Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
Published 1936 · 95,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · literary fiction, satirical novel, social realism, condition of England novel
How hard is Keep the Aspidistra Flying to read?
Keep the Aspidistra Flying scores 44 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Orwell writes in deliberately plain educated British English — no invented words, no specialized jargon, no dense literary archaism. The vocabulary includes some period advertising terminology and 1930s London slang but nothing that impedes comprehension. Slightly more literary than 1984 but well below Fitzgerald or Conrad.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Orwell's sentences are characteristically direct and declarative, consistent with the principles he later articulated in 'Politics and the English Language.' Interior monologue passages run longer and accumulate subordinate clauses, but the overall syntax is navigable without difficulty. Comparable to 1984 in syntactic accessibility.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- The novel embeds abstract ideological content — Gordon's extended rants about the money-god, capitalism, and artistic integrity — within concrete narrative and personal grievance. These philosophical passages are more abstract than straightforward realist fiction but are expressed through character psychology rather than theoretical argument. More grounded than Brothers Karamazov, more charged than a pure social novel.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Character-driven with a focused single-protagonist plot. Density comes primarily from Gordon's obsessive internal monologues about money and class, which pack ideological argument into everyday scenes. Not encyclopedic or multi-threaded. The novel sustains a steady, moderate density without ever overwhelming the reader.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Third-person close narration gives direct access to Gordon's thoughts, so Orwell tells us explicitly what Gordon believes. The interpretive work lies in seeing through Gordon's rationalizations — he is clearly self-deceived, and readers must hold his stated principles against his actual behavior. Dramatic irony is steady but not labyrinthine.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The aspidistra — that virtually indestructible parlor plant — functions as a sustained, unmissable symbol of bourgeois respectability and the stubborn persistence of ordinary life. Money takes on quasi-religious status as the novel's central metaphor. Gordon's unfinished epic poem 'London Pleasures' represents his thwarted creative ambitions. The symbolism is meaningful but Orwell signals his symbols clearly rather than burying them.
- Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
- Sustained irony permeates the novel: Gordon's rebellion against the money-god makes him its most obsessive devotee; his wealthy socialist friend Ravelston is the comfortable literary establishment Gordon claims to despise; his principled poverty destroys the relationships and creative work it was meant to protect. Orwell positions the reader to sympathize with and judge Gordon simultaneously, in the manner of Fitzgerald with Gatsby — though more satirically blunt.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- The plot closes conventionally — Gordon gets Rosemary pregnant, rejoins the advertising world, marries, and buys an aspidistra. But Orwell refuses to signal whether this resolution is defeat, maturation, or simply reality reasserting itself. The ending's moral valence remains contested, giving the novel an interpretive afterlife disproportionate to its tidy surface closure.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Conventional linear narrative in strict chronological order with a single close third-person perspective throughout. No timeline jumps, no POV shifts, no formal experiments. Orwell uses his plainest narrative structure, subordinating form entirely to character and argument.
How Keep the Aspidistra Flying is regarded
Keep the Aspidistra Flying holds a literary regard score of 61 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.