The story follows George Bowling, a 45-year-old husband, father, and insurance salesman, who foresees World War II and attempts to recapture idyllic childhood innocence and escape his dreary life by returning to Lower Binfield, his birthplace.

The novel is comical and pessimistic, with its views that speculative builders, commercialism, and capitalism are killing the best of rural England, and that his country is facing the sinister appearance of new, external national threats.

His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was a civil servant in British India, and he lived a genteel life with his mother and two sisters, though spending much of the year at boarding school at Eastbourne and later at Eton in Britain.

The novelist L. H. Myers anonymously gave £300 to enable this and Orwell went with his wife to North Africa where he stayed, in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh, from September 1938 to March 1939.

)[3] Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air while he was in North Africa[4] and left the manuscript at his agent's office within a few hours of arriving back in England on 30 March 1939.

The book's themes are nostalgia, the folly of trying to go back and recapture past glories, and the easy way the dreams and aspirations of one's youth can be smothered by the humdrum routine of work, marriage, and getting old.

It is written in the first person, with George Bowling, the forty-five-year-old protagonist, who reveals his life and experiences while undertaking a trip back to his boyhood home as an adult.

Along with 'some sound in the traffic or the smell of horse dung or something,' these thoughts trigger Bowling's memory of his childhood as the son of an unambitious seed merchant in "Lower Binfield" near the River Thames.

Bowling relates his life history, dwelling on how a lucky break during the First World War landed him a comfortable job away from any action and provided contacts that helped him become a successful salesman.

The concept of "you can't go home again" hangs heavily over Bowling's journey as he realizes that many of his old haunts are gone or considerably changed from his younger years.

As with other writers he had read while at St Cyprian's Prep school, – Kipling, Wodehouse, Swift, Shaw, Thackeray – his loyalty was virtually unwavering.

He and Connolly would leave the school grounds and set out across the Downs to Beachy Head, or far along the plunging leafy roads that led deep into the Sussex countryside, to villages that might have figured in a Wells novel: Eastdean and Westdean and Jevington.

This was the plain, decent, bread-and-sunlit world that Orwell recalled so nostalgically the further it retreated from him; eventually he would write [a] Wellsian [novel of this kind], in Coming Up For Air.

In its central movement, Coming Up For Air is an unembarrassedly affirmative recovery of early-century innocence:boyhood, family life and country rambling in the town of Lower Binfield.

He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman, and the book is at its best when Orwell is 'out-of-character', speaking in a voice which is recognisably his rather than an imitation of 'Fatty' Bowling's.