Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

I read George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel in high school—saw the 1956 movie then too, which fit well with my taste for 1950s paranoid science fiction, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, etc. Looking at the movie again reminded me how much I associated it with the novel. Edmond O’Brien, Jan Sterling, and Michael Redgrave are not much like the characters I imagined when I reread it. But the heavy gray mood is pinpoint perfect. For some reason I don’t think of Nineteen Eighty-Four as science fiction, though obviously enough it is. Maybe I’m distinguishing science fiction from dystopian from utopian literature in my head, the paradoxical three sides of the future-seeing coin. For all its foreboding mood, Nineteen Eighty-Four is surprisingly funny in places. I didn’t notice that in high school. England (or Britain, or the UK), for example, has been renamed “Airstrip One.” I love that! But note to self: George Orwell is not Ayn Rand. I don’t want to hold it against Orwell that he has been championed so ardently by braying right-wing clowns like Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan. (In fairness, Hitchens died before Trump’s political era began and Sullivan is now more of a Never Trumper and ally, however temporary.) I like the deeply somber mood Orwell constructs here. Many of his ideas are intriguing and some maybe even prescient. He certainly understands how propaganda works, and the best single aspect of it might be “Newspeak,” the updates to the English language made by the totalitarian regime of Oceania. They’ve been working on it for decades, eliminating not only redundancies of the language but also attempting to retire ideas of political and intellectual freedom by eliminating all the words associated with them. Orwell may have been a little too enamored with some of his ideas, filling up the back half of this novel with large sections of exposition. A book banned for political reasons is quoted at stultifying length though fans of world-building might like it. He also tacked on an appendix that goes into more detail on Newspeak (which alone could well have inspired the slang in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange). I suspect, ultimately, that Nineteen Eighty-Four might have been more meager without this supporting material. The rise and fall of the love affair between Winston Smith and Julia would probably not be enough to put this over. And whatever reservations I may have here, to be clear, the prevailing vision of this novel—the surveillance culture (slowly coming true, the prescient part) coupled with a fastidious industry constantly at work rewriting and erasing history in the actual archives—is chilling, bleak, pervasive, and cleverly designed to demoralize. Totalitarianism, get your totalitarianism here. The reputation of Nineteen Eighty-Four is deserved. Something about it gets into your bones.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.