A Concise and Practical Treatise On the Principal Diseases of the Air-Passages, Lungs, and Pleura

Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth. In an attempt to escape the bogus world of 1938, Bowling returns to Lower Binfield, the small farming village of his turn-of-the-century childhood only to discover that it too has been infected with the streamlining disease. The food in the shops is made with margarine, the beer with chemicals. Worse, there's an upscale housing development on a hill just outside the village, designed in a faux-Tudor style. The inhabitants are a group of environmentally minded middle-class hypocrites who prate of the virtues of unspoiled landscapes and smugly deplore the filthy working-class industrial cities that make their genteel comfort possible. Meanwhile, they've turned Bowling's childhood fishing pond into a dump filled with the refuse of their synthetic lives. Ten years later, in the totalitarian society depicted in his novel 1984 (1949), Orwell imagined the ruling Party members working in "enormous pyramidal structure[s] of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air," against a background of an unreconstructed war-torn London ...»