This he succeeds in doing very effectively here through his description of life as a plongeur or dishwasher at a couple of Paris restaurants. Even though times have changed (and I don’t live in Paris anyway), I shall certainly remember this book next time I eat out. You will too, if you read it, and we shall both consume nothing but bottled mineral water that day as a result.
If the dishwashing chapters don’t make you spew, the chapters on bedding down in the ‘casual wards’ (dosshouses) of London and Kent surely will.
So, dear reader, consider yourself warned. If, in spite of my words, you still go ahead and read this book, good for you. You should; I should have read it ages ago myself. Besides, you will love it, even if at times you find it hard to go on.
Stay the course! Don’t let yourself be put off by the utopian-socialist analyses of the lives and sufferings of tramps and plongeurs. Despite the lucidity and honesty of his writing, Orwell was a man who thought with his heart not his brain. The politics he espoused – his sturdy opposition to totalitarianism excepted – was nonsense. His one great insight was that Communist Russia was an evil, oppressive tyranny, not the workers’ Paradise his fellow Socialists in Britain thought it was. That isn’t relevant here, of course. But the batty socioeconomics interleaved among the pages of perceptive and courageous prose fiction or journalism is the price one pays for loving Orwell.
