George Orwell- A Clergyman's Daughter

I've been away from book blogging, instead lying in a hospital bed bored out of my mind. But enough of that, here's a new look at an old book;

A Clergyman's Daughter

Penguin Modern Classics

George Orwell

1935

Other Orwell Reviews- Burmese Days - A Clergyman's Daughter - Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

"But after all there must be SOME meaning, SOME purpose in it all! The world cannot be an accident. Everything that happens must have a cause--ultimately, therefore, a purpose. Since you exist, God must have created you, and since He created you a conscious being, He must be conscious. The greater doesn't come out of the less. He created you, and He will kill you, for His own purpose. But that purpose is inscrutable. It is in the nature of things that you can never discover it, and perhaps even if you did discover it you would be averse to it. Your life and death, it may be, are a single note in the eternal orchestra that plays for His diversion. And suppose you don't like the tune?"

Like most fans of Orwell, I began my exploration of his work about five or six years ago with his two most famous pieces, and two of the most important and influential novels to ever have been written, in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. I was immediately blown away with how much mesmerizing enjoyment I got from reading them, and through the realization of just how much those books had effected so many other things I'd both read and seen in popular culture and its analysis. Regardless of what you might think of theories of Big Brother and our future, Orwell infiltrated how people look at modern day society. Hungry for more of his work I read through most of his earlier work, and it became clear that these books were leading up to his future legacy, talking about similar topics of society in similar ways, crafting and presenting his ideas through personal experience, carefully written non-fictional essays like Down and Out in Paris and London, and through the almost black-humoured attack on society of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. It took me a while to find a copy of A Clergyman's Daughter, only his second work of fiction (after Burmese Days, which I still haven't read), and I wasn't sure what to expect from this novel that Orwell himself had later disowned as something he wasn't at all happy with.

Orwell, looking homeless.

A Clergyman's Daughter, despite having a title that makes it sound like a bottom-rate slice of romantic fiction written for frustrated forty-year-old housewives, fits into the developing pantheon of Orwellian fiction with the same style and prominence of every other entrant in his bibliography. Although it's all fiction, Orwell uses his personal experience to address around three particular social topics that together combine into the same sort of overall (mostly damning) study of 1940's English society as do his other earlier, more realistically set novels. The story revolves around the adventures and misfortunes of Dorothy Hare, daughter of a Parish rector in a small countryside town, following a brief period of turbulence in her life in a manner reminiscent to me of an abridged Dickens book. The opening (and closing) chapters bring into focus one of Orwell's key themes; the helpless plight of women like Dorothy who have no real freedom or power of their own and seem destined to live a hard, uninteresting life stripped of potential for the sake of a form of personal sacrifice bordering on slavery. Dorothy's life changes quickly when a quick series of events leave her stranded and homeless on the streets of London, temporarily stripped of her memory.

This address of the issue of poverty and homelessness isn't without some power, and the reader is definitely made to feel for Dorothy, but it's just not as interesting as the non-fiction of Down and Out in Paris and London, and for me was the weakest segment of the book. Things become far more interesting when Orwell has his lead catch a break, getting a job as a teacher in a small private school, which exists as an opportunity for Orwell to direct a tirade of stinging criticism at the school system, ripping it apart with his trademark direct arguing and very personal narration. For me this was the most interesting portion of the book. I don't wish to spoil much more of the plot (because this book is so new and all), but things eventually come full circle and we're given an ambiguous ending.

This book isn't one of Orwell's best by any means, instead languishing in the lower reaches of the quality of his bibliography. But then this is George Orwell, and his worst literature is still going to be far more interesting and thought-provoking than 99% of anything else anybody writes, so that's not really a criticism per se. As a result, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone looking for their first taste of Orwell because clearly Nineteen Eighty-Four is essential, but this is certainly going to appeal to anyone who's enjoyed some of his other works.