# Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Comstock is \'obsessed\' by what he sees as a pervasion of money (the \'Money God\', as he calls it) behind social relationships, feeling sure that women would find him more attractive if he were better off. At the beginning of the novel, he senses that his girlfriend Rosemary Waterlow, whom he met at New Albion and who continues to work there, is dissatisfied with him because of his poverty. An example of his financial embarrassment is when he is desperate for a pint of beer at his local pub, but has run out of pocket money and is ashamed to cadge a drink off his fellow lodger, Flaxman.
One of Comstock\'s last remaining friends, Philip Ravelston, a Marxist who publishes a magazine called *Anti-Christ*, agrees with Comstock in principle, but is comfortably well-off himself and this causes strains when the practical miseries of Comstock\'s life become apparent. He does, however, endeavour to publish some of Comstock\'s work and his efforts, unbeknownst to Comstock, had resulted in *Mice* being published via one of his publisher contacts.


# Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Gordon and Rosemary have little time together---she works late and lives in a hostel, and his \'bitch of a landlady\' forbids female visitors to her tenants. Then one evening, having headed southward and having been thinking about women---*this women business* in general, and Rosemary in particular---he happens to see Rosemary in a street market. Rosemary won\'t have sex with him but she wants to spend a Sunday with him, right out in the country, near Burnham Beeches. At their parting, as he takes the tram from Tottenham Court Road back to his bedsit, he is happy and feels that somehow it is agreed between them that Rosemary is going to be his mistress. However, what was intended as a pleasant day out away from London\'s grime turns into a disaster when, though hungry, they opt to pass by a \'rather low-looking\' pub, and then, not able to find another pub, are forced to eat an unappetising lunch at a fancy, overpriced hotel. Gordon has to pay the bill with all the money he had set aside for their jaunt and worries about having to borrow money from Rosemary. Out in the countryside again, they are about to have sex for the first time when she violently pushes him back---he wasn\'t going to use contraception. He rails at her; \"Money again, you see! \... You say you \'can\'t\' have a baby. \... You mean you daren\'t; because you\'d lose your job and I\'ve got no money and all of us would starve.\"


# Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Having sent a poem to an American publication, Gordon suddenly receives from them a cheque worth ten pounds---a considerable sum for him at the time. He intends to set aside half for his sister Julia, who has always been there to lend him money and support. He treats Rosemary and Ravelston to dinner, which begins well, but the evening deteriorates as it proceeds. Gordon, drunk, tries to force himself upon Rosemary but she angrily rebukes him and leaves. Gordon continues drinking, drags Ravelston with him to visit a pair of prostitutes, and ends up broke and in a police cell the next morning. He is guilt-ridden over the thought of being unable to pay his sister back the money he owes her, because his £5 note is gone, given to, or stolen by, one of the prostitutes.
Ravelston pays Gordon\'s fine after a brief appearance before the magistrate, but a reporter hears about the case, and writes about it in the local paper. The ensuing publicity results in Gordon losing his job at the bookshop, and, consequently, his relatively \'comfortable\' lifestyle. As Gordon searches for another job, his life deteriorates, and his poetry stagnates. After living with his friend Ravelston, Gordon ends up working, this time in Lambeth, at another book shop and cheap two-penny lending library owned by the sinister Mr. Cheeseman, where he\'s paid an even smaller wage of 30 shillings a week. This is 10 shillings less than he was earning before, but Gordon is satisfied; \"The job would do. There was no *trouble* about a job like this; no room for ambition, no effort, no hope.\" Determined to sink to the lowest level of society Gordon takes a furnished bed-sitting-room in a filthy alley parallel to Lambeth Cut. Both Julia and Rosemary, \"in feminine league against him,\" seek to get Gordon to go back to his \'good\' job at the New Albion advertising agency.


# Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Rosemary, having avoided Gordon for some time, suddenly comes to visit him one day at his dismal lodgings. Despite his terrible poverty and shabbiness, they have sex but it is without any emotion or passion. Later, Rosemary drops in one day unexpectedly at the library, having not been in touch with Gordon for some time, and tells him that she is pregnant. Gordon is presented with the choice between leaving Rosemary to a life of social shame at the hands of her family---since both of them reject the idea of an abortion---or marrying her and returning to a life of respectability by taking back the job he once so deplored at the New Albion with its £4 weekly salary.
He chooses Rosemary and respectability and then experiences a feeling of relief at having abandoned his anti-money principles with such comparative ease. After two years of abject failure and poverty, he throws his poetic work \'London Pleasures\' down a drain, marries Rosemary, resumes his advertising career, and plunges into a campaign to promote a new product to prevent foot odour. In his lonely walks around mean streets, aspidistras seem to appear in every lower-middle class window. As the book closes, Gordon wins an argument with Rosemary to install an aspidistra in their new small but comfortable flat off the Edgware Road.


# Keep the Aspidistra Flying
- Gordon Comstock -- a \"well-educated and reasonably intelligent\" young man possessed of a minor \'talent for writing\'.
- Rosemary Waterlow -- Comstock\'s girlfriend, whom he met at the advertising agency, who lives in a women\'s hostel and who has a forgiving nature, but about whom little else is revealed.
- Philip Ravelston -- the wealthy left-wing publisher and editor of the magazine *Antichrist* who supports and encourages Comstock.
- Julia Comstock -- Gordon\'s sister, who is as poor as he is and who, having always made sacrifices for him, continues to do so: \"A tall, ungainly girl -- her nature was simple and affectionate.\"
- Mrs. Wisbeach -- landlady of the lodging house in Willowbed Road who imposes strict rules on her tenants, including Comstock.
- Mr Flaxman -- Comstock\'s fellow lodger, a travelling salesman for the Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. who is temporarily separated from his wife.
- Mr McKechnie -- the lazy, white-haired and white-bearded, teetotal and snuff-taking Scot who owns the first bookshop.
- Mr Cheeseman -- the sinister and suspicious owner of the second bookshop.
- Mr Erskine -- a large, slow-moving man with a broad, healthy, expressionless face who is the managing director of the advertising agency, the New Albion Publicity Company, and promotes Gordon to a position as a copywriter.


# Keep the Aspidistra Flying
No need to repeat the blasphemous comments which everyone who had known Gran\'pa Comstock made on that last sentence. But it is worth pointing out that the chunk of granite on which it was inscribed weighed close on five tons and was quite certainly put there with the intention, though not the conscious intention, of making sure that Gran\'pa Comstock shouldn\'t get up from underneath it. If you want to know what a dead man\'s relatives really think of him, a good rough test is the weight of his tombstone.

:   : Gordon and his friends had quite an exciting time with their \'subversive ideas\'. For a whole year they ran an unofficial monthly paper called the Bolshevik, duplicated with jellygraph. It advocated Socialism, free love, the dismemberment of the British Empire, the abolition of the Army and Navy, and so on and so forth. It was great fun. Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.

Gordon put his hand against the swing door. He even pushed it open a few inches. The warm fog of smoke and beer slipped through the crack. A familiar, reviving smell; nevertheless as he smelled it his nerve failed him. No! Impossible to go in. He turned away. He couldn\'t go shoving into that saloon bar with only fourpence halfpenny in his pocket. Never let other people buy your drinks for you! The first commandment of the moneyless. He made off down the dark pavement.

:   : Hermione always yawned at the mention of Socialism, and refused even to read Antichrist. \'Don\'t talk to me about the lower classes,\' she used to say. \'I hate them. They smell.\' And Ravelston adored her.

This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can\'t cut it right out, or at least be like the animals---minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the hen\'s backs without so much as a with your leave or by your leave. And no sooner is it over than the whole subject is out of his mind. He hardly even notices his hens any longer; he ignores them, or simply pecks them if they come too near his food.

:   : Before, he had fought against the money code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself---to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground. He liked to think of the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes\... He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal \... It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself forever.


# Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Cyril Connolly wrote two reviews at the time of the novel\'s publication. In the *Daily Telegraph* he described it as a \"savage and bitter book\", and wrote that \"the truths which the author propounds are so disagreeable that one ends by dreading their mention.\" In the *New Statesman* he wrote that it gave \"a harrowing and stark account of poverty\", and referred to its \"clear and violent language, at times making the reader feel he is in a dentist\'s chair with the drill whirring\".
For an edition of the BBC Television show *Omnibus*, (*The Road to the Left*, broadcast 10 January 1971), Melvyn Bragg interviewed Norman Mailer. Bragg said he \"just assumed Mailer had read Orwell. In fact he\'s mad on him.\" Of *Keep the Aspidistra Flying* Mailer said : \"It is perfect from the first page to the last.\"
Orwell wrote in a letter to George Woodcock dated 28 September 1946 that *Keep the Aspidistra Flying* was one of the two or three of his books that he was ashamed of because it \"was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn\'t to have published it, but I was desperate for money. At that time I simply hadn\'t a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so.\" Like *A Clergyman\'s Daughter*, Orwell did not want the book reprinted during his lifetime. Orwell\'s biographer Jeffrey Meyers found the novel flawed by weaknesses in plot, style and characterisation, but praised \"a poignant and moving quality that comes from Orwell\'s perceptive portrayal of the alienation and loneliness of poverty, and from Rosemary\'s tender response to Gordon\'s mean misery\". The novel has won other admirers besides Mailer, notably Lionel Trilling, who called it \"a *summa* of all the criticisms of a commercial civilization that have ever been made\".


# Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Tosco Fyvel, literary editor of *Tribune* from 1945 to 1949, and a friend and colleague of Orwell\'s during the last ten years of Orwell\'s life, found it interesting that \"through Gordon Comstock Orwell expressed violent dislike of London\'s crowded life and mass advertising---a foretaste here of *Nineteen Eighty-Four*. Orwell has Gordon reacting to a poster saying *Corner Table Enjoys His Meal With Bovex* in a manner already suggesting that of the later novel:
\"Gordon examined the thing with the intimacy of hatred.... Corner Table grins at you, seemingly optimistic, with a flash of false teeth. But what is behind the grin? Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of doom. ---For can you not see --- Behind that slick self-satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there\'s nothing but a frightful emptiness, a secret despair? And the reverberations of future wars.\"
Catherine Blount pointed also to the theme of a London couple needing to go into the countryside in order to find a private place to have sex, which has a significant place in the plot of \"Aspidistra\" and which is taken up prominently in \"Nineteen Eighty-Four\". Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor said of Comstock, \"Like Dorothy in *A Clergyman's Daughter* and like Winston Smith in *Nineteen Eighty-Four*, he rebels against the system and is ultimately swallowed up by it \... Like Winston Smith, he rebels, the rebellion fails, and he has to reach an accommodation with a world he'd previously disparaged\".
A film adaptation of the same name was released in 1997. It, was directed by Robert Bierman, and stars Richard E. Grant and Helena Bonham Carter. The film was released in North America and New Zealand under the alternative title of *A Merry War*.


# Thinks ...
***Thinks \...*** is a 2001 novel by British author David Lodge. The novel concerns the extramarital affairs between faculty members at a fictional British university.
Helen Reed, an English novelist in her early forties, arrives at the University of Gloucester to spend the term there as \"writer-in-residence\" and to teach a creative writing class. Still grieving over the death of her beloved husband, Helen thinks a change of scenery might be a good idea to get over her loss. Apart from the English Department, she is intrigued by the department of Cognitive Science and by its head, 50-year-old Ralph Messenger, to whom she is introduced at a social function very soon during her stay. Helen feels curiously attracted by Messenger but she soon learns about his reputation as a womaniser.
When a student submits some chapters from the novel she is writing, Helen recognises one of the male characters as having been modelled on her late husband Martin. Gradually it dawns upon Helen that her husband must have had a succession of young lovers, with everyone except herself knowing everything. During a fundraising event, Carrie tells Helen she knows about her husband\'s flings and, by taking a lover herself, tries to get back at him. Ralph Messenger, she is quite sure, does not know anything about her affair. Helen decides to get on with her life and allows herself to be drawn into an affair with Messenger. Soon, Helen ponders whether she is falling in love with him.
When he is waiting for Helen in her maisonette, Messenger cannot resist the temptation to turn on her laptop and read parts of her journal. This is how he learns about his wife\'s infidelity. When Helen enters her apartment, his jealousy gets the better of him so that he cannot hide the fact that he has invaded her privacy.


# Thinks ...
Ralph Messenger undergoes surgery, after which he loses his reputation as a woman-chaser. In 1999, he publishes a new book entitled *Machine Living* and in due course is awarded a CBE. He never confronts Carrie with her affair and remains married to her. Helen Reed returns to London and resumes writing. In the following year she publishes *Crying is a Puzzler*, a novel about life on campus quite similar to that of the University of Gloucester.
*The Guardian* gave a neutral review, noting the similarities between *Thinks\...* and Lodge\'s other \"campus novels,\" as well as Lodge\'s use of his characters as philosophical mouthpieces. Literary website *Bookish Thoughts* called *Thinks\...* \"a thought experiment on the nature of consciousness\" even as it cautioned readers about extensive and explicit discussions of sex.
- Secker & Warburg, 2001,
- Penguin Books, 2002, (United States).
- Penguin Books Ltd, 2005, (United Kingdom).


# Coming Up for Air
***Coming Up for Air*** is the seventh book by English writer George Orwell, published in June 1939 by Victor Gollancz. It was written between 1938 and 1939 while Orwell spent time recuperating from illness in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh. He delivered the completed manuscript to Victor Gollancz upon his return to London in March 1939. 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 (a) speculative builders, commercialism, and capitalism are killing the best of rural England, and (b) his country is facing the sinister appearance of new, external national threats.
As a child, Orwell lived at Shiplake and Henley in the Thames Valley. 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. He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family.
In 1937 Orwell spent some months fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was wounded in the throat in May 1937, by a Fascist sniper at Huesca.


# Coming Up for Air
Orwell was severely ill in 1938 and was advised to spend the winter in a warm climate. 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. (Orwell never learned the source of the money and he accepted it only on condition that it be considered a loan. He repaid the loan, eight years later, when he began making money from the success of *Animal Farm*.) Orwell wrote *Coming Up for Air* while he was in North Africa and left the manuscript at his agent\'s office within a few hours of arriving back in England on March 30, 1939. It was submitted to Victor Gollancz, who had an option on Orwell\'s next three novels, in spite of the \'cold treatment which Orwell had been given when *Homage to Catalonia* was rejected.\' In fact Orwell heard in April 1939 that Gollancz had reservations about the book, and was delaying a decision to accept it. The descriptions in the novel of a character who lectures at a meeting of Gollancz\'s Left Book Club, and of the meeting itself, were such that Gollancz \'could not have helped being offended by them.\' Nevertheless, the publisher did bring out the novel without demanding major changes and it was published on June 12, 1939. It was the last Orwell novel to bear the Gollancz imprint.
The themes of the book 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.


# Coming Up for Air
At the opening of the book, Bowling has a day off work to go to London to collect a new set of false teeth. A news-poster about the contemporary King Zog of Albania sets off thoughts of a biblical character Og, King of Bashan that he recalls from Sunday church as a child. 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 in a comfortable job away from any action and provided contacts that helped him become a successful salesman.
Bowling is wondering what to do with a modest sum of money that he has won on a horserace and which he has concealed from his wife and family. Much later (part III) he and his wife attend a Left Book Club meeting where he is horrified by the hate shown by the anti-fascist speaker, and bemused by the Marxist ramblings of the communists who have attended the meeting. Fed up with this, he seeks his friend Old Porteous, the retired schoolmaster. He usually enjoys Porteous\' company, but on this occasion his dry dead classics makes Bowling even more depressed.


# Coming Up for Air
Bowling decides to use the money on a \'trip down memory lane\', to revisit the places of his childhood. He recalls a particular pond with huge fish in it which he had missed the chance to try and catch thirty years previously. He therefore plans to return to Lower Binfield but when he arrives, he finds the place unrecognisable. Eventually he locates the old pub where he is to stay, finding it much changed. His home has become a tea shop. Only the church and vicar appear the same but he has a shock when he discovers an old girlfriend, for she has been so ravaged by time that she is almost unrecognisable and is utterly devoid of the qualities he once adored. She fails to recognise him at all. Bowling remembers the slow and painful decline of his father\'s seed business -- resulting from the nearby establishment of corporate competition. This painful memory seems to have sensitised him to -- and given him a repugnance for -- what he sees as the marching ravages of \"Progress\". The final disappointment is to find that the estate where he used to fish has been built over, and the secluded and once hidden pond that contained the huge carp he always intended to take on with his fishing rod, but never got around to, has become a rubbish dump. The social and material changes experienced by Bowling since childhood make his past seem distant. The concept of \"you can\'t go home again\" hangs heavily over Bowling\'s journey, as he realises that many of his old haunts are gone or considerably changed from his younger years.
Throughout the adventure he receives reminders of impending war, and the threat of bombs becomes real when one lands accidentally on the town.
- George Bowling is a fat, married, middle-aged (45 years old) insurance salesman, with \'two kids and a house in the suburbs\'.
Orwell\'s brother-in-law, Humphry Dakin, the husband of Orwell\'s elder sister Marjorie, a \'short, stout, loquacious\' man, thought that Bowling might be a portrait of him. He had known Blair (Orwell) since they were youngsters, when the Blairs lived at Henley-on-Thames and later when they lived at Southwold where he married Marjorie.


# Coming Up for Air
- Joe Bowling is George\'s elder brother. He was not intellectual, and, according to George \'therefore he had a slight proficiency in mechanics\'. He never did any sizeable amount of work and worked for his dad as an \'errand boy\'. One day when George was younger, Joe stole all the money from the shop till. He was said to have always wanted to emigrate to America, and was never mentioned again.
- Uncle Ezekiel is a shop owner with quite liberal beliefs, being a \'little Englander\'. He kept an assortment of caged birds inside his shop as decoration.
- Hilda Bowling, his wife, belongs to the poverty-stricken officer class of an Anglo-Indian family who after marriage has settled-down into a depressed lifeless middle-aged frump. 39 years old, \'very thin and rather wizened, with a perpetual brooding, worried look in her eyes.\'
- Old Porteous, a retired public-school master whose whole life has been lived in an atmosphere of Latin, Greek, and cricket.
- Elsie, George\'s ex-partner; they met in the vicar\'s reading circle, and she was said to be \'deeply feminine\'. They stayed together \'living in sin\' until George enlisted. Shortly afterwards he loses contact with her. Upon his 1939 return to Lower Binfield, George sees her and remarks that \'the milky white skin was gone\...\' and that she was now a cylinder with lumps sticking out. She also now speaks with a strong cockney accent and married a shop owner, also named George.


# Coming Up for Air
In their 1972 study of Orwell, *The Unknown Orwell*, the writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams described the novel as *Wellsian*. Whilst at his prep school in Sussex (1911--1916), Wells had been a favourite author of Eric Blair/Orwell. As with other writers he had read while at St Cyprian\'s Prep school, -- Kipling, Wodehouse, Swift, Shaw, Thackeray -- his loyalty \"was virtually unwavering. What he valued in Wells was not the later polemicist, but the novelist whose evocation of certain aspects of life in England before the First World War recalled to Orwell comparable experiences of his own. 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. They would pause in each, and buy penny sweets and various fizzy drinks. 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.*\"


# Coming Up for Air
The writer Michael Levenson remarked upon the influence at this period in Orwell\'s life, of Henry Miller, and Miller\'s attitude to what was happening in the world. Miller sees what is happening, but is *Inside the Whale*, he \" feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, *accepting* -- even when this means accepting \"concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes.\" \"George Bowling is Orwell\'s Jonah, and *Coming Up For Air* is in significant respects a contribution to the \'school of Miller\'. Hemmed in on every side ̶ by job, home, history -- Bowling neither comprehends the political world nor tries to change it. He merely wants to rediscover the grounds of happiness. 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. Fishing in *Coming Up For Air* is what sex was in *Tropic of Cancer*. \'Fishing\', as Bowling puts it, \'is the opposite of war\'.
The novel sold three thousand copies, a thousand of which represented a second printing and thus bettered \"the dismal response in the bookshops which had met the publication of *Homage to Catalonia*.\" The reviews were among the best that Orwell had received for a novel. Margery Allingham, in *Time and Tide*, wrote that her only regret \"is that the story was written in the first person. This device, although it has the important virtue of making the narrative clear and easy to read, tends to falsify the character slightly since Bowling\'s uncanny perception where his own feelings are concerned makes him a little less of the ordinary mortal which his behaviour would show him to be.\" A recent biographer, Michael Shelden, praised the \"many passages of lyrical beauty, not unbecoming a novelist who once aspired to be a poet. The one serious defect in the novel is Orwell\'s attempt to *be* the voice of his narrator-protagonist. 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.\"


# Coming Up for Air
The writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, in their 1972 *The Unknown Orwell*, noted: \"Eric Blair looked back unforgivingly on the world before 1914 -- it was that world that had sent him to his prep school -- while George Orwell could believe it was superior to what came after it, and looked back to it nostalgically in *Coming Up for Air*.\" The writer John Wain thought the book \" not a success in novelistic terms\", but saw \"vitality in its hinterland.\" He considered the novel \" a bleaker work than *Keep the Aspidistra Flying*; in *Aspidistra* everybody fears the sack, hankers for more money and security, cringes to the boss. But only to the boss at work, the economic boss. When Bowling thinks of the future, he fears not only the ever-present financial insecurity, the endless work, work, work with the gutter only a few steps away; he fears also the new breed of tyrants, the leader and his strong-arm boys.\" And Wain noted the third region of Bowling\'s nightmare -- \" what we have since learnt to call \'the environment\'.\" He places *Coming Up For Air* alongside Orwell\'s 1946 essay *Some Thoughts on the Common Toad* where he had written that, \"retaining one\'s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and -- toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable\". \"What makes *Coming Up For Air* so peculiarly bitter to the taste is that, in addition to calling up the twin spectres of totalitarianism and workless poverty, it also declares the impossibility of \'retaining one\'s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies\' -- because it postulates a world in which these things are simply not there any more.\"
- Bibliography of George Orwell


# The Bell Jar
***The Bell Jar*** is the only novel written by the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath. Originally published under the pseudonym \"Victoria Lucas\" in 1963, the novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed. The book is often regarded as a *roman à clef* because the protagonist\'s descent into mental illness parallels Plath\'s own experiences with what may have been clinical depression or bipolar II disorder. Plath committed suicide a month after its first United Kingdom publication. The novel was published under Plath\'s name for the first time in 1967 and was not published in the United States until 1971, in accordance with the wishes of both Plath\'s husband, Ted Hughes, and her mother. The novel has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.
In 1953, Esther Greenwood, a nineteen-year-old undergraduate student from the suburbs of Boston, is awarded a summer internship at the fictional *Ladies\' Day* magazine in New York City. During the internship, Esther feels neither stimulated nor excited by the work, fashion, and big-city lifestyle that her peers in the program seem to adore. She finds herself struggling to feel anything at all aside from anxiety and disorientation. Esther appreciates the witty sarcasm and adventurousness of another intern Doreen, but also identifies with the piety of Betsy, an old-fashioned and naïve young woman. Esther has a benefactress in Philomena Guinea, a formerly successful writer of women\'s fiction, who funds the scholarship through which Esther -- from a working-class family -- is enrolled at her college.
Esther describes in detail several seriocomic incidents that occur during her internship, beginning with mass food-poisoning of the interns from a lunch thrown by the staff of the magazine. She reminisces about her boyfriend Buddy, whom she has dated more or less seriously, and who considers himself her *de facto* fiancé. Esther\'s internal monologue often lingers on musings of death and violence. Shortly before the internship ends, she attends a country club party with Doreen and is set up with a man who treats her roughly and sexually assaults her, before she breaks his nose and leaves. That night, after returning to the hotel, she impulsively throws all of her brand-new and fashionable gifted clothing off the roof.


# The Bell Jar
Esther returns to her Massachusetts home that she shares with her widowed mother. She has been hoping for another scholarly opportunity once she is back in Massachusetts, a writing course taught by a world-famous author, but on her return she is immediately told by her mother that she was not accepted for the course and finds her plans derailed. She decides to spend the summer potentially writing a novel, although she feels she lacks enough life experience to write convincingly. All of her identity has been centered upon doing well academically; she is unsure of what to make of her life once she leaves school, and none of the choices presented to her (motherhood, as exemplified by the prolific child-bearer Dodo Conway, Esther\'s neighbour, or stereotypical female careers such as stenography) appeal to her. Esther becomes increasingly depressed, and finds herself unable to sleep. Her mother instructs her to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon, whom Esther mistrusts because he is attractive and doesn\'t seem to listen to her. He prescribes electroconvulsive therapy (ECT); afterward, she tells her mother that she will not go back.


# The Bell Jar
The ECT is not effective, and Esther\'s mental state worsens. She makes several half-hearted attempts at suicide, including swimming far out to sea, before making a serious attempt. Esther crawls into a well-hidden hole in the cellar and swallows many sleeping pills that had been prescribed for her insomnia. The newspapers presume her kidnapping and death, but she is discovered alive under her house after an indeterminate amount of time. She is sent to several different mental hospitals until her college benefactress, Philomena Guinea, supports her stay at an elite treatment center where she meets Dr. Nolan, a female therapist. Along with regular psychotherapy sessions, Esther is given huge amounts of insulin to produce a \"reaction\" (a common -- and disproven -- psychiatric treatment at the time) and again receives shock treatments, with Dr. Nolan ensuring that they are properly administered. While there, she describes her depression as a feeling of being trapped under a bell jar, struggling for breath. Eventually, Esther describes the ECT as beneficial in that it has a sort of antidepressant effect; it lifts the metaphorical bell jar in which she has felt trapped and stifled. While there, she also becomes reacquainted with Joan Gilling, who also used to date Buddy. Whilst Esther and Joan are hospitalised, Joan commits suicide unexpectedly. The novel heavily implies that Joan is homosexual, and attracted to or interested in Esther.
Esther tells Dr. Nolan how she envies the freedom that men have and how she, as a woman, worries about getting pregnant. Dr. Nolan refers her to a doctor who fits her for a diaphragm. Esther now feels free from her fears about the consequences of sex; free from previous pressures to get married, potentially to the wrong man. Under Dr. Nolan, Esther improves. Various significant events, such as having sex for the first time, being hospitalized as a result, and Joan\'s suicide, provide her with new perspective. Esther interacts with Buddy once again towards the end of the novel, when he visits her to ask if it was something about him that drove women to insanity given that he dated both Joan and Esther. Buddy later wonders out loud who will marry Esther now that she has been hospitalised, effectively ending their commitment to get engaged. Esther feels relieved.


# The Bell Jar
The novel ends with Esther entering a conference with her doctors, who will decide whether she can leave the hospital and return to school.
It is suggested near the beginning of the novel that, in later years, Esther goes on to have a baby.


# The Bell Jar
- Esther Greenwood is the protagonist of the story, an English student from Boston. While working as a summer intern at *Ladies\' Day* magazine, she lives at the Amazon hotel in New York City along with the other women and girls working for the magazine. Esther becomes mentally unstable during that summer and the following months. The cumulative effects of fear and panic from not knowing what to do in life after graduation, professional setbacks, social alienation, traumatizing encounters such as narrowly avoiding attempted rape, and the feeling that she simply does not fit into the culturally acceptable role of womanhood contribute to her instability. Though it is not immediately apparent, unresolved grief at the death of her father when she was 8 also affects her. Having returned to live with her mother in the suburbs, and experiencing increasing insomnia, loss of appetite, inability to read or write, and she becomes fixated on and later attempts suicide. Before her mental health more precipitously declines, Esther is characterized as a hardworking student, high achieving in prizes and grades, with a vague idea she might go into publishing or being an author and poet. She is also fairly self-interested and prone to feeling withdrawn and tired. She leaves her friend Doreen with a man they just met after being asked to stay to help protect her. Later, when Doreen arrives late at night back to the hotel they both stay at asking for her, she leaves Doreen, still-drunk, to sleep on the ground near her own vomit rather than set her up in Esther's bed.
- Doreen is a rebel-of-the-times young woman and another intern at *Ladies\' Day*, the magazine for which Esther won an internship for the summer, and Esther\'s best friend at the hotel in New York where all the interns stay. Esther finds Doreen\'s confident persona enticing but also troublesome, as she longs for the same level of freedom but knows such behavior is frowned upon. Esther takes care to praise Doreen's appearance, humor, personality, and even smell, which she describes as sweaty and sweet like fresh crushed ferns. At other times Esther repudiates Doreen and swears to have little more to do with her, and to instead be friends with more conventional women like Betsy. When first looking for an escape after failing to get into her desired writing program, Esther thinks to write Doreen and ask to stay with her, but her handwriting has deteriorated and she never sends the letter.
- Joan is an old acquaintance of Esther, who joins her at the asylum. She also dated Buddy Willard, but tells Esther later that she was more interested in keeping up relationship with Buddy's parents, who she says are much more caring and superior to her own. At the asylum she and Esther have a quiet rivalry over who will become better quicker, as appears to be common culture among the patients. Intruding, Esther finds Joan in bed with another female asylum patient, DeeDee. Esther then reflects on other women who have sex with women she has known. Ambiguously, Joan may later proposition Esther, either romantically or in a gesture of friendship. Esther tells Joan she never liked her. When Esther needs help getting to the hospital while hemorrhaging after sex with Irwin, Joan helps her get there. Joan eventually dies by suicide at the asylum. Esther attends her funeral.
- Doctor Nolan is Esther\'s doctor at the asylum. A beautiful and caring woman, her combination of personal sensitivity and professional ability allows her to be the first woman in Esther\'s life she feels she can fully connect with. Nolan administers shock therapy to Esther and does it correctly, which leads to positive results.
- Doctor Gordon is the first doctor Esther encounters. Self-obsessed and patronizing, he subjects her to traumatic shock treatments that haunt her for the rest of her time in medical care.
- Mrs. Greenwood, Esther\'s mother, loves her daughter but is constantly urging Esther to mold to society\'s ideal of white, middle-class womanhood, from which Esther feels a complete disconnection.
- Buddy Willard is Esther\'s former boyfriend from her hometown. Studying to become a doctor, Buddy wants a wife who mirrors his mother, and hopes Esther will be that for him. Esther adores him throughout high school, but upon learning he is not a virgin loses respect for him and names him a hypocrite. She struggles with ending the relationship after Buddy is diagnosed with tuberculosis. He eventually proposes marriage, but Esther rejects him since she has decided she will never marry, to which Buddy responds that she is crazy.
- Mrs. Willard, Buddy Willard\'s mother, is a dedicated homemaker with conservative views on women's social roles and sexual propriety who is determined to have Buddy and Esther marry. Joan loves Mrs. Willard and found her to be the mother she never had.
- Mr. Willard, Buddy Willard\'s father and Mrs. Willard\'s husband, is a good family friend.
- Constantin, a simultaneous interpreter with a foreign accent, takes Esther on a date while they are both in New York. They return to his apartment and Esther contemplates giving her virginity to him, but for unknown reasons he chooses to spend the night sleeping chastely side by side with Esther instead.
- Irwin is a tall but rather ugly young man, who is Esther's first sexual experience, causing her to hemorrhage. He is a \"very well-paid professor of mathematics\" and invites Esther to have coffee, despite not knowing her at all (and not knowing she was out on leave from an asylum). The rare hemorrhage caused by penetrative sex with Irwin leads to Esther having to go to the hospital to get help to stop the bleeding.
- Jay Cee is Esther\'s strict boss, who is very intelligent, so \"her plug-ugly looks didn\'t seem to matter\". She is responsible for editing Esther\'s work.
- Lenny Shepherd, a wealthy young man and disc jockey living in New York, invites Doreen and Esther for drinks while they are on their way to a party. They go together to his place. Doreen asks Esther to stay with her in case Lenny "tries anything", but Esther leaves. Doreen and Lenny start dating, taking Doreen away from Esther more often.
- Philomena Guinea, a wealthy, elderly lady, was the person who donated the money for Esther\'s college scholarship. Esther\'s college requires each girl who is on scholarship to write a letter to her benefactor, thanking him or her. Philomena invites Esther to have a meal with her. At one point, she was also in an asylum herself, and pays for the \"upscale\" asylum that Esther stays in.
- Marco, a Peruvian man and friend of Lenny Shepherd, is set up to take Esther to a party, assaults her, and attempts to rape her.
- Betsy, a wealthier girl from the magazine, is a \"good\" girl from Kansas whom Esther strives to be more like. She serves as the opposite to Doreen, and Esther finds herself torn between the two behavioral and personality extremes.
- Hilda is another girl from the magazine, who is generally disliked by Esther after making negative comments about the Rosenbergs, rejoicing in their imminent execution.


# The Bell Jar
According to her husband, Plath began writing the novel in 1961, after publishing *The Colossus*, her first collection of poetry. Plath finished writing the novel in August 1961. After she separated from Hughes, Plath moved to a smaller flat in London, \"giving her time and place to work uninterruptedly. Then at top speed and with very little revision from start to finish she wrote *The Bell Jar*,\" he explained.
Plath was writing the novel under the sponsorship of the Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, affiliated with publisher Harper & Row, but it was disappointed by the manuscript and withdrew, calling it \"disappointing, juvenile and overwrought\". Early working titles of the novel included *Diary of a Suicide* and *The Girl in the Mirror*.
The novel is written using a series of flashbacks that reveal parts of Esther\'s past. The flashbacks primarily deal with Esther\'s relationship with Buddy Willard. The reader also learns more about her early college years.
*The Bell Jar* addresses the question of socially acceptable identity. It examines Esther\'s \"quest to forge her own identity, to be herself rather than what others expect her to be.\" Esther is expected to become a housewife, and a self-sufficient woman, without the options to achieve independence. Esther feels she is a prisoner to domestic duties and she fears the loss of her inner self. *The Bell Jar* sets out to highlight the problems with oppressive patriarchal society in mid-20th-century America.


# The Bell Jar
### Mental health
Esther Greenwood, the main character in *The Bell Jar*, describes her life as being suffocated by a bell jar. A bell jar is a thick glass display container sometimes used to create a vacuum space. Here, it stands for \"Esther\'s mental suffocation by the unavoidable settling of depression upon her psyche\". Throughout the novel, Esther talks of it suffocating her, and recognizes moments of clarity when it is lifted. These moments correlate to her mental state and the effect of her depression. Scholars argue about the nature of Esther\'s \"bell jar\" and what it can stand for. Some say it is a retaliation against suburban lifestyle, others believe it represents the standards set for a woman\'s life. However, when considering the nature of Sylvia Plath\'s own life and death and the parallels between *The Bell Jar* and her life, it is hard to ignore the theme of mental illness.
Psychiatrist Aaron Beck studied Esther\'s mental illness and notes two causes of depression evident in her life. The first is formed from early traumatic experiences, her father\'s death when she was 9 years old. It is evident how affected she is by this loss when she wonders, \"I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.\" The second cause of her depression is from her perfectionist ideologies. Esther is a woman of many achievements -- college, internships and perfect grades. It is this success that puts the unattainable goals into her head, and when she doesn\'t achieve them, her mental health suffers. Esther laments, \"The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn\'t thought about it.\"
Esther Greenwood has an obvious mental break -- that being her suicide attempt which dictates the latter half of the novel. However, Esther\'s entire life shows warning signs that cause this depressive downfall. The novel begins with her negative thoughts surrounding all her past and current life decisions. It is this mindset mixed with the childhood trauma and perfectionist attitude that causes her descent that leads her to attempt suicide.


# The Bell Jar
### Mental health
This novel gives an account of the treatment of mental health in the 1950s. Plath speaks through Esther\'s narrative to describe her experience of her mental health treatment. Just as this novel gives way to feminist discourse and challenges the way of life for women in the 1950s, it also gives a case study of a woman struggling with mental health.
The book contains many references to real people and events in Plath\'s life. Plath\'s magazine scholarship was at *Mademoiselle* magazine beginning in 1953. Philomena Guinea is based on author Olive Higgins Prouty, Plath\'s own patron, who funded Plath\'s scholarship to study at Smith College. Plath was rejected from a Harvard course taught by Frank O\'Connor. Dr. Nolan is thought to be based on Ruth Beuscher, Plath\'s therapist, whom she continued seeing after her release from the hospital. A good portion of this part of the novel closely resembles the experiences chronicled by Mary Jane Ward in her autobiographical novel *The Snake Pit*; Plath later stated that she had seen reviews of *The Snake Pit* and believed the public wanted to see \"mental health stuff\", so she deliberately based details of Esther\'s hospitalization on the procedures and methods outlined in Ward\'s book. Plath was a patient at McLean Hospital, an upscale facility which resembled the \"snake pit\" much less than wards in the Metropolitan State Hospital, which may have been where Mary Jane Ward was hospitalized.
In a 2006 interview, Joanne Greenberg said that she had been interviewed in 1986 by one of the women who had worked on *Mademoiselle* with Plath in the college guest editors group. The woman claimed that Plath had put so many details of the students\' lives into *The Bell Jar* that \"they could never look at each other again\", and that it had caused the breakup of her marriage and possibly others.


# The Bell Jar
### Mental health
Janet McCann links Plath\'s search for female independence with a self-described neurotic psychology. Ted Hughes, Plath\'s husband, suggested that *The Bell Jar* might have been written as a response to many years of electroshock treatment and the scars it left.
*The Bell Jar* received \"warily positive reviews\". The short time span between the publication of the book and Plath\'s suicide resulted in \"few innocent readings\" of the novel.
The majority of early readers focused primarily on autobiographical connections from Plath to the protagonist. In response to autobiographical criticism, critic Elizabeth Hardwick urged that readers distinguish between Plath as a writer and Plath as an \"event\". Robert Scholes, writing for *The New York Times*, praised the novel\'s \"sharp and uncanny descriptions\". Mason Harris of the *West Coast Review* complimented the novel as using \"the \'distorted lens\' of madness to give an authentic vision of a period which exalted the most oppressive ideal of reason and stability.\" Howard Moss of *The New Yorker* gave a mixed review, praising the \"black comedy\" of the novel, but added that there was \"something girlish in its manner that betrays the hand of the amateur novelist\".
On November 5, 2019, the *BBC News* listed *The Bell Jar* on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels.
*The Bell Jar* has been referred to many times in popular media. Iris Jamahl Dunkle wrote of the novel that \"often, when the novel appears in American films and television series, it stands as a symbol for teenage angst.\"
Larry Peerce\'s *The Bell Jar* (1979) starred Marilyn Hassett as Esther Greenwood, and featured the tagline: \"Sometimes just being a woman is an act of courage.\" In the film, Joan attempts to get Esther to agree to a suicide pact, which does not occur in the book.
In July 2016, it was announced that Kirsten Dunst would be making her directorial debut with an adaptation of *The Bell Jar* starring Dakota Fanning as Esther Greenwood. In August 2019, it was announced Dunst was no longer attached and *Bell Jar* will become a limited TV series from Showtime.
- 1963 in literature


# Trainspotting (novel)
***Trainspotting*** is the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, first published in 1993. It takes the form of a collection of short stories, written in either Scots, Scottish English or British English, revolving around various residents of Leith, Edinburgh who either use heroin, are friends of the core group of heroin users, or engage in destructive activities that are effectively addictions. The novel is set in the late 1980s and has been described by *The Sunday Times* as \"the voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and grown eloquent\".
The novel has since achieved a cult status and served as the basis for the film *Trainspotting* (1996), directed by Danny Boyle. A sequel called *Porno* was published in 2002. A prequel called *Skagboys* was published in April 2012.


# Trainspotting (novel)
- **Mark \"Rent Boy\" Renton** -- The novel\'s protagonist and most frequent narrator, Renton is the voice of reason among his group of friends, many of whom he dislikes. He narrates his daily life -- from supporting his heroin addiction with dole money and petty theft to interacting with the \"normal world\" -- with a cynical approach. He is intelligent and capable of participating in mainstream society, but he is misanthropic and depressed, and uses heroin to give purpose to his life as well as for hedonistic purposes.
- **Simon \"Sick Boy\" Williamson** -- A promiscuous, amoral con artist and one of Renton\'s close friends. He is often on the lookout for potential scams and has little respect for the many women he seduces. Sick Boy swears off heroin after the death of the infant Dawn, implied to be his daughter, who asphyxiates while her mother Lesley and Sick Boy are on a heroin binge.
- **Daniel \"Spud\" Murphy** -- Naive and childlike, Spud is both the whipping boy and only real source of comfort among Renton\'s circle of friends, who feel protective of him even as they take advantage of him. Spud is kind, sensitive, and loves animals. Spud is sent to Saughton prison for a section of the novel for petty theft.
- **Francis \"Franco\" Begbie** -- A violent psychopath, Begbie bullies his \"friends\" into going along with whatever he says, assaulting and intimidating anyone who easily angers him. He expresses intense loyalty to his friends even though he considers junkies to be the lowest form of life, despite being addicted to alcohol and the adrenaline rush of violence.
- **Davie Mitchell** -- Another Leith native and acquaintance of Renton. Davie is a university graduate and holds down a decent job. His life is thrown into chaos when he contracts HIV. He narrates the chapters \"Bad Blood\" and \"Traditional Sunday Breakfast\".
- **Tommy Lawrence** -- A childhood friend of Renton\'s, Tommy asks Renton for heroin to try after his girlfriend dumps him, which Renton reluctantly provides. Tommy\'s resulting addiction, illness and death weighs heavily on Renton\'s conscience.
- **Rab \"Second Prize\" McLaughlin** -- A friend of the main group, who is often inebriated and gets into frequent fights while drunk, which he always loses. Second Prize had a promising career as a pro footballer for Manchester United, but he was fired from the team after a few years because of his drinking problem.


# Trainspotting (novel)
The novel is split into seven sections. The first six sections contain multiple chapters from various perspectives; the final section contains one chapter. The novel\'s plot is nonlinear.
Most chapters are narrated in first-person, stream-of-consciousness style in some combination of Scots dialect and Standard English. Some chapters are written from a third-person omniscient stance to convey the actions and thoughts of several characters in a scene.

### Section 1: Kicking
Mark and Simon (a.k.a. Sick Boy) are watching a Jean-Claude Van Damme video when they decide to go buy heroin from Johnny Swan (also called \"Mother Superior\") since they are both feeling symptoms of withdrawal. They cook up with Raymie and Alison. After being informed that he should go and see Kelly, who has just had an abortion, Renton goes home to finish his video instead.
Mark initially makes an attempt to come off heroin by acquiring a bare room and all the things he will require when coming down (canned soup, headache medicine, and pails for vomit). When withdrawal begins to set in, however, he resolves to get another hit to ease the decline. Unable to find any heroin, he acquires opium suppositories which, after a heavy bout of diarrhoea, he must recover from a public lavatory. Simon attempts to pick up girls while being annoyed by Mark, who wants to watch videos. Sick Boy loses Renton and launches into an internal monologue that is self-glorifying and nihilistic.


# Trainspotting (novel)
### Section 1: Kicking
The chapter \"It Goes Without Saying\" opens with the death of an infant, Dawn, whose mother Lesley is a heroin addict and acquaintance of the main characters. The cause of death is unclear; characters speculate that it may have been a cot death or a death from neglect. The Skag Boys are unsure of how to respond. However, Sick Boy becomes notably more emotional and distressed than the others and eventually breaks down as well, stating he is kicking heroin for good. Simon does not explicitly state that he was the child\'s father, playing to the title of the story. Mark wants to comfort his friend, but is unsure how and simply cooks a shot for himself in order to deal with the situation. A sobbing Lesley asks him to also cook her up a hit, which Mark does but makes sure he injects himself before her, stating the action \"goes without saying\".

### Section 2: Relapsing
After an argument with his girlfriend Carol, Second Prize meets Tommy in a pub, and Tommy confronts a man who is punching his girlfriend. They are shocked to find the woman supports her abusive boyfriend instead of her would-be liberators by digging her nails into Tommy\'s face, inciting a brawl. While the couple slips out unnoticed, Tommy and Second Prize find themselves taking the blame for the whole affair from the pub locals.
Renton, Begbie and their girlfriends meet up for a drink before going to a party, but it ends when Begbie throws a glass off a balcony, hitting someone and splitting open their head, setting off a huge pub brawl.
In another scene, Tommy comes around to Renton\'s flat (shortly after Renton relapsed) after being dumped by his girlfriend. Renton reluctantly gives him some heroin upon request, setting off Tommy\'s gradual decline into addiction, HIV/AIDS, and later, death.


# Trainspotting (novel)
### Section 2: Relapsing
Later, Renton\'s brother Billy and his friends Lenny, Naz Peasbo, and Jackie are waiting for their friend Granty to arrive for a game of cards, as he is holding the money pot. They later find out that Granty is dead and his girlfriend has disappeared with the money, prompting them to beat Jackie, whom they knew to have been sleeping with her. Later, Begbie and Lexo have pulled an unknown crime, so Begbie decides to lie low in London with Renton. The chapter covers their train journey.

### Section 3: Kicking Again
Spud manages to kick heroin, and visits his grandmother, where his mixed-race uncle Dode is staying. He recounts the trouble that Dode has had with racism growing up, particularly an event when he and Spud went to a pub and were soon assaulted by white power skinheads. This abuse led to a fight, which left Dode hospitalised, where Spud visits him.
Renton has kicked heroin and is restless. He ends up picking up a girl at a nightclub, Dianne, unaware that she is only fourteen. He is later forced to lie to her parents at breakfast the following morning. Despite his guilt and discomfort, he sleeps with Dianne again when she shows up at his flat. Spud, Renton and Sick Boy take some ecstasy and stroll to The Meadows where an excited Sick Boy and Renton try to kill a squirrel but stop after Spud becomes upset by their actions towards the animal. He states to the reader that you can\'t love yourself if you hurt animals as it\'s wrong and compares their innocence to that of Simon\'s dead baby Dawn. He also notably states that squirrels are \"lovely\" and \"free\" and that \"that\'s maybe what Rents can\'t stand\" indicating Mark envies those he feels are completely unbound and free. Mark is ashamed and Spud forgives him quickly and the pair embrace, before Simon breaks them up.


# Trainspotting (novel)
### Section 4: Blowing It
Renton and Spud are in court for stealing books. Renton gets a suspended sentence owing to his attempts at rehabilitation, while Spud is sentenced to ten months in prison. Renton relapses and has to suffer heroin withdrawal at his parents\' house, where he experiences hallucinations of dead baby Dawn, the television programme he is watching, and the lecture provided by his father. He is later visited by Sick Boy and goes out to a pub with his parents, whose unnerving enthusiasm acts as a veneer for their authoritative treatment.
Renton\'s brother Billy dies in Northern Ireland with the British Army. Renton attends the funeral; there, he almost starts a fight with some of his father\'s Unionist relatives, and ends up having sex with Billy\'s pregnant girlfriend in the toilets. Demonstrating some topicality, Renton discusses the hypocrisy of Unionism and the British in Northern Ireland.

### Section 5: Exile
Renton is stranded in London with no place to sleep. He tries to fall asleep in an all-night porno theatre, where he meets an old homosexual named Gi, who lets him stay at his apartment. Later, Renton, Spud, Begbie, Gav, Alison and others venture out for another drink and then something to eat. Spud and others reflect upon their sex lives.

### Section 6: Home
Spud, Begbie, and a teenager have engaged in a criminal robbery. Spud recounts the crime and comments on Begbie\'s paranoia and how the teenager is likely to get ripped off by the pair. Gav tells Renton the story of how Matty died of toxoplasmosis after attempting to rekindle his relationship with his ex using a kitten.
The group attends Matty\'s funeral, where they reflect on his downfall, and what may have caused it. Later, Renton returns to Leith for Christmas and meets Begbie, who beats up an innocent man after having seen his alcoholic father in the disused Leith Central railway station. He visits a former drug dealer, Johnny Swann, who has had his leg amputated as a result of heroin use, and he visits Tommy, who is dying of AIDS.


# Trainspotting (novel)
### Section 7: Exit
Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud and Second Prize go to London to engage in a low-key heroin deal and see a Pogues gig. The book ends with Renton stealing the cash and going to Amsterdam. Renton thinks to himself that he will send Spud his cut, as he is the only \'innocent\' party.
Soon after publication, the book was adapted for the stage by Harry Gibson. The stage version inspired the subsequent film, and regularly toured the UK in the mid-1990s. This adaptation starred Ewen Bremner and later Tam Dean Burn as Renton.
The Los Angeles production of Trainspotting won the 2002 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Direction, and the 2002 LA Weekly Theater Award for Direction, for director Roger Mathey.
In 2013 In Your Face Theatre and Seabright Productions staged a new immersive production of Gibson\'s adaptation rebranded as Trainspotting Live. Directed by Adam Spreadbury-Maher and Greg Esplin, this production has gone on to sell out at three Edinburgh Festival Fringes and played to critical acclaim in London, on several UK tours and in New York City.
The film was directed by Danny Boyle, with an adapted screenplay written by John Hodge. It starred Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller and Ewen Bremner. Irvine Welsh made a cameo appearance as the drug dealer Mikey Forrester. The film has been ranked 10th by the British Film Institute (BFI) in its list of Top 100 British films of all time. It also brought Welsh\'s book to an international cinema audience and added to the phenomenal popularity of the novel.
\"Trainspotting\" was longlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize (and was apparently rejected for the shortlist after \"offending the sensibilities of two judges\").
Welsh claimed that the book had sold over one million copies in the UK by 2015, and been translated into thirty languages.
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# Captain Corelli's Mandolin
***Captain Corelli\'s Mandolin**\'\', released simultaneously in the United States as***Corelli\'s Mandolin**\'\', is a 1994 novel by the British writer Louis de Bernières, set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Italian and German occupation of the Second World War.
The main characters are Antonio Corelli, an Italian army captain, and Pelagia, the daughter of the local physician, Dr Iannis. An important event in the novel is the massacre of Italian troops by the Germans in September 1943---the Italian Acqui Division had refused to surrender and had fought the Germans for nine days before running out of ammunition. Some 1,500 Italian soldiers died in the fighting; 5,000 were massacred after surrendering, and the rest were shipped to Germany, of whom 3,000 drowned when the ship carrying them hit a mine.
In 2003, the novel was listed at number 19 on the BBC\'s survey The Big Read.
The story begins with **Dr. Iannis**, a multilingual doctor with an established practice on the Greek island of Cephalonia. Iannis lives with his daughter **Pelagia**; Pelagia\'s mother died of tuberculosis. Pelagia, now a young woman, is headstrong and intelligent, and has learned about medicine by observing her father.
Pelagia meets a young fisherman named **Mandras**, and they become engaged. War has been declared, and Mandras decides to go fight at the front. Pelagia\'s letters to him go unanswered.
Meanwhile, **Carlo Guercio** fights among the Italian forces that invade Albania, and sees his beloved friend, Francesco, whom he is in love with, shot by the Greek army during the Greco-Italian War.


# Captain Corelli's Mandolin
In 1941, Italian and German soldiers are posted to Cephalonia, where they are ostracized by the locals. Pelagia is determined to hate them, especially when a jovial young captain by the name of **Antonio Corelli** is domiciled with her. Mandras comes home from the war, injured and filthy, and as Pelagia nurses him she realizes she no longer loves him. Mandras leaves for the Greek mainland, where he joins the communist partisan organisation ELAS. In the book\'s depiction, ELAS is cruel towards the civilian population and more frequently attacks other partisan groups (for being ideologically different) than the Axis\' occupying forces.
After Mussolini loses power, Italy joins forces with the Allies. The Italians who occupy Greece thus are freed from their duties. After defeating the Italian division, the German soldiers on Cephalonia turn on them, and order a massive execution. Corelli\'s life is saved by Carlo Guercio, who shields him with his body when they face execution by firing squad. Guercio dies, and the wounded Corelli is aided by a Greek back to Pelagia\'s house. Corelli has to stay hidden from the Germans, whose orders are to kill any surviving Italians.
As soon as he is well enough, Corelli escapes to Italy, promising Pelagia that he will return as soon as the war ends and then they will be married. Corelli leaves **Antonia**, his mandolin, with Pelagia for safekeeping.
The Germans become brutal but the war eventually ends. Communists take over the island for a period of time (and large parts of Greece in general) and mistreat the population. Dr Iannis is considered an intellectual, therefore suspect, and is sent to a camp along with some of his friends who protest against his treatment. Mandras returns, indoctrinated with Communist ideologies and having learned to read. He has read Pelagia\'s letters and knows that she does not love him, so he tries to rape her. This is prevented by the fact that Pelagia is armed, and by intervention of Mandras\' mother who realizes what almost happened and repudiates her own son. Ashamed, he commits suicide. Mandras\' mother comforts Pelagia and for the remainder of her life, remains close with Pelagia.


# Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Some time after, a baby girl is left on Pelagia\'s doorstep, whom Pelagia adopts. Dr Iannis comes home, traumatised. Life goes on in Cephalonia, though interrupted by the 1953 Ionian earthquake, in which Iannis dies.
Corelli does not return, though Pelagia is convinced she sees his ghost. The baby girl, whom Pelagia has named **Antonia**, grows up and marries. Antonia later has a son who is named Iannis in honor of the doctor.
Many years later, an old man visits Pelagia. It is Antonio Corelli, now a famous mandolin player. He explains that he did not visit before because, having seen her with baby Antonia on her doorstep and believing her to be married, he was bitter. The novel ends on a happy note.

### Major themes
*Captain Corelli\'s Mandolin* explores many varieties of love. We see the initial lust-based love between Pelagia and Mandras, which burns out as a result of the war, and the change it prompts in both of them. Corelli and Pelagia\'s slow-developing love is the central focus of the novel. Love is described by Dr Iannis as \"what is left when the passion has gone\", and it certainly appears that this criterion is fulfilled by the love of Corelli and Pelagia. The paternal love of Iannis for Pelagia is also strong and is heavily compared with that of Corelli.
The theme of music is predominant, offering a direct contrast to the horror and destruction that the war brings and showing how something beautiful can arise from something horrible.
The war is described in graphic detail, particularly the death of Francesco. It is responsible for the fall of Mandras and Weber, the deaths of Carlo and Francesco, and the separation of Pelagia and Corelli.
Throughout the novel, Bernières takes a harsh view of all forms of totalitarianism, condemning Fascism, Nazism, and Communism alike. Bernières himself described this as a novel about \"what happens to the little people when megalomaniacs get busy.\"


# Captain Corelli's Mandolin
### Major themes
Another theme of the novel is the study of history. Dr Iannis spends much of his spare time attempting to write a history of Cephalonia, but he often finds his personal feelings and biases running through whatever he writes. There is also a strong feeling against \'professional\' history, which is suggested by Carlo Guercio\'s statement that \"I know that if we the Axis win then there will be stories about mass graves in London and vice versa\". This is reinforced by a quotation from Bernières which says that: \"history ought to be made up of the stories of ordinary people only.\" From this viewpoint, it can be seen that Bernières is very much a revisionist historian, considering social history superior to political history.
Bernières takes an ambiguous attitude towards heroism and villainy in the novel: many of the characters, despite committing atrocities, are viewed as human victims of bad circumstances. For example, the German character Günter Weber receives a great degree of sympathy from the writer, even though he fully engages with the Nazi ideology and is guilty of taking part in the killing of an entire Italian division. Despite having become friends with many of the men, Weber must follow orders. Similarly, Mandras is guilty of murder, torture, and rape, yet the author portrays him sympathetically: \"just another life tarnished\... by war.\"
Bernières has denied that the character of Corelli is based on Amos Pampaloni who was then an Italian artillery captain in Cephalonia, despite the many similarities in their stories. Pampaloni survived execution, joined the Greek People\'s Liberation Army, the Partisans in the Greek civil war, and fought with them in Epirus for fourteen months. Pampaloni was interviewed by *The Guardian* newspaper in 2000 and expressed the view that the novel misrepresented the Greek partisan movement.
The novel also shows some similarities to *Bandiera bianca a Cefalonia*, a novel by Marcello Venturi published in 1963, translated in English as *The White Flag* (1969).
The *Orlando Sentinel* called *Corelli\'s Mandolin* a \"radically traditionalist\" novel, \"a good nourishing tale full of true things, historical and psychological, spiced with opinion and contrariness, with not one dollop of regard for artistic fashion.\"


# Captain Corelli's Mandolin
### Major themes
The *Cleveland Plain Dealer* praised the multiple emotional levels of the novel, remarking, \"Like Puccini, de Bernières can evoke golden narrative, full of both pain and gladness.\"
Gene Hyde wrote, \"To defy Sisyphus and rebel against the absurd, especially in the face of war, is an excruciatingly difficult and noble task. The beauty of Bernières\' unique and deeply moving novel is his insistence that our hope lies in these seemingly quixotic impulses.\"
1995 -- Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book
2004 -- 19th place on The Big Read

### Radio
The novel was adapted as four 45-minute radio plays from 17--20 September 2007 on BBC Radio 4, having been chosen as a popular \"Book of the Week\" on the same station some years earlier. The episode titles were \"A Pea in the Ear,\" \"Invasion of the Italians,\" \"Looking for Snails\" and \"Earthquake.\" It was narrated by Tom Goodman-Hill, with Celia Meiras as Pelagia, Stephen Greif as Dr Iannis, Daniel Philpott as Corelli. The mandolin music for it was composed and performed by Alison Stephens, and the production was produced and directed by David Hunter. Other cast members included:
- Carlo -- Anthony Psaila
- Mandras -- Chris Pavlo
- Velisarios -- Alexi Kaye Campbell
- Father Arsenios -- Alex Zorbas
- Lemoni -- Ania Gordon
- Drosoula -- Anna Savva
- Hector -- Nitin Ganatra
- Officer -- Simon Treves

### Film
A film version of *Captain Corelli\'s Mandolin* was released in 2001, with Nicolas Cage as the Italian Captain Corelli, John Hurt as Dr Iannis, and Penélope Cruz as his daughter, Pelagia. The film, directed by John Madden, also starred Christian Bale, Irene Papas and Joanna Daria Adraktas.


# Captain Corelli's Mandolin
### Theatre
In 2011, the Mercury Theatre in Colchester, England, and the Kote Marjanishvili Theatre of Tbilisi, Georgia, produced an adaptation of the novel written by Mike Maran and directed by Levan Tsuladze. This production combined live actors and puppetry. It had its premiere in Georgia at the Tbilisi International Festival in October 2011, before transferring to the Mercury.
A new stage adaptation by Rona Munro and directed by Melly Still previews at the Leicester Curve from 13 to 20 April 2019 before opening at the Rose Theatre, Kingston (23 April to 12 May), and touring to Theatre Royal, Bath (14 to 18 May), Birmingham Repertory Theatre (29 May to 15 June), King\'s Theatre, Edinburgh (18 to 22 June) and Theatre Royal, Glasgow (25 to 29 June). Following its UK tour, the production transferred to London\'s West End at the Harold Pinter Theatre from 4 July to 31 August 2019 starring Alex Mugnaioni as Captain Antonio Corelli and Madison Clare as Pelagia.


# Robots and Empire
***Robots and Empire*** is a science fiction novel by the American author Isaac Asimov, published by Doubleday Books in 1985. It is part of Asimov\'s *Robot* series, which consists of many short stories (collected in *I, Robot*, *The Rest of the Robots*, *The Complete Robot*, *Robot Dreams*, *Robot Visions*, and *Gold*) and five novels (including *The Positronic Man*, *The Caves of Steel*, *The Naked Sun*, and *The Robots of Dawn*).
*Robots and Empire* is part of Asimov\'s consolidation of his three major series of science fiction stories and novels into a single future history: his *Robot* series, his *Galactic Empire* series and his *Foundation* series. (Asimov also carried out this unification in *Foundation\'s Edge* and its sequel.)
In the novel, Asimov depicts the transition from his earlier Milky Way Galaxy, inhabited by both human beings and positronic robots, to his Galactic Empire. The galaxy of his earlier trilogy of *Robot* novels is dominated by the blended human/robotic societies of the fifty \"Spacer\" planets, dispersed through the near-Earth part of the Galaxy. While the Earth is much more populous than all of the Spacer planets combined, its people are looked down upon and treated almost as sub-human by the Spacers. For a long time, the Spacers have forbidden immigration of people from the Earth. But Asimov\'s later Galactic Empire is populated by many quadrillions of human beings on hundreds of thousands of habitable planets and by very few robots (such as R. Daneel Olivaw). Even the technology to maintain and upgrade robots exists on only a few out-of-the-way planets. Therefore, this novel attempts to describe how his earlier *Robot* series ultimately connects to his *Galactic Empire* series.
The Earthman Elijah Baley (the detective hero of the previous *Robot* books) has died nearly two centuries earlier. During these two centuries, Earth-people have overcome their agoraphobia and resumed space colonization, using faster-than-light drive to reach distant planets beyond the earlier \"Spacer\" worlds. Their inhabitants, calling themselves \"Settlers\" rather than \"Spacers\", revere Earth as their mother-world.


# Robots and Empire
Baley\'s memory remains in the mind of his former lover, Gladia Delmarre, a long-lived \"Spacer\" who uncharacteristically relocated from the spacer world of Solaria to Aurora. Gladia\'s homeworld and the 50th-established of the Spacer planets, Solaria, has become empty of all human inhabitants, although millions of robot servants remain. A seventh-generation descendant of Baley\'s, Daneel Giskard (\'D.G.\') Baley, gains Gladia\'s help in visiting Solaria, to investigate the destruction of several \"Settler\" spaceships that made landings there and to capture the presumably unsupervised robots. Gladia is accompanied by the positronic robots R. Daneel Olivaw and R. Giskard Reventlov, both the former property of their creator, Dr. Han Fastolfe, who bequeathed them to Gladia in his will. R. Giskard has secret telepathic powers of which only R. Daneel knows.
At the same time, Daneel and Giskard are engaged in a struggle of wits with Fastolfe\'s rivals: The roboticists Kelden Amadiro and Vasilia Aliena, Fastolfe\'s estranged daughter. Frustrated by his series of failures, Amadiro accepts an ambitious and unscrupulous apprentice, Levular Mandamus, who plans to destroy the population of the Earth by a newly developed weapon, the \"nuclear intensifier\", with which to accelerate the natural radioactive decay in the upper crust of the Earth, thereby making the surface of the Earth radioactive. R. Daneel and R. Giskard discover the roboticists\' plan and attempt to stop Amadiro; but are hampered by the First Law of Robotics,
which prevents them from a direct attack on Amadiro. Daneel and Giskard, meanwhile, have inferred an additional Zeroth Law of Robotics:


# Robots and Empire
It might enable them to overcome Amadiro, if they can use their telepathic perception of humanity to quell the inhibitions of the first law. When Vasilia accuses Giskard of telepathy (earlier created by herself) Giskard is compelled to manipulate her mind to make her forget about his telepathic powers. The two robots locate Amadiro and Mandamus on Earth, at the site of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. After Amadiro admits their plans, Giskard alters Amadiro\'s brain (using the newly created Zeroth Law); but in so doing, threatens his own.


# Robots and Empire
Now alone with the robots, Mandamus claims that his intentions were to draw out the radioactive catastrophe over many decades, rather than the mere years that Amadiro wanted, and Giskard, believing it best for humanity to abandon the Earth, allows Mandamus to do this (resulting in the situation depicted in *Pebble in the Sky*), and deprives Mandamus of the memory of doing so. Giskard predicts, correctly, that by forcing humanity into leaving the Earth, vigor will be reintroduced into mankind and the new Settlers will populate space until all the governments of the interstellar colonies form a \"Galactic Empire\". Under the stress of having violated the First Law (in accordance with the Zeroth Law, but with the predicted benefit to humanity being uncertain), R. Giskard himself suffers a soon-fatal malfunction of his positronic brain but manages to confer his telepathic ability upon R. Daneel.
In his memoir *I. Asimov* (1994), Asimov explained that following his commercial and critical success with *The Robots of Dawn*, he decided to write *Robots and Empire* with the intentions of making Daneel, \"the real hero of the series\", the novel\'s protagonist, and that *Robots and Empire* would create a bridge to the later volumes of his future history. About this second aim, Asimov said that he was dissuaded by Lester del Rey and Judy-Lynn del Rey, his long-time friends and the editors of Del Rey Books, who thought that the fans of Asimov\'s series of novels would rather that Asimov kept the *Robot* and *Empire*/*Foundation* universes separate. On the other hand, his editors at Doubleday, his hardcover book publisher, encouraged Asimov to do what deep down he wanted to do. From then on, Asimov proceeded with his plans for unifying the two series.


# Robots and Empire
Asimov organized *Robots and Empire* nonlinearly. (Other examples of nonlinear plotting in Asimov\'s novels can be found in *The Gods Themselves* and *Nemesis*.) Flashbacks by the major characters alternate with the present-time storyline. The story starts on the Spacer planet Aurora, where the heart of Amadiro\'s conspiracy against Settler civilization is developing. Meanwhile, aboard a starship, Gladia, Daneel, and Giskard visit the planets Solaria and Baleyworld before reaching the Earth, where this novel\'s climax takes place.
Asimov used a planet-hopping itinerary in most of the volumes of the *Foundation* series from *Foundation and Empire* onward. Unlike the detective fiction methods of the previous Robot novels, where Baley assembles the clues to a crime that had been committed, in *Robots and Empire* a murderous conspiracy developing against the Earth, and its discovery by the robots, keep pace with each other right up through the final confrontation with Amadiro on the Earth. Then, the robots have only moments to spare in terminating Amadiro\'s plan for a quick death to all Earthlings.


# Robots and Empire
As well as linking the two series into a single future history, the present book served to address a criticism levelled against the largely radioactive Earth depicted in *Pebble in the Sky* and mentioned in several other books. Though not explicitly stated, there was the clear implication that the world\'s being mostly radioactive with humans precariously surviving in limited uncontaminated areas was the result of a nuclear war hundreds or thousands of years before the time of the plot. This would have made *Pebble in the Sky* part of the post-nuclear war subgenre common in the 1950s. It was, however, pointed out by critics that such an extensive use of nuclear weapons as to leave persistent and widespread radiation even after centuries would have completely destroyed all life on Earth at the moment when it took place. Therefore, in the present book Asimov provided a different origin for the future Earth\'s radioactivity.
Dave Langford reviewed *Robots and Empire* for *White Dwarf* #85, and stated that \"Asimov always perks up when chopping logic with the Three Laws of Robotics, and here his robots come up with a Fourth, or rather Zeroth, Law. This works out approximately as \'the end justifies the means\'. For some reason the author doesn\'t even seem mildly worried by the implications\...\"


# Skellig
***Skellig*** is a children\'s novel by the British author David Almond, published by Hodder in 1998. It was the Whitbread Children\'s Book of the Year and it won the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year\'s outstanding children\'s book by a British author. In the US it was a runner up for the Michael L. Printz Award, which recognises one work of young adult fiction annually. Since publication, it has also been adapted into a play, an opera, and a film. In 2010, a prequel entitled *My Name is Mina* was published, written by David Almond himself.
Delacorte Press published the first US edition in 1999.
10-year-old Michael and his family have recently moved into a house. He and his parents are nervous, as his new baby sister was born earlier than expected and may not live because of a heart condition. When Michael goes into the garage, he finds a strange emaciated creature hidden amid all the boxes, debris and dead insects. Michael assumes that he is a homeless person, but decides to look after him and gives him food. The man is crotchety and arthritic, demanding aspirin, Chinese food menu order numbers 27 and 53 and brown ale. Michael hears a story that human shoulder blades are a vestige of angel wings.
Meanwhile, his friends from school become more and more distant as Michael stops attending school and spends less time with them. He meets a girl named Mina from across the road and over the course of the story they become close. Mina is home-schooled and enjoys nature, birds, drawing and the poems of William Blake. Often drawing or sculpting at home, she invites Michael to join in. She takes care of some baby birds who live in her garden and teaches Michael to hear their tiny sounds. Michael decides to introduce her to the strange creature. Michael\'s friends, Leakey and Coot, become skeptical about Michael and try to find out what he is hiding from them. Michael and Mina try to keep it a secret from them, and have to move \"Skellig\" to a safer space.


# Skellig
Michael asks about arthritis and how to cure it, talking to doctors and patients in the hospital where his baby sister is being treated. Grace, an old woman, took a run through the hospital and came to see her. The creature whom Michael had moved from the garage---revealing a pair of wings at his shoulders---introduces himself as \"Skellig\" to Michael and Mina.
Michael\'s baby sister comes dangerously close to death, necessitating heart surgery. His mother goes to the hospital to stay with the baby and, that night, \"dreams\" of seeing Skellig come in, pick the baby up, and hold it high in the air, saving her. He subsequently moves from the garage after saying goodbye to Michael and Mina, answering their questions about his nature by saying that he is \'something,\' combining aspects of human, owl and angel.
The family struggles with deciding on a name for the baby. After considering calling her Persephone, they settle on Joy.
- Michael (Main Character)
- Mina ( Michael\'s friend)
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- Leakey (Michael\'s friend)
- Coot (Michael\'s friend)
- Skellig (Main character)
- Joy (Michael\'s baby sister)
- Mr. Batley (Michael\'s teacher)
- Mr. Stone (Real estate agent that sells Michael\'s family the house)
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- Dr. Death (aka Dr. Dan, the doctor that comes to Michael\'s house to check up on the baby)
- Rasputin (Michael\'s science teacher)
- Grace (Old woman from hospital)
- Whisper (Mina\'s cat)
- Dr. MacNabola (A cocky but friendly Dr who Michael talks to in order to figure more about arthritis)
*Skellig* is deliberately ambiguous about its title character. Almond has provided public answers to some frequent questions from his school visits. The names \"Skellig\" and \"Michael\" are derived from the Skellig Islands off the coast of County Kerry, Ireland. One of them is Skellig Michael Island; St Michael is also the name of an archangel.


# Skellig
Almond has acknowledged the influence of \"A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings\", a short story by Gabriel García Márquez. Paul Latham compares the works in a research article, \"Magical Realism and the Child Reader: The Case of David Almond\'s *Skellig*\". Despite many similarities, he notes that Almond\'s child protagonists are much more caring and accepting than the closed-minded and sometimes cruel adults in the Márquez story. Also, Mina and Michael keep Skellig a secret from the rest of human society. Thus the negative social commentary in *Skellig*, regarding medical institutions and other aspects of adult society, is not as harsh as in Márquez\'s story.\'\'
Hodder published Almond\'s 300-page prequel to *Skellig* late in 2010, *My Name is Mina* (). It was one of four books on the 2011 Guardian Award shortlist and one of eight on the 2012 Carnegie shortlist. Both *The Guardian* and the Carnegie panel recommend *Mina* for readers age nine and up. According to children\'s book editor Julia Eccleshare, \"Almond promotes and celebrates freedom for children and their thinking in this lyrical book about growing up.\"
Delacorte published the US edition in 2011. According to the summary, \"Creative, intelligent, nine-year-old Mina keeps a journal in her own disorderly way that reveals how her mind is growing into something extraordinary, especially after she begins homeschooling under the direction of her widowed mother.\"

### 2003 play
*Skellig* was adapted into a play in 2003 directed by Trevor Nunn who thought it was important to follow the book\'s example of not revealing Skellig\'s exact nature, designed by John Napier. The original play was conceived from the novel to the play at The Young Vic Theatre, London. Cast included in alphabetical order; Ashley Artus, Noma Dumezweni, Akiya Henry, David Threlfall, Kevin Wathen, Mo Zinal. The play was later performed by Playbox Theatre Company in 2008.
In March 2011 the play was performed at the New Victory Theater, New York by The Birmingham Stage Company who previously toured the UK with their production, from 2008 in London and Birmingham. The BSC founder and manager Neal Foster played Skellig.


# Skellig
### 2008 opera
*Skellig* has been adapted into a contemporary opera with music by American composer Tod Machover and libretto by David Almond himself. The opera was staged at The Sage Gateshead from 4 November to 19 December 2008, with orchestration by the Northern Sinfonia.
The Opera starred Omar Ebrahim as Skellig with Sophie Daneman and Paul Keohone as Michael\'s parents.

### 2009 film
*Skellig*, produced by Feel Films, was part of Sky 1\'s plan to invest £10 million in producing three new high-definition dramas. Filming started on 2 September 2008 in Caerphilly in Wales. Cast members included Oscar-nominee Tim Roth in the title role and Bill Milner as Michael Cooper with Skye Bennett as Mina, Kelly Macdonald and John Simm as Michael\'s parents (Louise \'Lou\' and Steve Cooper). The screenplay was written by Irena Brignull and filming was directed by Annabel Jankel. The first showing of *Skellig* on Sky 1 was on 12 April 2009.


# Burmese Days
***Burmese Days*** is the first novel by English writer George Orwell, published in 1934. Set in British Burma during the waning days of empire, when Burma was ruled from Delhi as part of British India, the novel serves as \"a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj.\" At the centre of the novel is John Flory, \"the lone and lacking individual trapped within a bigger system that is undermining the better side of human nature.\" The novel describes \"both indigenous corruption and imperial bigotry\" in a society where, \"after all, natives were natives---interesting, no doubt, but finally\...an inferior people\".


# Burmese Days
*Burmese Days* was first published \"further afield,\" in the United States, because of concerns that it might be potentially libelous; that the real provincial town of Katha had been described too realistically; and that some of its fictional characters were based too closely on identifiable people. A British edition, with altered names, appeared a year later. Nonetheless, Orwell\'s harsh portrayal of colonial society was felt by \"some old Burma hands\" to have \"rather let the side down\". In a letter from 1946, Orwell wrote, \"I dare say it\'s unfair in some ways and inaccurate in some details, but much of it is simply reporting what I have seen\".
Orwell spent five years from 1922 to 1927 as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Police force in Burma (now Myanmar). The British had gradually annexed Burma in stages, and it was not until 1885, when they captured the royal capital of Mandalay, that Burma as a whole could be declared part of the British Empire. Migrant workers from India and China supplemented the native Burmese population. Although Burma was the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia under British rule, as a colony it was seen very much as a backwater. The image which Britons were meant to uphold in these communities was a huge burden and the majority of them carried expectations all the way from Britain with the intention of maintaining their customs and rule. Among its exports, the country produced 75 per cent of the world\'s teak from up-country forests. When Orwell came to the Irrawaddy Delta in January 1924 to begin his career as an imperial policeman, the delta was Burma\'s leading exporting region, providing three million tons of rice annually, half the world\'s supply. Orwell served in a number of locations in Burma. After a year of training in Mandalay and Maymyo, his postings included Myaungmya, Twante, Syriam, Moulmein, and Kathar. It also included Insein, situated north of Rangoon, the site of the colony\'s most secure prison, and now Burma\'s most notorious jail.


# Burmese Days
*Burmese Days* was several years in the writing. Orwell drafted it in Paris from 1928 to 1929. He revised it in 1932 at Southwold while doing up the family home during the summer holidays. By December 1933 he had typed the final version, and in 1934 delivered it to his agent, Leonard Moore, who submitted it to Victor Gollancz, the publisher of Orwell\'s previous book. Gollancz, already fearing prosecution from having published another author\'s work, turned it down because he was worried about charges of libel. Heinemann and Cape turned it down for the same reason. After demanding alterations, Harpers was prepared to publish it in the United States, where it appeared in 1934. In the spring of 1935, Gollancz declared that he was prepared to publish a British edition provided Orwell could demonstrate he had not named real people. To that end, extensive checks were made in colonial lists before Gollancz brought out the English version on 24 June 1935. Nonetheless, many of the main European names appearing in the novel have since been identified in the *Rangoon Gazette* as belonging to real people, with the name \"U Po Kyin\" in particular belonging to a Burmese officer who was at the Police Training School in Mandalay with Orwell.
*Burmese Days* is set in 1920s British Burma, in the fictional district of Kyauktada, based on Kathar (formerly spelled Katha), a town where Orwell served. Like the fictional town, it is the head of a branch railway line above Mandalay on the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River. As the story opens, U Po Kyin, a corrupt Burmese magistrate, is planning to destroy the reputation of the Indian, Dr Veraswami. The doctor hopes for help from his friend John Flory who, as a *pukka sahib* (European white man), has higher prestige. Dr Veraswami also desires election to the town\'s European Club, of which Flory is a member, expecting that good standing among the Europeans will protect him from U Po Kyin\'s intrigues. U Po Kyin begins a campaign to persuade the Europeans that the doctor holds anti-British opinions in the belief that anonymous letters with false stories about the doctor \"will work wonders\". He even sends a threatening letter to Flory.


# Burmese Days
John Flory, a jaded 35-year-old teak merchant with a birthmark on his face in the shape of a ragged crescent, spends three weeks of every month acquiring jungle timber. Friendless among his fellow Europeans and unmarried, but with a Burmese mistress, he has become disillusioned with life in an expatriate community centred round the local European Club in a remote provincial town. At the same time, he has become so embedded in Burma that it is impossible for him to leave and return to England. Flory has one good friend, the Indian, Dr Veraswami, whom he often visits for what the Doctor delightedly calls \"cultured conversation\". But when Flory dismisses the British as mere moneymakers, living a lie, \"the lie that we\'re here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them,\" he provokes consternation in the doctor, who defends the British as the efficient administrators of an unrivalled empire. Toward his mistress, Flory is emotionally ambivalent: \"On the one hand, Flory loves Burma and craves a partner who will share his passion, which the other local Europeans find incomprehensible; on the other hand, for essentially racist reasons, Flory feels that only a European woman is acceptable as a partner\".


# Burmese Days
Flory\'s wish seems to be answered with the arrival of Elizabeth Lackersteen, the orphaned niece of Mr Lackersteen, manager of the local timber firm. Flory rescues her when she believes she is about to be attacked by a small water buffalo. He is immediately taken with her and they spend some time together, culminating in a highly successful shooting expedition. Flory shoots a leopard, promising the skin to Elizabeth as a trophy. Lost in romantic fantasy, Flory imagines Elizabeth to be the sensitive object of his desire, the European woman who will \"understand him and give him the companionship he needed\". He turns Ma Hla May, his pretty, scheming Burmese mistress, out of his house. However, whereas Flory extols the virtues of the rich culture of the Burmese, the latter frighten and repel Elizabeth, who regards them as \"beastly.\" Worse still is Flory\'s interest in high art and literature, which reminds Elizabeth of her pretentious mother who died in disgrace in Paris of ptomaine poisoning as a result of living in squalid conditions while masquerading as a Bohemian artist. Despite these reservations, of which Flory is entirely unaware, she is willing to marry him to escape poverty, spinsterhood, and the unwelcome advances of her perpetually inebriated uncle.


# Burmese Days
Flory is about to ask her to marry him, but they are interrupted first by her aunt and secondly by an earthquake. Mrs Lackersteen\'s interruption is deliberate because she has discovered that a military police lieutenant named Verrall is arriving in Kyauktada. As he comes from an extremely good family, she sees him as a better prospect as a husband for Elizabeth. Mrs Lackersteen tells Elizabeth that Flory is keeping a Burmese mistress as a deliberate ploy to send her to Verrall. Indeed, Flory had been keeping a mistress, but had dismissed her almost the moment Elizabeth had arrived. Elizabeth is appalled and falls at the first opportunity for Verrall, who is arrogant and ill-mannered to all but her. Flory is devastated and after a period of exile attempts to make amends by delivering to her the leopard skin. A bungled curing process has left the skin mangy and stinking and the gesture merely compounds his status as a poor suitor. When Flory delivers it to Elizabeth she accepts it regardless of the fact that it stinks and he talks of their relationship, telling her he still loves her. She responds by telling him that unfortunately the feelings aren\'t mutual and leaves the house to go horse riding with Verrall. When Flory and Elizabeth part ways, Mrs Lackersteen orders the servants to burn the reeking leopard skin, representing the deterioration of Flory and Elizabeth\'s relationship.