50 pages • 1 hour read
Coming Up for Air
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Symbols & Motifs
Fishing
Fishing serves as a powerful symbol of both George Bowling's unfulfilled desires and his longing to return to the simplicity of the past. Three of the 10 chapters comprising Bowling’s memories are dedicated to fishing: as he explains, “when I look back the whole of my boyhood from eight to fifteen seems to have revolved round the days when we went fishing” (41). Fishing is connected to some of the most important moments of Bowling’s life, such as the first time he stood up to his brother Joe, the first time he had sex, and his experience in World War I. After the age of sixteen, however, Bowling’s family pulled him out of school so that he could work, his priorities shifted, and he never fished again. Bowling recalls two instances in his adult life when he was prevented from fishing: once during the war, shortly before he was injured, and later, after his marriage, when Hilda scolded him for spending money on “those silly little fishing rods” (53). In both instances, the pressures of the modern world prevented Bowling from indulging in his favorite activity.
As an adult, Bowling understands fishing to be a relic of the past, speculating that, “the very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool—and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside—belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler” (44). When he decides to return to Lower Binfield, he chooses his timing specifically so that he can fish and indulge his nostalgia: “I wanted peace, and fishing is peace” (107). When Bowling returns to Binfield House, however, he finds that the secret pool of fish has been drained and filled with tin cans. This deterioration mirrors Bowling's own disillusionment with the world around him, as he realizes that the past he seeks to reclaim is irretrievably lost. Ultimately, Bowling leaves his fishing gear behind when he returns home to his family, deciding that “fat men of forty-five can’t go fishing. That kind of thing doesn’t happen any longer, it’s just a dream, there’ll be no more fishing this side of the grave” (143). Bowling knows that the world he longed for is dead, and so pessimistically assumes fishing is also gone for good.
Bowling’s False Teeth
George Bowling's false teeth are a visceral symbol of the inevitability of death. The novel does not reveal how Bowling lost his teeth, but he is explicit in saying how he feels about them: “[V]ery likely it sounds absurd to say that false teeth can make you feel younger, but they did so” (14). Bowling brags that “when I’ve got my teeth in I probably don’t look my age” (1), and feels confident that they make him more attractive to women. In Bowling’s eyes, the false teeth disguise his age and elevate his status in the eyes of others.
Although Bowling wears false teeth to hide his age, the very fact of the false teeth is a reminder that he is aging. As Bowling explains, “[F]alse teeth are a landmark. When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you can kid yourself that you’re a Hollywood sheik is definitely at an end” (1). False teeth do, however, allow Bowling to kid himself about his aging appearance. Bowling’s descriptions of his mouth without the false teeth are a painful reminder of his age: “It gives you a rotten feeling to have your gums meet, a sort of pinched-up, withered feeling like when you’ve bitten into a sour apple” (1). It’s a rotten feeling, in other words, to be the person one really is. Thus, when Bowling wakes up feeling morose, he looks around his room and concludes that “it was those bloody false teeth. The things were magnified by the water in the tumbler, and they were grinning at me like teeth in a skull” (1). This macabre imagery suggests that the teeth themselves are a symbol of death, mocking attempts to appear more youthful and presumptions to trick time.
Hilda’s Friends
Hilda’s friends, Mrs. Wheeler and Miss Minns, represent aspects of the modern world with which Bowling is dissatisfied. Thus, Bowling laments that Miss Minns is “always burbling about ‘modern progress’ and ‘the woman’s movement,’” (87) and that Mrs. Wheeler has “very bitter ideas about the male sex” (87). He would prefer them to be what he thinks they are: uninformed, unintelligent, incapable of understanding the world. His attitude toward women, in other words, is both conventional and demeaning. Thus, although they attend a political lecture and eagerly sit in the front row, Bowling is dismissive: “They don’t know what the meeting’s about and they don’t care, but they’ve got a vague feeling, especially Miss Minns, that they’re improving their minds” (88). Likewise, their interest in theosophy (an occult movement), faith-healing, and seances amount to “a kind of idiocy” (87) in Bowling’s view. He can’t see it as a search for meaning—for exactly the kind of meaning that no longer exists in the post-World War I modern world.
Disdain masks insecurity, however. Ultimately, it is Mrs. Wheeler who encourages Hilda to contact the hotel Bowling told her he was visiting and thus enables Hilda to catch him in his lie. The independence and the astuteness of these women are, in effect, a direct threat to Bowling’s belief in his own independence and astuteness.
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