Orwell’s Roses is very much of the essay writing tradition, full of precise close reading of texts, mostly Orwell’s essays, books, and letters, of course, but also the work of others who help Solnit explore her case, from Margaret Atwood to Jamaica Kincaid. Roses in these declarations stood for the way that human beings are complex, desires are irreducible, that what sustains us is often subtle and elusive.” The wisdom of that sentence wows me. She continues, “It was equally an argument against the idea that everything human beings need can be reduced to quantifiable, tangible goods and conditions.
“Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities,” Solnit writes in one particularly lyrical passage. The book really takes off when Solnit presents a full recounting of the phrase bread and roses-she sets its origin straight-which became central to the labor movement and eventually the heart of a beloved 1960s song thanks to versions by Mimi Fariña, Judy Collins, and Joan Baez. She writes, “Thinking about Orwell’s roses and where they led was a meandering process and perhaps a rhizomatic one, to deploy a word that describes plants such as strawberries that send out roots or runners to spread in many directions.” What better than a nonhierarchical model of knowledge to kick start a new kind of thinking. It takes a bit to catch the rhythms Solnit builds in the book, as she provides insightful literary biography of Orwell’s work, offers moments of memoir explaining her own connections to Orwell, narrates her visit to Orwell’s Wallington home to see the roses herself and a trip to Colombia to tour late capitalist rose factory farms, and does a deep dive into the history, symbolism, and imagery we have built around roses. Both calm yet crusading writers help us witness “imperfect and unidealized beauty.” That is, see the world we live in. Despite relatively harrowing, clear-eyed passages about our current climate crisis and about the vicious Stalin-led starving of Ukraine in the 1930s, Solnit also succeeds at what she claims Orwell accomplishes. That would be the too facile conclusion one might have before reading Solnit’s lovely, hopeful book.
Planting fruit trees made a certain practical sense, but roses fed no one. Beyond admitting how much he influenced her as a writer/journalist/activist, Solnit was also moved to learn of the rose bushes Orwell planted by his countryside English cottage in Wallington.
Think of Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses as a whydunit.
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