An exploration of roses, pleasure, and politics: a look at George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world.
... on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected ... Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable ... The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker ... And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things.
Essayist that she is, Rebecca Solnit pursues her subjects down multiple pathways of thought, feeling, memory and experience, aided by historical research and the intuitive literary hunch, as needed. Like George Orwell as essayist, the subject of her latest book and her model, she deploys the full human instrument in service of her curiosity ... wide-ranging yet disciplined ... This is Solnit applying economic and social analysis to longstanding cultural mythology. How, the reader wonders, is the life-loving Orwell she has just conjured going to survive this scrutiny? ... She implicates us in these comfortable delusions ... I won’t give away how Solnit rescues her portrait of Orwell from the bear trap she has sprung on it. Suffice it to say that in the end she throws us up on the shores of our flawed, vulnerable selves through a detailed portrait of Orwell dying in his mid-40s on an island in the Hebrides as he writes 1984. That novel, Solnit convincingly shows, is not primarily about how totalitarianism works but rather about what it destroys: consciousness, experience, life lived with the full human instrument — the very vision of political freedom that she has earlier identified at the heart of Orwell’s values ... Solnit doesn’t argue with her own counterpoint. She just creates a frame large enough to contain both revolutionary brilliance and unwitting reactionary associations in the same person — large enough to contain life’s contradictions in a way that only the essay, that humble literary mouthpiece, can.
George Orwell too was known to roam, which might be one reason why Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses, is, from its beautiful cover to its impassioned coda, one of her very best. This multifaceted tribute to one of her principal literary influences is a reassessment of a writer best known for his fervent criticism of totalitarianism as 'threat not just to liberty and human rights but to language and consciousness' ... is at once a biographical study of this champion of freedom, an impressive work of cultural and literary criticism and a testament to Solnit’s far-ranging curiosity. Known for her penchant for digressions and tangents, Solnit leaves no row unhoed as she simultaneously explores the roots of Orwell’s prolific literary output and the fecund history of roses ... a delight of digressions. This is in part due to Solnit’s nose for a good story, but also because, especially in this book, she artfully trains her branching offshoots on a supportive trellis ... However laudatory, Solnit’s tribute to Orwell does not ignore his 'significant blind spots' around gender, including his failure to review books by women writers or to recognize 'how marriages and families can become authoritarian regimes in miniature' ... [a] humanizing portrait.
