Perhaps I was expecting too much from this book. I had heard high praises of it. Maybe I wanted it to unveil some sort of Anarchist Utopia that secretly thrived in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War.
It didn't. Much the opposite perhaps, it reveals the tediousness and futility of war. Orwell's personal (very personal, one might say) account of his participation in the war against Franco's Fascism reads like a personal diary. It's view is limited, personal and or course, biased. He wanted to defeat Fascism and showed up to war. He found the pettiness and poverty of the frontline, the endless waits and the uncomfortable conditions. He does a great job of highlighting how comraderie and spirit were kept in a non-hierarchical army of anarchist or sometimes communist soldiers.
Yet the politics themselves are complicated, the power struggles are intrincate and full of betrayal and lies. The whole fight seems to be a bit futile in the end.
So yeah, I'd reccommend it as a vivid and personal account of living war in the trenches, of trying to stand up for your beliefs and of betrayal and confusion. But I don't think it does much to instill hope of a possible anarchist society, which was perhaps what I was looking for in this book.
Anyway, there is no denying that Orwell is a great writer and his mastery with words shines through even in the most banal of passages and descriptions.