“1984” - George Orwell

It's not easy for me to be ob­jec­tive about this mas­ter­piece of a book. When­ever I write any non-fic­tion, I al­ways have one man (fig­u­ra­tively) look­ing over my shoul­der and that man is George Or­well - he is noth­ing less than a lit­er­ary hero to me. De­spite this, I will try to be even-handed, though I in­tend to ig­nore some of the main themes of “1984” be­cause a thou­sand re­view­ers be­fore me have writ­ten in de­tail about the wider is­sues be­hind the Or­wellian world that he so skill­fully sets out.

Of course, if we look at this book as a pre­dic­tor of the fu­ture Or­well was cer­tainly mis­taken about some things. The state, for ex­am­ple, is shriv­el­ling rather than being the all-pow­er­ful mon­ster ma­chine that Or­well fore­saw. Face­less in­ter­na­tional cap­i­tal­ism, rather than big gov­ern­ment has in­stead be­come the cen­tral force of our time.

I think where Or­well strikes clos­est to the bone is when he cap­tures the touch­ing de­tails of hu­man­ity and then con­trasts this with the cold in­dif­fer­ence of an all-en­com­pass­ing sys­tem that is at every op­por­tu­nity try­ing to wipe out the pos­si­bil­ity of even a sin­gle re­bel­lious in­di­vid­ual. In the gen­eral so­ci­ety of “1984” the sub­tle points of daily ex­is­tence are just as re­press­ing as the strong arms of the state. Apart­ments smell like boiled cab­bage and the food is barely ed­i­ble, the fur­ni­ture is un­com­fort­able, rooms are damp and under heated, the cig­a­rettes are cheap and even the “Vic­tory” gin tastes foul. For every­one, ex­cept those in the priv­i­leged realm of the Inner Party, there are no plea­sures left ex­cept cruel ones like the col­lec­tive 'group­think' of the vi­cious 'Two Minute Hate' ses­sions. Even the act of sex is in the process of being wiped out.

With this as a part of the back­ground, some of the other bril­liance of the novel comes from the au­thor's un­der­stand­ing and in­ter­pre­ta­tion of how the me­chan­ics of to­tal­i­tar­ian regimes work. Gov­ern­ment pro­pa­ganda con­stantly runs through every facet of life. His­tory is con­tin­u­ally being rewrit­ten, the of­fi­cial lan­guage is being shrunk and ma­nip­u­lated so that ex­pres­sion and thought are also shrunk and the work­ing class pop­u­la­tion is sub­dued as well as phys­i­cally iso­lated. Fear of in­va­sion is also con­stant be­cause Ocea­nia, their great power is per­pet­u­ally at war. Or at least that is what the pop­u­lace is led to be­lieve. On top of these per­ver­sions, “child hero” spies de­nounce their par­ents, who often live in fear of the lit­tle brutes.

Over­all, Or­well deftly bal­ances his po­lit­i­cal con­tent with a love story and often re­turns to the motif of the human face, in all it's emo­tive qual­ity. He has a warm fas­ci­na­tion for ob­jects and the his­tory within them - how they have the abil­ity to es­cape the cen­sor­ship and de­struc­tion of so much else that tells of the past.

This book has the kind of men­tal at­mos­phere that was so poignantly de­vel­oped in films such as The Lives of Oth­ers, a drama­ti­sa­tion of strug­gles in cre­ative cir­cles pit­ted against the 'Stasi' se­cret po­lice in Com­mu­nist East Berlin. Trag­i­cally, Or­well was in his late for­ties and was slowly dying of tu­ber­cu­lo­sis when we wrote “1984.” It is a fit­ting tes­ta­ment to a life­time of phys­i­cal and in­tel­lec­tual brav­ery and some­times painful but al­ways en­light­en­ing hon­esty.