Homage to Catalonia, a review

History 317

Dr. Van Hall

Joanna Klazinga

October 10, 2016

Book Review for Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

Homage to Catalonia was written in 1938 by George Orwell. It is a very interesting account of Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War. He tells about what went on at the front during his time in Spain, and of how even when at the front lines in Catalonia, he felt that he was not doing a whole lot of good in the war against Fascism. He recounted his time with the P.O.U.M. (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista), in Barcelona while there was fighting in the streets between the Civil Guards and the Anarchists. In his own admission, this account is probably very different from most other accounts of the events, as most were written by communists, and therefore have a very different perspective of what went on there and whose fault it was.Finally, his description of the last days of the P.O.U.M. and his escape from Spain was most exciting.

This book is organized into fourteen chapters, and is overall a fairly easy read. There are two chapters in which Orwell describes the political parties, their actions and what their biased newspapers reported about them. These chapters both begin with a warning that “if you are not interested in the horrors of party politics, please skip; I am trying to keep the political parts of this narrative in separate chapters for precisely that purpose” (Orwell, 46). If I had not been writing a review of this book, I might have skipped them, but as I didn’t, I can report that they were much less interesting than the rest of the narrative. It was also a tad confusing when reading about the different views of the political parties, because they all had acronyms as names. The C.V.T., the P.O.U.M. (which was the easiest one to distinguish from the others, as that was Orwell’s party), the P.S.U.C., the C.N.T, and the J.S.U all stood for different parties, or sections of parties, such as Socialists, Communists, Fascists, and others.It was a bit hard to keep them straight.

Orwell states very clearly that he is not without bias; he says, “I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest. But it will be seen that the account I have given is completely different from that which appeared in the foreign and especially the Communist press” (Orwell, 160). Since he fought in the P.O.U.M., which was the party that the Communists put all of the blame for their troubles on (besides the Fascists, of course), he obviously has a very different perspectivethan most.

Orwell was born in Indiain 1903 with the name of Eric Arthur Blair, where his father was a minor customs official in the opium department of the Indian Civil Service. His family moved back to England when he was four years old, and he grew up in Henley. He was educated in private preparatory and secondary schools, including Wellington and Eton.He has said that his experiences in these schools helped to determine his views on the class system in England later on in his life. After school, he went to Burma to train as an Indian Imperial Policeman, where he served for five years before resigning to become a writer. His first book Down and Out in Paris and London, he wrote with the pen name of George Orwell, which he used in his later books as well. It has been said that he did so because he didn’t want to associate his Eton educated upbringing with what he was writing, and also because, for that particular book, he did not wish for his family to know that he had lived like a tramp on the streets. In January of 1937 he joined the P.O.U.M., and in 1938, published Homage to Catalonia.Orwell died in London on January 21, 1950, after writing several masterpieces, such as Animal Farm, and 1984.

Since Orwell was an active participant in the events of his book, it is obvious that his main source of information would be his experience. However, throughout the book there are footnotes that he put in at a later time (many of them found in his writings, and published posthumously) that say something along the lines of, ‘I later found out that this was not the case, though it seemed that way at the time’, or ‘this certain newspaper says something completely opposite, so I may have been mistaken’. He does say that a lot of what could be read in the newspapers was completely unreliable because, depending on where in the country they were published, and which side had control over that area, they were full of propaganda from the party in control of that region. Orwell does quote the newspapers, but does not rely very heavily on the information that he gets from them.

While I personally do not enjoy reading about sad things (and this whole war seemed pretty sad to me), I think that this was a good book. It was well written, not terribly difficult to get through (except for those two chapters about party politics), and had an interesting narrative. The fact that Orwell admits that he has changed his views on several things throughout (from almost joining the International Brigade of mostly communists to saying he could never get behind such a group) was very refreshing. I also appreciated that he tried to present things from the opposing viewpoint as well as his own.

While I would not recommend this book to someone looking for light reading, I would recommend it to someone who wanted to know a bit more about the Spanish Civil War. Though Orwell does not deal with all aspects of the war,mostly focusing on what happened to him, it sheds some light on the events that took place during that time.

Works Cited

Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1980. Print.