh I don't know, I haven't read the Daily Mail for ages.

I really enjoyed this and not just for the short chapters which kept me bouncing along. It is still as topical today as it was then, as illuminating a look at today as it was then. My only gripe, if I'll allow myself a gripe, is that he makes assumptions about women but then in London he didn't really have any contact with them and didn't talk to the one female tramp he met on his road.

Orwell paints a vivid and comic picture of his experience. I'm ready to read Animal Farm on the back of this!

(OK, this is my first 'review'. I hope I haven't put you off a corker of a book. Better I do it though than not do it because well, I said I would didn't I?)