Will Self is in no position to criticise George Orwell

In The Mating Season, P.G. Wodehouse – perhaps George Orwell’s only rival as the century’s greatest English writer – puts this piece of advice into Bertie Wooster’s gormless gob:

‘In dishing up this narrative for family consumption, it has been my constant aim throughout to get the right word in the right place and to avoid fobbing the customers off with something weak and inexpressive when they have a right to expect the telling phrase. It means a bit of extra work, but one has one’s code.’

Orwell, I think, would have approved of Bertie’s code. If Will Self – who recently put out an essay describing Orwell as ‘the supreme mediocrity’ – has a literary code, it seems to be nearer Aleister Crowley’s ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’.

Most popular

Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

Self’s line is that Orwell’s ‘solid virtues of homespun Englishness’ left with him an inhibited prose style from which he was never able to liberate himself.