Analysts of Orwell’s legacy are now so common that they can focus on finding the holes in each other’s works (Richard Bradford‘s “Orwell, A Man Of Our Time”, recently reviewed here, is one example). Solnit picks out in particular Orwell’s pleasure in gardening and growing, identifying this as an appreciation of beauty in commonplace life, and these sentiments as a key component of his more widely celebrated opposition to the ideological or totalitarian mindset. Solnit’s focus is diverse, making sweeping but softly-linked connections and themes, gently stated unlike the bombast she is identifying and resisting. The “Roses” of her title are a recurring example, for their inherent beauty, but also as image of non-uniform joy and of thinking from and valuing first hand experience. The case she makes is persuasive, both as to Orwell himself and in wider contexts; her thoughtful and historical description of aspects of climate change, for example, has made me think anew of this contemporary issue. Similarly, this book’s wide sweep of interest leads one to want to learn more of the many figures and occurrences covered. E.g the fascinating Tina Modotti in section III - her energy, her work, her motives, her overlapping associations in the revolutionary ferment of interwar Mexico City with Rivera, the Spanish Civil War, and the Russian NKVD in its brutal ideological gangsterism. ( )

I tweeted* the other day that sometimes reading is sheer bliss, and linked to my Sensational Snippets from Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses. It's been a while since I interrupted The Spouse's to read an excerpt from a book, but I'll start this review by quoting the most recent, from Solnit's chapter about visiting a rose factory in Colombia:

The workers have a slogan, "The lovers get the roses, but we workers get the thorns." A rose is beautiful, but a greenhouse with thousands upon thousands of roses, a place producing millions per year, with stems and leaves and petals all strewn on the floor and heaped together in bins as byproduct, was not. Insofar as these roses were beautiful, their beauty was meant to occur somewhere else, for someone else, a continent away. Some of them were grown in paper bags to protect the petals from light, and we saw a row of rosebushes whose stems culminated in brown sacks, like divas backstage with their hair in curlers. (p.202, underlining mine.)

Isn't that just brilliant? Solnit's book about Orwell (and other things) is full of striking turns of phrases like that. Quite apart from the originality of her ideas and her passionate commitment to important values, it makes for intense pleasure in the reading.

It's an unconventional biography. That chapter about the industrialisation and corporatisation of floristry is relevant to a book about Orwell and his writing because Orwell, from the time he penned The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937, was hyper-alert to the ugliness that lay behind Britain's prosperity, international status, military power and its empire. In a biography that disposes of the dour prophet of doom and introduces Orwell as a man who loved beauty and the joys of the garden, Solnit shows how we in the 21st century are just as oblivious to the ugliness behind much of our comfortable lives, just as Britons were oblivious to the human and environmental costs of producing coal. (Reviewer Gaby Hinsliff at The Guardian took exception to this chapter, but I thought it was wonderful.)

It is, however, indicative of Solnit's discursive style. If, like me, you have a mind like a butterfly, flitting from one loosely related topic to another, with ideas fertilised apparently at random, you will love it. I enjoyed reading chapters which seemed to have nothing to do with anything and then finding that — apart from being interesting in their own right — actually they illuminated some aspect of Orwell's life and writing in ways I hadn't thought of before.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/08/26/orwells-roses-2021-by-rebecca-solnit/ ( )

I like Solnit and her thinking & writing, so I had a built-in expectation that this book would be worthwhile, but I liked it a whole lot and learned much from it. Well worth reading from many perspectives. ( )

It's somehow comforting to discover that George Orwell loved roses. This man, with one of the bleakest perspectives on his times and the future, found solace in that most elemental of human activities, cultivating a garden, the solution preferred by another philosopher in another turbulent age.

In April, 1936, Orwell moved to a small rented cottage in Wallington, one with a tin roof, lacking gas, electricity, and indoor toilet. While fairly standard rural living for the times, it was not exactly easy living. He immediately planted a garden, one focussed mainly on food, but he also planted roses; not an obvious choice given the circumstances. Later there would be goats.

Orwell left for Spain and its Civil Was at the end of that year, but he would return to the cottage and its garden, saying in 1940 Outside my work, the thing I care about most is gardening... In 2009, the [George Orwell Diaries] were published, filled with accounts of this domestic life.

Solnit suggests this was a way of remaining grounded, focussed.

Pursuits like that can bring you back to Earth from the ether and the abstractions. They could be imagined as the opposite of writing.
...
A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It's vivid to all the senses, it's a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect.

Gardens are full of life and death, but also of hope. This is the influence on Orwell and his writings Solnit examines in these essays.

At first they seem to meander, but then suddenly they return to the subject, and everything falls into place. How else does Ralph Lauren's 1980s insistence on chintz and roses morph into a discussion of the imperial passion for importing the products of empire, and then connect to Jamaica Kincaid and her visceral reaction to the colonisation of her Antigua home? Solnit suggests The Road to Wigan Pier] provides the parallel and the answer, with Orwell saying You have got to choose between liberating India and having extra sugar. Which do you prefer?

Another essay. "In the Rose Factory", quotes Orwell on coal, saying It is only very rarely, when I make a great mental effort, that I connect this coal with the far-off labor in the mines. Solnit visited an actual rose factory in Bogata, describing the process of growing roses for the floral industry, and the condition under which the female workers work, ending with ...it was even more rarely that anyone connected the roses to the invisible toil in these greenhouses. They were the invisible factories of visual pleasure.

Orwell's Roses is not by any means a standard biography. Rather, it is an exploration and a meditation on the writer, his works, and how he is viewed today. Solnit certainly knows her subject and his writing. Her thoughts often provide a different way of viewing them; ideas that definitely inspire another look at Orwell.

As for those roses he planted, they were still there at the cottage when Solnit visited in 2016.

Solnit never writes anything that is not interesting. I never expected to learn how important gardens were to Orwell, or all the stories about his life and beliefs that are in this book. ( )