Orwell's Nose

August 1, 2016

The smells of people, places, and food permeate the writings of George Orwell (1984; Animal Farm, among others). In this unusual biography, Sutherland (English emeritus, Univ. Coll. London; How To Be Well Read) uses Orwell's obsession with smell as an approach to understanding the novelist's life (1903-50). He partially succeeds. A lengthy preface quickly establishes the irreverent tone of the book, with subsections titled "Orwell's Smell-Talent" and "The Sour Smell of Politics." The preface is ripe with rich examples from Orwell's novels and nonfiction (e.g., "The lower classes smell," his famous line from The Road to Wigan Pier), but Sutherland doesn't follow through when he delves into a concise standard biography. A more dominant theme emerges from those pages, that of Orwell's sexual predatory nature. Orwell was called a "sexual raider" by his friends, and he pursued any available woman he could find. Sutherland also writes extensively about the contradictions in Orwell's life, his fascination with hardship and farming, and his frequent cruelty toward family and loved ones. VERDICT While this is a compelling and lively book, it will give average readers a skewed introduction to Orwell. It will not replace the major biographies by Michael Shelden, Jeffrey Meyers, and Gordon Bowker, but will have some appeal to devotees of all things Orwell.--Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2016
A biography of George Orwell (1903-1950) based on his "obsessive relationship with smell."Having recently lost his sense of smell, Sutherland (Emeritus, English/Univ. College, London; A Little History of Literature, 2013, etc.) noticed that Orwell was hypersensitive to odors and loved the smell of farmyard animals and other "uplifting natural smells." Although Sutherland asserts that it is possible to trace "scent narratives" in Orwell's fiction, his "nasocriticism" rarely fulfills that project. Instead, Sutherland offers a brisk biographical overview, drawing in part from previous biographies that he admires: Bernard Crick's, authorized by Orwell's widow (1980), and later works by D.J. Taylor and Gordon Bowker, both published in 2003. Sutherland's Orwell is awkward, cynical, and generally unsympathetic. He was a bright student, winning a scholarship to a prestigious prep school, and then went on to Eton, where he met two influential and wealthy young men who helped him to get published; one "immensely and discretely" supported him as he lay dying of tuberculosis. Poverty was a consistent theme in Orwell's life and work. Sutherland does not dispute rumors that Orwell was a "flagellophile" who derived "a fetishized sexual thrill from the whip and being whipped," nor that he went to Burma ("the biggest brothel in the Empire") for sex; nor that he was attracted by "the androgynous beauty of the dominant Burmese race." As a young man, he botched his relationship with a girlfriend by nearly raping her as they walked through the countryside, a landscape that Orwell found "wildly aphrodisiac." When he finally married, in 1936, his mother told his new wife that she must be "a brave girl" to marry her son. The couple lived in an "uncomfortably primitive" house in a remote village, where they tried to farm. Sutherland offers three "smell narratives" as appendices, but, otherwise, few odors waft through the book. An unusual perspective illuminates a much written-about author.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 18, 2016
As the title suggests, this entertaining and scholarly, if somewhat eccentric, biography examines the life and works of George Orwell through the lens of his olfactory preoccupations. Sutherland (A Little History of Literature) lost his sense of smell in 2012, just as he was embarking on his research for this book. One can’t help but imagine that this sensory loss primed him to see scent writ bold wherever he looked, but the case he makes for taking this angle is largely convincing. What emerges is a rigorous, rollicking, and at times ribald portrait of the author, from his childhood “born into a class neurotic about sanitation” to the “lower-class smell” of his barracks as a British colonial policeman in Burma and his eventual marriage and purchase of “a grand building, still smelling of oats and horse piss.” The text is peppered with references to Orwell’s troubling sexual history, which includes one attempted rape; Sutherland suggests plausibly that the smell of parks and greenery triggered Orwell’s libido. The overall depiction is diligently researched and scrupulously evenhanded, with the two authors’ (perhaps) shared fixation providing a unique scaffolding for a fresh look at a luminary of English letters.