This was an Orwell book I'd never heard of until recently when I watched the 1990's movie based on it called <i>A Merry War</i> starring Richard E. Grant and Helena Bonham Carter. The movie is very close to the book. To start with I didn't even know what an aspidistra was. It sounds kind of futuristic like Orwell's better known books, but it's just a houseplant, and a very common, very respectable, very hardy one at that, such that it becomes a symbol of middle class respectability in the story.
I found Gordon Comstock, the hero (or shall we say, anti-hero) quite tiresome, but enjoyed the book nonetheless. Somehow he was a lot less tiresome when R.E. Grant was playing him onscreen. Anyway, he's a copywriter for an ad agency with literary aspirations who manages to get a small collection of poetry published. Buoyed up by this small success, he decides to quit his day job and become a full time writer. Since he can't support himself writing, he has to take another day job as a clerk at a bookseller's that pays less than the old one. Why not just keep the copywriting job since he has to have a job anyway? Because he has declared a one-man war on money and wants to be as independent of it as possible. So he wants a job, but it has to be a dead-end job. Meanwhile he finds that having less money actually leads to his becoming more preoccupied with money than before, and he does less writing than before. Money becomes an obsession. He hates it, the people who have it, and the things he can't do for lack of it more and more. Finally, he is forced out of this vicious circle when he gets his (very patient) girlfriend Rosemary pregnant and has to solve some real life problems.
It's a very entertaining story about growing up and facing the real world. The title alludes to how middle class respectability wins out in the end as Gordon and Rosemary start their married life together with their own aspidistra in the window.
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