In the spring of 1936, the writer George Orwell planted roses in his garden.
Rebecca Solnit begins all seven sections of her new book, Orwell’s Roses, with some variation of this sentence, drawing her readers into an array of topics sprouting from this solitary act of horticulture. The book is about Orwell and it is about roses and it is about writing and gardening and politics and, above all, the importance of truth. Solnit seamlessly pulls all these threads together into an affirmation of the complex and often fraught struggle that is the human condition.
"Orwell's Roses" by Rebecca Solnit
Solnit, who has written more than twenty books, visits Orwell’s former home in Wallington, England, near London, where she sees that the roses he planted remain “exuberantly alive.” She marvels that a writer “most famous for his prescient scrutiny of totalitarianism and propaganda, for facing unpleasant facts, for a spare prose style and an unyielding political vision, had planted roses.” She recounts the etymology of the labor union slogan, “Bread and Roses,” noting that Orwell celebrated “the intangible, ordinary pleasures, the joy available in the here and now.” She also looks into the origin and use of the adjective Orwellian.
Most strikingly, Solnit is permitted a rare visit to a rose plantation in Colombia, the South American nation that produces 80 percent of the roses sold in the United States. There, she sees the toil and misery of the workers who churn out roses for Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and other holidays. They earn about $256 a month, augmented by overtime that can spike into 100-hour workweeks. They wear overalls inscribed with frankly Orwellian slogans, such as “Effort and passion make us feel satisfied in our work.”
Throughout his career, Orwell clashed mightily with the totalitarian mindset, which demands fealty to falsehood. As Solnit puts it, “Totalitarianism is impossible without lies. So it is significantly a language problem and a storytelling problem that can be fought to some extent with language.”
Orwell saw how the Soviet Union under Stalin became a place where lies triumphed and language was betrayed, to disastrous effect. (Solnit quotes journalist and historian Adam Hochschild: “When the national census showed that his reign of terror was shrinking the country’s population, Stalin ordered the members of the census board shot. The new officials, not surprisingly, came up with higher figures.”)
It’s easy, but not all that enlightening, to draw parallels between what Orwell decried and the modern political landscape. “The age of Trump and climate denial are of course over-the-top Orwellian,” Solnit notes, offhandedly. The unifying horror is that entire populations are in on the lies. The tonic Orwell offers is one of bracing allegiance to truth. And, as the old saying, often incorrectly attributed to Thoreau, goes, “Truths and roses have thorns about them.”
Solnit explores Orwell’s tender embrace of living things, from plants and nature to his adopted son. He was a man who noticed and loved the world around him and believed in the transformative power of the human spirit. Solnit even finds hope and affirmation baked into Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. His protagonist, Winston Smith, is not just a victim of authoritarian repression, but also someone, she points out, who “desires the life of the mind and the senses, beauty, history, nature, pleasure, and sex, and the privacy and freedom in which all those things flourish.”
In a similar vein, Orwell “saw the willingness to suffer and accept suffering . . . as part of being human and the price paid for the joys also included,” Solnit reflects. “In some sense, perhaps his unsaintly martyr Winston Smith became fully human through his misadventures.”
Orwell, who was often in ill health, died of tuberculosis in 1950, at age forty-six. He asked that roses be planted on his grave. “When I checked, a few years ago,” Solnit writes, “a scrappy red rose was blooming there.”