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“Sentimental” is a peculiar insult, used by both Left and Right. “Bourgeois sentimentality” was a popular expression with Communists: Lenin, apparently, used it to describe A Christmas Carol. Stalinists sometimes labelled their enemies as “sentimental” when they objected to Stalin’s atrocities. But “sentimental” is also often used in the endless arguments about the running of the British countryside, usually to describe people who object to pollution and cruelty to animals. In both cases, the implication is the same: you are too soft and unmanly to understand this, so shut up and stand aside, so we can do what we want.
George Orwell was not soft, especially to himself, but he did have a sentimental streak. He once observed that a love of nature and useless trivia was a healthy thing. In 1984, he even suggested that that sentimentality had helped to keep the proles human, where the Party had become “hard inside”. Unsurprisingly, he was a keen gardener and nature-enthusiast. So, it’s interesting to see that Rebecca Solnit has written a book about Orwell and nature – more specifically, about the roses he grew.
The main problem is that this book is less about Orwell’s rural writing and more about what Orwell’s roses make the author think about. At points, Solnit comes across as a bit of a “type”: as if the Guardian newspaper had become self-aware and written a book. That said, it’s striking how alike her own preoccupations and Orwell’s actually are, even though they might express them differently.
Part of the problem is that Orwell is such a vague writer (how many positive suggestions did he actually make? Not many). One chapter, “Enclosures”, supports a comment Orwell made in “Inside the Whale”, to the effect that a person who has to till the land will not feel sentimental about it. However, Orwell says exactly the opposite in the later, better essay “Some Thoughts On The Common Toad”, where he points to medieval and Chinese art to suggest that people who worked the land had a poetic affection for it. This isn’t to suggest that Solnit is slipshod or dishonest, just that her target is hard to pin down.
Some of the digressions are very interesting: the parts about the cultivation of roses and fraudulent science in the Soviet Union are eye-opening. But at points the book really meanders: a chapter about a writer from Antigua who disliked daffodils because they reminded her of colonialism, for instance, or an overlong description of some pieces of slate that the author found on a country walk. At one point, Solnit catches a plane. In the airport, she buys some Jaffa cakes (a sort of sponge biscuit), which reminds her of an article she wrote about Jaffa in the Middle East, where the Palestinians… It’s just too rambling.
That said, the stuff that’s on-target is very good. There’s a discussion of Orwell’s final years that says some very astute things about 1984, and sees it as more than just a set of miserable warnings: Orwell’s love of nature, and perhaps a sense of optimism, comes through even there.
Personally, I would have liked to see more about Orwell in the tradition of rural writing. There is a line of English rural Leftism (or perhaps Anarchism) that can be traced through William Morris, back to the Levellers and Diggers, and maybe even to the medieval peasant risings, in which the countryside is respected without being a source of snobbery or inherited wealth. What would Orwell have made of, say, the HS2 railway project? Maybe I was hoping for the wrong thing. Ultimately, this book is well-written and often engrossing, but it was too much the author’s “personal journey” for my tastes.
