Orwell’s Roses is the latest non-fiction offering from Rebecca Solnit. Its topics range from the climate, feminism, slavery, the natural world, the meaning and purpose of art, Stalinism, to the ugly realities of participating in a wildly unfair global economy.
These are interlinked by repeated returns to George Orwell; his life, writing, politics and, specifically, his love of nature, exemplified by the roses he grew in his garden. This appreciation, most significantly of planting, is taken by Solnit as indicative of hope for a better future, thusly evinced by the 20th century’s most famous pessimist.
Yet, the most notable thing about Orwell’s Roses is perhaps its structure. Within the text, Solnit discusses the rhizomatic nature of propagation pursued by some plant life. Equally (as she no doubt intended), this could be said of her topics, which spurt and grow from one another in seemingly random yet contained patterns. In holding aloft all of these interrelated subjects and concepts, whilst also maintaining a sense of the whole, one feels that a more suitable form to encase Solnit’s work would be one that mirrors the workings of an ecosystem, rather than the rigid linearity of a book.
This makes one think of Virginia Woolf’s call for a new, different female sentence, which in turn makes one think of the ongoing, ever more pressing need for the invention of a new, feminine form and, through that form, a way of seeing and communicating the world that defies the traditional, beginning-middle-end logic of masculine writing and thought. Solnit, in structuring Orwell’s Roses in this consciously rhizomatic matter, is bringing us closer to some vision of what this female form could and ought to be. In this way, the book itself, like the petals of a rose unfurling, conveys hope for a better future.
Although Orwell’s Roses hasn’t quite converted me to wholehearted Solnit fandom (there’s an obviousness, and a repetitive clunkiness to parts of her writing, that jar), I’ve certainly come away more knowledgeable, and with much food for thought. Overall, I was extremely happy to luxuriate in the meanderings of a genuinely exceptional mind, whose curiosity, intelligence and willingness to learn seem unbounded (and, ultimately, isn’t curiosity the greatest quality that can be attributed to the nonfiction writer?).
