50 pages • 1 hour read
Coming Up for Air
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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 1 Summary
Bowling returns from his day out in London, still unsure of how to spend the £17 he is keeping secret from his wife. He and Hilda go to a meeting of the Left Book Club featuring a special guest speaker; Bowling notes condescendingly that Hilda doesn’t know who the speaker is. He is unsurprised to find that the lecture is on Adolf Hitler and the rise of fascism or that its warnings about war are similar to those he reads in the newspaper, and he quickly stops listening. Although Hilda and her friends are sitting in the front row and appear to be engaged, Bowling speculates that they cannot understand the lecture. He is surprised to find that the lecturer seems to truly believe in what he’s saying, and believes that he is full of hate. Bowling speculates that what the man really wants is to commit violence.
Bowling describes the other members of the limited audience. He sees two old men who he knows belong to the town’s Labour Party, and speculates that their political movement has changed dramatically during the men’s lifetime. He suggests that these old men would be confused by the fact that, whereas the Labour Party once advocated for poor people in Britain, it now advocates for Jewish people abroad. Also attending the lecture are a group of young communists and a young Jewish man, whom Bowling describes as a Trotskyist. Bowling wonders whether the communists actually care about the war, or whether they just want the glory and honor they think service in the war will bring them. At the end of the meeting, the young men draw Bowling into a debate with the speaker, asking if he’d fight to defend Britain from fascism. Bowling responds negatively, saying that the boys don’t understand the reality of war and wouldn’t support it if they did. The young men dismiss him, and Bowling speculates that they see him as a relic.
Dissatisfied and upset, Bowling decides to visit his friend Porteous, a retired schoolmaster who keeps late hours and offers Bowling an intellectual challenge. Bowling admits that he doesn’t understand everything Porteous says, but he appreciates the academic atmosphere and romantic worldview these visits offer. Bowling explains that Porteous considers the modern world—meaning, in his mind, the last 2,000 years—to be a disaster compared to the ancient world, and Bowling finds this perspective comforting. On this visit, however, Porteous’s dismissive response to Bowling’s anxieties about Hitler and the war lead Bowling to reconsider his opinion. Porteous reads Bowling a poem, and Bowling realizes that Porteous has already read him this very poem in the very same tone of voice. As he leaves Porteous’s home, he thinks that the schoolmaster is a relic of the old world.
Part 3, Chapter 2 Summary
Chapter 2 begins two months later, on a beautiful March day—the first warm and sunny day of the year—as Bowling is driving between appointments. Spotting a field of primroses so beautiful he feels compelled to pull over, he decides to pick them and considers bringing some home to Hilda. As he approaches the empty field, Bowling is careful to watch for anyone nearby. He notices a small pile of white embers, and speculates that an unhoused person recently lit a fire. As he picks the primroses, Bowling begins to feel happy, and he thinks that the spirit of life is like a glowing ember, burning bright through the ash. Bowling takes out his teeth and imagines what he looks like before deciding that it doesn’t matter. He thinks that he feels alive, despite the fact that he’s old and no women want to sleep with him.
As he walks through the field, Bowling considers the multitude of life teeming within a small pond. He assures the reader that he’s not overly sentimental about nature and acknowledges that his experience in the war has sometimes made it difficult to appreciate flowers. Bowling speculates that anxieties about the upcoming war have isolated people from the miracles of nature. He wonders what his life would be like if war and fascism came to England: He imagines that his life would remain much the same, and that his wife and children would hardly notice the difference.
After a while, Bowling notices an oncoming car and becomes suddenly self-conscious, thinking about how ridiculous he must look with his bowler hat and bouquet. The sight of young people in the car inspires him to return to Lower Binfield, where he plans to use his remaining £12 for a week’s secret vacation. Bowling imagines that returning to Lower Binfield will be a giant release, as though he were a sea turtle coming up for air and that the peaceful feeling he had as a child will return. He also wants to return to Binfield House and try to catch the giant fish he saw swimming in the secret pond decades prior. He is delighted by the thought of how big the fish are now.
Part 3, Chapter 3 Summary
The action of Chapter 3 occurs on a sunny day in mid-June, three months after Bowling first decides to visit Lower Binfield. He explains that the plan has come off more easily than he’d expected: He has taken a week’s vacation from his job and lied to Hilda, telling her that he’d be in Birmingham for work. Anxious that she would try to write to him, Bowling asked a fellow salesman who said he’d be passing through Birmingham to send Hilda a letter from the hotel where he told her he was staying, explaining that he’d had to move and she shouldn’t write him. He feels confident that, even if Hilda is suspicious, she won’t be able to unravel his plan.
Bowling details his beautiful, peaceful drive through the countryside, which he describes as looking like a woman he would “want to lie on” (108). While driving through the business district, Bowling begins to feel guilty about the lies he’s telling, and he decides to take an alternate route out of town that will take him along familiar paths. He explains that he feels that if he remains within his business district, he won’t be breaking any rules. He has a nagging impulse to cancel the plan, and confess everything to his wife. At a major intersection, he briefly considers turning around, but then decides to proceed.
As soon as Bowling turns onto the road that will eventually take him to Lower Binfield, he begins to feel paranoid, as though he’s being followed. Bowling imagines his wife and her friends chasing him, with his children running close behind. Behind his family, Bowling imagines a great line of his bosses and their bosses and all of the higher-ups in his company also chasing him, along with political figures such as the British Home Secretary, foreign leaders including Hitler and Mussolini, religious leaders ranging from the pope to English bishops, and social authorities such as the Temperance League, which regulated alcohol consumption, and Scotland Yard, the police. Bowling imagines these figures going after him for trying to avoid the present and calling for him to stop. Bowling keeps driving until he misses the last opportunity to turn back. He reflects that his plan is the result of all the thinking he did on the day back in January when he got his new false teeth.
Part 3 Analysis
The episode that centers on the anti-fascist lecturer suggests that Bowling’s criticism of Hilda’s intelligence is rooted in his own intellectual insecurity. At the meeting, Bowling imagines that Hilda and her friends are too stupid to understand the lecture: “Was this improving her mind, or wasn’t it? If only she could make out what it was all about” (91). He describes his wife and her friends as “lumps of pudding” (91) incapable of understanding or absorbing the information presented in the lecture. This is a clear example of Bowling as an unreliable narrator: Although Bowling himself admits that “there are more ways than one of listening” (92), his disdain for Hilda means that he automatically reads her attitude in the meeting as confusion. He also does not acknowledge that contrary to his view of Hilda as being utterly uninterested in the world or current events, she is quite engaged, unlike him. Whereas Hilda and her friends “had planked themselves in the front row” (89), Bowling sits in the back, where his mind wanders. His inclination to think about the past is reinforced in his visit to Porteous, the retired school master, who dismisses the modern world. He also dismisses Bowling, as Bowling recalls one of their conversations: “[Porteous] tells me sometimes that it’s a pity I’m ‘insensible to beauty,’ which I suppose is a polite way of saying that I’ve got no education” (96). Although Bowling doesn’t acknowledge it, this is exactly the kind of condescending attitude he has toward Hilda, and the fact that Bowling repeats this remark suggests that his own condescension to Hilda may be a response to his own insecurity.
Although Bowling directly addresses the reader throughout the novel in a way that draws the reader into his story, he also shows himself to be divided. Thus, he both takes pleasure in his isolation in the primrose field—“not a soul in sight” (101), “I was alone, quite alone,” (102)—and betrays anxiety about being seen—“lucky there was no one to see me” (102). In that anxiety, he sees himself as he imagines others would see him, as “a fat man in a bowler hat holding a bunch of primroses! It wouldn’t look right at all” (104). Again, he cannot live in the moment, even one in which picking primroses alone brings him great pleasure.
Bookended by references to the January day of Part 1, Part 3 begins with Bowling’s recollection that when “I came home that evening, I was still in doubt as to what I’d spend my seventeen quid on” (89), and ends with his intention to put into action “the idea which, in a dim sort of way, had begun to form itself in my mind the day I got my new false teeth” (109). In effect, Parts 1 and 3 together both circle around his entire life up to that point, as recounted in Part 2, and prefigure his effort to return to the past, which is, of course, impossible, as he soon learns.
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