Coming Up for Air follows George Bowling, a 45-year-old husband, father, and insurance salesman, who foresees World War II and attempts to recapture idyllic childhood innocence and escape his dreary life by returning to Lower Binfield, his birthplace. The novel is comical and pessimistic, with its views that speculative builders, commercialism, and capitalism are killing the best of rural England, and his country is facing the sinister appearance of new, external national threats.