AS ONE of the masters of English prose, George Orwell (1903-50) is a puzzling case. Contemporaries knew that he was special, but often found it hard to say why. Getting him into focus grows no easier with time. His best work was political, but his politics were difficult to pin down. Shy in person, though vehement on the page, he could fairly describe himself as simultaneously a left-wing socialist, an anti-communist and a Tory anarchist.

The puzzle is compounded by the variety and unevenness of Orwell's writing. He is best known for two anti-totalitarian parables, “Animal Farm” (1945) and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1949), which made him, just before his death, into one of the first truly global literary stars. Yet their immediate target, Soviet communism, has passed into history, and the second book in particular has acquired a dated feel.

The man himself strikes a notably old-fashioned figure—tall, gaunt, rather shabbily dressed, bent over a typewriter with permafag stuck to the lip. Yet confining Orwell to the austerity of the 1930s and 1940s is a mistake. Anyone who turns back to his finest essays or to his classic piece of war writing, “Homage to Catalonia”, will hear a voice that speaks as urgently to our times as it did to his.

Locking people up

Orwell's life, ably recounted in these two new biographies, offers clues to the values he held and the nature of his achievement. He was born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal, where his father worked in the office that regulated China's opium trade. Shipped back to England as a child, he trotted obediently off to prep school. Later he wrote of its miseries in “Such, Such Were the Joys”, a vivid recollection of homesickness, arbitrary rule and the oppressiveness of “team spirit”.

An underperforming scholar at Eton, he was just young enough to escape the slaughter of the first world war. Rather than follow school friends to Oxford or Cambridge, he signed up for the colonial police in Burma. The job turned him against colonialism—he was fed up, he wrote, with locking people up for doing what he would do in their shoes—and he soon left.

From this experience came two superb autobiographical stories, “Shooting an Elephant”, a self-critical piece about the disturbing power of crowds, and “A Hanging”, a quietly brilliant polemic against the death penalty.

Back in Europe, Orwell worked in Paris in a hotel kitchen, joined tramps in London doss-houses and visited unemployment-racked regions of Britain. The results were two highly personalised documentaries, “Down and Out in Paris and London” and “The Road to Wigan Pier”.

In 1936 he went to Barcelona to report on the Spanish civil war. Not content to watch, he enlisted with the Republicans, though hostile to their Soviet backers, and almost died of a neck wound.

Spain was Orwell's defining moment and perhaps also the high point of his life. Though recognition followed, his remaining years were hard. Tubercular lungs kept him in continual ill health. In 1945, soon after he and his wife, Eileen, adopted a son, she died during an operation for uterine cancer. When serious money came in at last with “Animal Farm”, releasing Orwell from day jobs, he took the toddler and a housekeeper to live on the remote tip of the Scottish island of Jura.

The other side of Orwell's burning conscience was an almost monkish ability to cut himself off. His health grew worse, his lungs haemorrhaged and in January 1950 he died.

Gordon Bowker and D.J. Taylor wrote their books to coincide with Orwell's centenary on June 25th. Both are good, clear accounts of his life, though neither supersedes Bernard Crick's 1980 biography. They note Orwell's originality in writing seriously about popular culture, his essentially political view of literature and his philistine hostility to avant-garde art.

Mr Taylor focuses on the man more than the works, interleaving his chronology with brief themelets on, for example, Orwell's face, his voice, his preoccupation with rats, his alleged anti-Semitism and his paranoia. Though duly recording them, Mr Bowker is less quick to flog Orwell for his human and journalistic failings, which included a tendency to self-pity, a certain mercilessness towards women and an inventive looseness with facts. Orwell, who boiled with anger beneath a quiet exterior, was perfectly good at flogging himself. Mr Bowker is also surer at putting Orwell into his political and cultural context.

Early death

In particular, Mr Bowker reminds us of the striking parallels between Orwell and Albert Camus (1913-60), another tubercular writer preoccupied with the individual in mass society, who died—in a car smash—also at 47. Camus was the better novelist, but their moral vision was remarkably close. Personal engagement and behaving decently mattered more to them in politics than policy or dogma. Neither was happy in party camps. They were distrusted by right and left alike. Both recognised the violence that could result from bad thinking and bad writing—a lesson Orwell put memorably into “Politics and the English Language”. Both believed in the boundlessness of our duty to resist injustice, yet took a bleakly limited view of how far any of us could succeed. Orwell, who was allergic to theory and speculation of all kinds, would have hated the word, but in a sense he was England's existentialist.

Preachy Orwell certainly was. But his anti-authoritarian sermons could almost always make you laugh. He was a master of the one-liner: “Good prose is like a window pane”; “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” Whether his weekly column was on writing clearly, resisting tyranny or making tea, he always made it sound like a matter of life and death. Newspapers nowadays tend to have more columns than a Roman temple, all interchangeable and most of them redundant. Few, if any, have Orwell's indispensable voice.