Book Review/Heather Seggel

Bread Is Not Enough

“In the spring of 1936 a writer planted roses.” So begins “Orwell’s Roses,” (Viking) Rebecca Solnit’s newest work. It’s a biographical study of George Orwell, or wait, not really, more of a book about roses, except also about war and colonialism, only not just those, also pleasure and beauty and politics. And art. And roses. It is true to the author’s habit of finding connections between things as diverse as one can imagine, but this reader struggled at times to follow each string to its anchoring pushpin.

Solnit describes seeing the titular roses, ones the author planted near his home that survive to this day, and then describes several scenes from Orwell’s life, which was cut short by illness but fairly packed with major events and noteworthy historical moments. These are interspersed with analysis of some of his essays and fiction, reflections on how Orwell’s real-life passion for gardening and nature appear in his work, and … a whole bunch of other stuff. She travels to Colombia and visits a rose factory of sorts, where cruel labor practices are papered over with peppy sloganeering and the flowers are exported to the US market. There are discussions of Stalin (who tried to force lemons to grow in a freezing climate), and the author Jamaica Kincaid, who writes with beautiful ferocity about colonialism, sometimes through stories about her own garden. And there’s a reflection on Orwell’s “1984” that argues the book is less bleak than one might think.

It’s engaging reading when taken in small bites, and seems to be a conscious design choice: Seven sections contain 27 short chapters. It’s possible to read each segment with a light touch, and then simply rejoin the text and take what comes next at face value. But trying to connect them did not come to me naturally, even when I had time to dig into multiple longer passages at one sitting.

Part of the difficulty I had may be due to the unfortunately tiny print in the copy I was reading; as my eyesight declines and I prepare to step away from reviewing books, it has been hard not to notice that reading can be energizing or fatiguing. I’m a fan of Solnit’s work, and her way of looking at the world has definitely informed my own perceptions, but reading this demanded a fair bit of persistence. Many of the links between one topic and another did not immediately register or make sense to me. After diving into the book eagerly, things quickly became bogged down. I then read the back cover copy, which describes many obvious connections I failed to see, and felt like an utter dunce. But there was also a nagging sense that some of those connections were themselves a bit forced.

Setting that issue aside, when the work is focused on Orwell and his life and work this is a terrific biographical introduction to a tender side of the author. Seeing how his wartime experience and time spent in coal mines (for research) appear in his writing, alongside lush descriptions that reference virtually every place he lived, loved, and tended, is illuminating. And Solnit’s various wanderings through some of those landscapes are beautifully reported.

There’s a discussion of the labor movement anthem, “Bread and Roses,” that makes a succinct argument for the connection of work, politics, and pleasure, and the need for the latter to be taken seriously and not dismissed as frivolous. Solnit quotes an earlier protest song that states point-blank, “We want to smell the flowers!” Those exact pauses that look the least like work sometimes enable the creative mind’s best efforts. And sometimes they’re as simple as enjoying a pleasant smell with the zen-like pure attention of a dog.

“Orwell’s Roses” did not fire me up the way Solnit’s work ordinarily does, but it’s not the fault of her approach or writing; I’m just tired and frankly ready to read for pleasure and not as unending, impoverishing labor. My biggest takeaway as someone who has not read Orwell beyond an essay or two is a desire to read more of his work. (How did I get stuck reading “Brave New World” multiple times in high school but never “1984”? In hindsight that seems wrong.) And when I do take on his essays and novels it’s nice to know I’ll go in attuned more to the author’s attention to pleasure than I would have otherwise. That counts as a win.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2021

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