ZapTown

So apparently the current economic crisis is good for libraries—there are supposed to be more people out reading and/or taking advantage of the library’s services as an alternative to more expensive, flashier forms of entertainment. That’s a good thing, I reckon. A lot of things people have taken for granted in the past seem to be changing very quickly right now, and if more people engage with stories or books they might not have picked up otherwise, well, it’s a small silver lining to the current crisis, but it’s still a silver lining, right?

I was going to write a column on George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, inspired by his recent (understandable) bit of internet crankiness at the numerous people who are demanding he stop whatever he’s doing and finish the cycle RIGHT THIS MINUTE before he gets the chance to slip in the shower and crack his head or something. On reflection, though, it seemed like a good idea to maybe take a page from Mr. Martin, and wait for the rest of the series to come out, first. Or at least the next installment. (A Dance with Dragons is still coming out this fall, isn’t it? September 2009, that’s what I remember hearing).

So what I’d actually like to talk about this week is a book I’ve been coming back to and parsing in the last few weeks, a book that is probably as timely now as it was when it was first written by George Orwell some seventy years ago. No, it’s not 1984. I’m talking about DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON, a riveting and insightful look at urban poverty in the midst of the modern world, of the lives of the working poor and the chronically unemployed. It’s nonfiction, but it’s terrific storytelling, thanks in large part to Orwell’s reliable qualities: His casual command of language, his empathy and insight into the people around hm, his eye for the vivid detail. You will, says the bible, always have the poor with you, and in that sense, in a 21st century that, for many has suddenly mutated from some kind of comfortable, detached consumerist playland to a crumbling failure of industry, the themes of poverty, the experiences that Orwell had in Paris and later, London, still resonate, even if the world that Orwell was describing no longer exists. A lot of schools force students to read ANIMAL FARM or 1984 in english class, and many kids grow up vaguely distrustful of government, and holding a grudge against Orwell for writing a book they were forced to read in grade nine. It would be interesting to see what would happen if English teachers started putting DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON on the curriculum.

The book itself is a simple enough idea: Orwell came from a well-off background and wanted to see how the ‘other half’ lived, so he spent time exploring firsthand, working in hotel kitchens in Paris, and sleeping in London flophouses, talking to people he met about their lives, trying to live on what he could earn and writing down the results. The resulting work serves to explode many of the myths and stereotypes about the poor—that they are idle on purpose, that they make the choice to be unemployed, and so on—stereotypes that still exist long after Orwell’s book first appeared. Furthermore, he highlights, with a darkly comic use of prose, the gulf that exists between the way we imagine our society to be and the way it really is. Consider the following writing:

Apart from the dirt, the PATRON swindled the customers wholeheartedly.
For the most part the materials of the food were very bad, though the cooks
knew how to serve it up in style. The meat was at best ordinary, and as to
the vegetables, no good housekeeper would have looked at them in the
market. The cream, by a standing order, was diluted with milk. The tea and
coffee were of inferior sorts, and the jam was synthetic stuff out of vast,
unlabelled tins. All the cheaper wines, according to Boris, were corked VIN
ORDINAIRE. There was a rule that employees must pay for anything they
spoiled, and in consequence damaged things were seldom thrown away. Once
the waiter on the third floor dropped a roast chicken down the shaft of our
service lift, where it fell into a litter of broken bread, torn paper and
so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth and sent it up
again. Upstairs there were dirty tales of once-used sheets not being
washed, but simply damped, ironed and put back on the beds. The PATRON was
as mean to us as to the customers. Throughout the vast hotel there was not,
for instance, such a thing as a brush and pan; one had to manage with a
broom and a piece of cardboard. And the staff lavatory was worthy of
Central Asia, and there was no place to wash one’s hands, except the sinks
used for washing crockery.

This is, of course, a description of work in one of the ‘dozen most expensive hotels in Paris’, where Orwell spends some of his time while working his way through the city, from kitchen to kitchen for hourly wages, between bursts of unemployment. Many people who have worked in restaurants or hotels may recognize echoes of their own experience in Orwell’s, however. It is a lifestyle that is occupied by many serving the upper-class, and once you are in it, as Orwell details, it is very hard to get out of. And in the years since it was first published, as we sit and wait for Big Brother to step in and care for us, more and more have gotten trapped.