1984 (1949)

This book doesn't seem to have blown my mind the way it has for other people, but I respect it as a keystone in the world of literature, and I did enjoy reading it. ( )

Orwell' dystopia famously titled 1984 was well wide of the mark when 1984 finally arrived and reading it today nearly thirty years later the horrors of Big Brother, Newspeak and Ingsoc seem further away than ever. It must have been very different for those readers picking up the book when it was published in 1949. The horrors of the Second World War were fresh in the mind, there was widespread rationing in much of Europe, cities were in ruins, and the totalitarian regime of the soviet Union was emerging with frightening force. War may well have seemed perpetual to a couple of generations who had lived through two world wars. It was a time when dictators were able to grasp power and mould society into their own crazy visions and so Orwell's book must have resonated all the more powerfully. Reading the book today that feeling of a post war European society reeling from the shock of war comes across very clearly and permeates much of the atmosphere of 1984.

Orwell's world is frightening: resulting in a complete loss of humanity. Initial impressions are of a claustrophobic shabby world of spies, informers and shortages with a population cowed into mindless work, but it soon becomes much more sinister. From Winston's first small act of rebellion (writing a diary hidden from view of the remote cameras) he realises he is signing his own death warrant. What sort of society is this we wonder? and Orwell reveals more and more horrors as the novel draws to its inevitable conclusion. Winston is told:

"Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves."

This is a society based on an elite's hunger for power, who have learnt from previous failures that to stay in power they must alter reality for those who they control. they must control thoughts as well as actions and the weapon that is used is the familiar one of fear. There is no hope in this world which contrasts so strikingly with Albert Camus [The Plague] published two years earlier. Phrases used by Orwell in the early part of his novel could have been lifted right out of Camus oeuvre. Orwell has Winston say "Now that he had recognised himself as a deadman he must stay alive as long as possible" and later "The sexual act successfully performed was rebellion" In Camus hands these thoughts would be signs of hope, a revolt against dogma that could be successful for the individual, but in Orwell's book, they are straws in the wind, the individual will be crushed along with any chance of revolt in the future.

I re-read [1984] in 1984, something that many readers probably did and so was fairly familiar with the book on this latest re-read. I was still horrified by the final third of the book, which describes Winston's incarceration, torture and brain washing. I was prepared for Orwell exposition of the politics and society of the government of Oceania, which runs for thirty pages and is considered by some readers to be a dry political tract. The doomed love affair between Winston and Julia is like an oasis in the gloom, but also has it's contradictions especially with the characterisation of Julia. Like many classics there is usually something to be gained from a re-read and this was once again a five star read. ( )

OK, this is more what I had in mind for "Essential SciFi"! While I am embarrassed that it took me this long to get around to reading this book, so glad that I did. Scary, creepy, eerily familiar...Fromm's afterword even adds to the creep factor. ( )