RACED through George Orwell's Homage To Catalonia - the most interesting book I have read for a long time.
For those who do not know, it tells of Orwell's time fighting for the revolutionary communists in the Spanish Civil War.
He survived, despite being shot in the throat, and also survived a purge of his 'Trotskyist' comrades and their anarchist allies by pro-Stalin communists.
The book is exciting, fascinating, moving and shocking in equal doses.
The biggest surprise is not that it sold so few copies on publication in 1938 - its anti-Moscow line was unpopular among those opposed to Franco's fascists - but that despite all he saw Orwell seems to have still believed the Left would win the war.
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| Brilliant |
Oh, I forgot to mention it also has lots of humour.
Here is Orwell describing how his accommodation was searched while he was not there but his wife was:
The police conducted the search in the recognized Ogpu or Gestapo style. In the small hours of the morning there was a pounding on the door, and six men marched in, switched on the light, and immediately took up various positions about the room, obviously agreed upon beforehand. They then searched both rooms (there was a bathroom attached) with inconceivable thoroughness. They sounded the walls, took up the mats, examined the floor, felt the curtains, probed under the bath and the radiator, emptied every drawer and suitcase and felt every garment and held it up to the light. They impounded all papers, including the contents of the waste-paper basket, and all our books into the bargain. They were thrown into ecstasies of suspicion by finding that we possessed a French translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. If that had been the only book they found our doom would have been sealed. It is obvious that a person who reads Mein Kampf must be a Fascist. The next moment, however, they came upon a copy of Stalin’s pamphlet. Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and other Double Dealers, which reassured them somewhat. In one drawer there was a number of packets of cigarette papers. They picked each packet to pieces and examined each paper separately, in case there should be messages written on them. Altogether they were on the job for nearly two hours. Yet all this time they never searched the bed. My wife was lying in bed all the while; obviously there might have been half a dozen sub-machine-guns under the mattress, not to mention a library of Trotskyist documents under the pillow. Yet the detectives made no move to touch the bed, never even looked underneath it. I cannot believe that this is a regular feature of the Ogpu routine. One must remember that the police were almost entirely under Communist control, and these men were probably Communist Party members themselves. But they were also Spaniards, and to turn a woman out of bed was a little too much for them. This part of the job was silently dropped, making the whole search meaningless.
