GEORGE Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a title considered too esoteric for the U.S.A., appears in its movie version as A Merry War. I haven’t read the novel (I always respected Orwell more than I enjoyed him), but I gather that it has been reasonably faithfully adapted by Alan Plater. It is amiably, even if somewhat ponderously, directed by Robert Bierman, but the ponderousness may well be Orwell’s.
Our hero is the advertising copywriter Gordon Comstock, revered by his boss and beloved of his fellow employee, the commercial artist Rosemary. All would be well in its benightedly bourgeois way if Gordon had not published a slim volume of verse that gleaned a gilt-edged notice in the most prestigious reviewing medium—-written, as it turns out, by his friend and publisher Ravelston, a wealthy upper-class socialist. Gordon, affecting to despise middle-class money, chucks his job and goes off to live for and by poetry.
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