Author: George Owell, 1949
Recommended 16+
The dream of human intimacy in a hellish setting
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four disturbed me as a teen. I hoped after 25 years I might process it more clearly but what I found worsened the malaise, though Orwell’s genius also shone more brilliantly.
What if England, not Germany or Russia, went violently totalitarian?
The year is 1984, and Oceania (England) is at war. War is peace, the government says. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. And citizens must exercise the mental gymnastics of doublethink to survive: to hold two opposing beliefs simultaneously and suppress the awareness that they contradict. People in power can say or do anything, as long as their subjects doublethink it as acceptable.
The message in Oceania is: Don’t worry who we’re really at war with, or who the mythic Big Brother really is, or what you as a person really want. Don’t feel anything, because the wrong emotion and behaviour at the wrong time betrays your treasonous thought crimes that threaten society’s order.
What you do have permission to feel at all times is fear, because, “Big Brother is watching you.” And if you don’t let him watch you, you’re committing treason.
“In the mind, it was possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness… from the moment of declaring war on the party, it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.”
Oceania is an exaggerated, technologically advanced Nazi or Stalin regime, one to curdle the blood of real-life World Wars’ survivors. Nineteen Eight-Four was banned in the then-Soviet Union for its obvious critique of Stalinism.
This isn’t a book I necessarily recommend reading. It is, however, one that offers a devastating critique of political and philosophical ideologies taken to extremes. Such a critique doesn’t apply only to extreme regimes: it’s a warning to power structures everywhere and an invitation to everyone to question reality as reported by empowered institutions.
Big Brother’s description sounds eerily like Orwell: dark moustache, brooding looks, and all. But it becomes clear that Big Brother is a mysterious, non-human, non-personal, overwhelming, eternal entity. It is a foil to the protagonist, Winston Smith, a frail, temporary human closing in on 40 years old. His tiny act of rebellion to purchase a journal sets him on a course for tragedy. The reader must decide whether Smith’s fate is worse than the one he’s already living or better for having had his rebellion.
Big Brother’s physical likeness to Orwell may mean Orwell is making an unusually vulnerable move to check his own capacity to abuse power.
Orwell—born Eric Blair—published Nineteen Eight-Four a year before he died at the age of 46. He crafted his pen name from St. George, patron saint of England, and England’s River Orwell. Despite his family being sufficiently well-off to not suffer want, he purposefully spent time as a tramp, tried at least once to get sent to prison, and sought treatment at a free hospital where = medical students tended the impoverished. This was the England—the reality—he felt compelled to know, not just know about, and the self-prescribed lifestyle that likely welcomed his poor health and sharpened his prophetic voice.
In the midst of all the dark storytelling, Orwell’s winsome writing style kept me wanting—with delight, horror and anticipation—to hear more about the fascinating fallen world he describes with such resonance in today’s world.
Winston, Julia, and other characters appear with memorably unique details that bring them to life. But what startled me was how body-aware the story is, the emotions coming across not by telling (“he was excited”) but by showing visceral response:
“For the moment he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating thing into the memory hole. He sat staring at the slip of paper. His heart bumped in his chest. Incredulity and joy welled up in him, and he felt as if a gigantic weight had been lifted from his shoulders.”
What grief did Eric Blair experience that made him so aware of the body’s power of communicating through sensation? His sophisticated relational and psychological awareness make other sci-fi (e.g. Robert Heinlein’s) pale in comparison as his rhythms of dialogue and action naturally alternate like a heartbeat.
In fact, Nineteen Eighty-Four overall reads like a mid-life confession of losing fear about what others think and, by time and suffering, to become more aware of one’s self. The regained courage allows a question to emerge: How does one find good-hearted people in the midst of evil? To stay good-hearted in the midst of evil?
The rich metaphorical language Orwell uses ironically contrasts his fictional “newspeak,” in which utilitarian motives pare down language and eliminate beauty. His imagined “versificator” that creates songs without human intervention served as an early inducement for our future AI to write poetry, stories and symphonies like skilled, deeply emotional humans.
Orwell’s answer to resisting autocracy and gaining freedom appears to be found in human emotion and in the language that communicates it: feeling and sharing one’s vulnerable humanness. For Winston and Julia, their resistance is their love affair, made an affair because of its forbiddenness. Thus, Julia and Winston’s elicit relationship becomes a nexus of language and activity that meaningfully rebels and, thus, threatens the system.
This story is the dream of human intimacy in a hellish setting.
Hear Orwell challenging idealized peacetime ethics in appalling realities that Western power structures often ignore. He sets what would have been a typical dating story today—[considered] an illicit relationship in 1940’s England—in the chaos of gross injustice and immorality being committed against the common people by lawmakers. The reader is left asking whether it was morally good that Winston and Julia tasted that forbidden humanness rather than never having accessed it at all in their sub-human existence.
This book will fuel conspiracy theorists for centuries to come.
Review written by: Jazmine Lawrence, Captain (Retired, RCAF), BSc Honours Physics, MA (Theology) student, future sci-fi author