1984 is one of that tiny number of cultural products whose memes, themes and vocabulary have escaped from the limits of the work itself, and become the common property of popular culture. I’m not just referring here to quotations or extracts (“To be or not to be,” or the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony) but to its assimilation into our culture, to the point that a reference by one person who has never read the book will probably be understood by someone else who hasn’t read it either. The first reason to read 1984, therefore, is precisely the almost unique degree of penetration into popular culture that the book has achieved: only Kafka has anything remotely like the same mythic status. We’ll look at why in a minute.
For example, if I tell you of armed, black-clad police forcing their way into someone’s house early in the morning to arrest them for a text message sent to a relative, or if I tell you that the European Union paid for the sending of weapons to Ukraine from its Peace Fund, or if finally I tell you that media and think-tank sites were busy in 2022 deleting or amending articles critical of Ukraine, you might well say “how Orwellian!” or “that sounds like 1984 !” even if you haven’t read the book. If you have, you may dimly remember episodes involving the black-clad Thought Police, one of the Party’s slogans (“War is Peace”) and that Winston Smith’s job involved rewriting or deleting embarrassing material that had been overtaken by political changes. In this context, I sometimes think that it’s not so much that Orwell foresaw everything (though perhaps he did), but rather that the world itself has for some time been doing its best to prove him an accurate visionary by developing in directions he foresaw. As we shall see, Orwell wasn’t a prophet and didn’t see himself as one, but his insights into power and language and their inter-relationship are eternally relevant, and 1984 is one of the very few books of which you can say that.
This is not, therefore, a conventional book review. We don’t read 1984 primarily for the characters or the plot anyway, and if we don’t already know the ending before we start, well it comes as no real surprise. The style is Orwell at his best: clear and precise, not getting in the way of the story. No, we read 1984 because of its unparalleled insights into the techniques of power and the use and abuses of language by someone who, as we’ll see, drew on his own first-hand experience, and also because of his acute awareness of the very beginning of trends which have now come to dominate our lives.
The book wasn’t always seen like that. When it was first published in 1949 it was seen as a Cold War document, a critique of Communism and even of Socialism (which deeply offended Orwell, who was a convinced Socialist) It’s true that he took some of his inspiration from Stalin’s purges (and the figure of Big Brother seems based at least partly on Stalin), but there was a lot more to the book than that. The world it superficially depicted was the one many people feared at the time: East and West become indistinguishable, the world divided into feuding power-blocks. By the time I first encountered the book as a teenager in the optimistic sixties, it was beginning to seem a bit dated and mostly of historical interest. We studied it mainly for what it had to say about language. And in the fateful year itself, Mrs Thatcher, with her habitual gift for getting the wrong end of the stick, proclaimed that “Orwell was wrong,” as though he had been predicting movements in share prices. And it just so happened that 1984 the year was around the beginning of the slippery descent into a society that more and more resembles 1984 the book.
I’ll briefly outline the world of the book, if you’re not familiar with it, and then I’ll approach the book itself through Orwell’s life, without which it’s hard to understand it, then through an explanation of what kind of book it is, and finally a few words about why it’s important today. I hope that if you haven’t read it you’ll be encouraged to do so, and if you have, to appreciate it better.
First, though, to say that we need to understand Orwell’s life is not to suggest that his books are disguised autobiography, still less that he obeyed the fatuous Creative Writing injunction to “write about what you know.” Rather, 1984 is a book that could only have been produced by someone with his kind of experience of life, and when he talks about unpleasant things—propaganda, loyalty investigations, purges, arrests, executions, torture, censorship, the midnight knock on the door—we realise that this is someone who knows what he’s talking about because he’s been there. Literally. He is therefore one of a very small group of authors whose personal experience instantly gives them an authoritative voice, like Joseph Conrad (whom Orwell admired) on ships and trade, like Melville on whaling or like Antoine de St-Exupéry on flying in peace and war. He knew whereof he spoke but, unlike authors who write and rewrite about one episode of their lives, he was also capable of generalising from his experiences.
The world of 1984 (if that is the year, nobody really knows) is apparently divided into three power-blocs, consisting of Oceania (the United States, Britain and the British Dominions), Eurasia, including a Europe dominated by Russia, and Eastasia, dominated by China. At any given point, Oceania is allegedly allied with one of the two against the third, but this relationship changes frequently. There is a constant war apparently in progress, usually in Africa, and enemy missiles sometimes strike London. But it is impossible to know if the world is actually as described, or indeed if the war is actually taking place. Britain has become Airstrip One: the forward base of Oceania, and is ruled (as Oceania seems to be ruled) by The Party, which has no ideology except power, has total control of the media and tries to control people’s very thoughts. A few percent of the population belong to the Inner Party, with privileges and status, and a somewhat larger group constitute the Outer Party, which you have to join to get any kind of decent job. Ideological conformity comes through the work of the Ministry of Truth, where the novel’s protagonist Winston Smith works, and which deals in lies, as the Ministry of Peace deals in war. Ideological conformity is enforced by the dreaded Thought Police. That, put simply, is Orwell’s world.
So who was George Orwell? Well, he wasn’t, actually. He was born Eric Arthur Blair in India in 1903, the son of a half-French mother and of a colonial civil servant father who spent nearly all his time in India. He was born into the grubbier fringes of the English Upper-Middle Class of the day, and remained acutely conscious of even tiny class distinctions all his life. He won a scholarship to Eton, the cradle of the British Establishment, but was not a good student, and did not follow the standard path to Oxford of many of his contemporaries. In one of the bewildering directional swerves that characterised his life, he joined the Indian Imperial Police, based in Burma, where he spent five years. This was a paramilitary force, and by the time Orwell returned to England, he was effectively a trained soldier, and had seen death and suffering and the realities of a colonial society where, as his first novel Burmese Days makes clear, the expatriate community lived a highly controlled and repressive life, according to rules never made explicit.
On his return from India, clearly reacting against his privileged existence to date, he led a vagrant life in England, often pretending to be a homeless tramp, but also spent eighteen months in Paris in a series of insecure jobs like washing dishes. His was not the Paris of Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, but more the Paris of Henry Miller, whose work he admired. He also spent some time teaching in private schools, while writing a memoir of his experiences of poverty (he had to adopt the pseudonym “George Orwell” to get it published) and tried to start a career as a novelist, with limited success. Again, when he described poverty, it was because he had seen it.
His life changed in 1937 when he married, and went off to fight in Spain for the Republican (government) forces against Franco’s troops. Leftist intellectuals of the time often talked about this, and encouraged others to go, but Orwell, who always preferred to do practical things, was one of the small number who actually left. He tried to join the Communist-led International Brigades, but was refused on ideological grounds (he always was an awkward customer) so he finally went to fight with the anarchist militia, the POUM, around Barcelona. His wife Eileen went as well. What Orwell didn’t know—and was hardly mentioned at the time—was that Stalin was determined to have the anti-Franco forces under his control, and to eliminate the many competitors to the International Brigade. Orwell spent months as a front-line soldier, experiencing boredom, discomfort and occasional fear, before being caught up in the purges that the International Brigades and the Soviet NKVD advisers were ruthlessly conducting. Friends and comrades were arrested, charged with being “Trotskyists” or Fascist spies and imprisoned and often executed. For months, the Orwells lived in an atmosphere of fear and suspicion, of anonymous denunciations and random arrests in the street, and most of all of the systematic falsification of news and information for political purposes. They barely escaped with their lives, and the experience of those months haunted Orwell for the rest of his life. And to top it all, he was shot in the throat by a sniper, and almost died.
What that experience did do, was turn a young man with rebellious instincts but no firm ideology into a convinced Socialist, and he returned to England to try to publish books and essays on that theme. But few people wanted to listen to him. The left-wing media at the time was largely dominated by Communist Party intellectuals, and the right-wing media was not interested. His book about his experiences, Homage to Catalonia, was turned down by several publishers with the excuse, familiar today, that the truth about what was going on in Spain would only strengthen the Right, so it should be suppressed. He therefore struggled to eke out a living from writing, even working at one point in a bookshop, and spending some time in Marrakesh for his health. Rejected for military service for medical reasons, he became a Talks Producer and occasional broadcaster for the BBC’s Overseas Service. This experience—which also involved detailed study of German propaganda—served partly as an inspiration for Winston Smith’s job, and the Ministry of Information, where Eileen worked, took over the towering Senate House building, was one inspiration for the Ministry of Truth.
Orwell’s literary breakthrough came with Animal Farm, a biting satire on the Russian Revolution which was considered too controversial to publish during the War, and appeared only in August 1945. By then, Eileen had died during routine surgery, and Orwell was increasingly ill from tuberculosis. The popular idea of Orwell battling against death to produce a warning to the world is an exaggeration: he had high hopes of recovery, and plans for more novels. But he died just after the publication of 1984, aged 46, having done a lot in a short life.
Well, then, what kind of book is 1984? I’ll suggest four distinct but complementary ways of looking at it. The first is that it is a work of science fiction. Now the modern tendency is to think of science fiction as a form of literature invented in the US in the 1920s by techno-geeks of the epoch, and featuring aliens, spaceships and galactic empires. And it’s quite possible that Orwell, who had a great interest in popular culture and had certainly come across American magazines, may have read some. But in fact he was working in a much older tradition: that of a future-set story about a utopia or a dystopia, often with a strong political message. Literally hundreds of such novels had been published in Britain, the United States, France Germany and Russia in the century before 1984 appeared. Many were best-sellers, and some, like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards and William Morris’s News from Nowhere permanently affected popular culture and even started political movements. But by far the greatest of these writers, and one whom Orwell both admired for his imagination and distrusted for his uncritical faith in scientific progress, was HG Wells, who towered over the imagination of generations, as well as inventing most of the tropes of modern science fiction single-handed.
But 1984 has one fundamental difference from virtually all of this literature, and it’s contained in the title (which is a date and should always be written as such.). The worlds described in those books are almost always distant in time, at least a century away, and the book that Orwell acknowledged as a major inspiration, Zemyatin’s We, was set in the far future. This meant that, although in some cases events of the twentieth century, and real places and people, might be mentioned, the utopias and dystopias were comfortably removed from the lives of the readers, and could be seen as interesting intellectual and political exercises. But one reason for the almost physical terror that 1984 evoked in its first readers, and for some time afterwards, was precisely that it was set in the near future. Statistically, Orwell might have lived to that year if he had survived his illness, and for many of the book’s first readers, the idea that they might one day actually live in the world of the Thought Police and the Ministry of Truth, was like receiving a bucket-full of freezing cold water in the face. Indeed, Orwell goes to some lengths to place the novel in a near-contemporary London, where older people still have some vague memories that life in the relatively recent past was quite different.
One reason why this is true, and the second major way of looking at the book, is that 1984 is a satire. Now sometimes people are surprised hear this, because surely satire is supposed to make you laugh, isn't it? Well, not necessarily. Before the term was hijacked by television, it referred to a branch of literature employing scorn and anger to attack the follies and vices of the day, by exaggerating them to the point of caricature. The genre has a long and distinguished history dating back to Juvenal and his contemporaries in Classical Rome. Its most important practitioner in English is probably Jonathan Swift, whom Orwell admired greatly, and whose deliberately off-putting treatment of human bodies and behaviour Orwell copied. He was also influenced by the saeva indignatio, the “savage indignation” which Swift described himself as bringing to his work.
But what is it a satire of? With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the Cold War framing of its first readers is only a small part of the book. Orwell had to take his images and his assumptions from somewhere, and like most writers about the future he used his present age as a basis. More specifically, Orwell was partly satirising a popular theory associated with the American political scientist James Burnham, who had argued in The Managerial Revolution, which Orwell reviewed, that political power was increasingly moving away from the traditional capitalist class, but the result would not be a Revolution and Socialism. Rather, a new managerial class would progressively take power for itself, even if the economy was still notionally in private hands. This is essentially the situation described in the Book (which may or may not be genuine) by Emmanuel Goldstein, leader of the Brotherhood (if either of them actually exist.) The Book describes the system as “Oligarchical Collectivism”, a mouthful meaning a society run on totalitarian lines but not by an individual or a small group. Rather, the Party is a non-hereditary oligarchy that anyone can join through competitive examinations, and recruits irrespective of colour or sex. In effect, Orwell is describing what we now call the Professional and Managerial Class, the more so since, as he insists throughout the book (and the Book) the Party has no ideology: it is only interested in power, and anyone wanting power can join it and make their career, provided they accept the nightmare living and working environment, which we’ll come to in a moment.
To this, Orwell added one other development: the decline of the traditional parties of the Left, and their abandonment of their ideologies in favour of making peace with the status quo, and guaranteed access to power. The party leaders would keep the traditional party names, and still claim to respect their principles, but in fact they jettisoned everything fundamental for a share in power. He saw this happening from the 1950s: he was right but a little early. Thus, the entire political space was taken up by a Party without an ideology, but with an unquenchable thirst for power, and which used violence and repression to preserve it. Without ideology there were no doctrinal disputes, and internal Party struggles were strictly about power. It was nonetheless necessary to pretend to have an ideology in order to discipline and overawe the population and indeed the Party members themselves, and to find something to charge dissidents with, or just people the Party didn’t like.
Orwell was writing in the age of mass political parties, where flags, slogans, banners, uniforms and parades were part of political life across the spectrum. Part of the shattering effect of the book on its first readers was the use of these everyday props in the near future in the service of a despotic regime without an ideology. His Party, as a kind of sick joke, dressed its members in variants of the industrial overalls worn by the working class in factories. Today, no doubt they would wear jeans and open-necked shirts, and give compulsory Powerpoint presentations.
Orwell, his ear ever close to the ground, was aware of the beginning of all of these trends. The question was how to present their logical outcome, albeit in exaggerated and satirical form, in a way that would shock and warn his readers. He accordingly extrapolated the trends he and others had already spotted, and set them not only in the frighteningly near future, but in the most unlikely environment he could think of: dear old England, with its “red buses and its blue policemen,” its politeness and its class system, and its utter unfamiliarity with dictatorships and police states. Look, says Orwell, if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. And if a very British style of Socialism, which Orwell believed had timidly arrived in small doses with the 1945 Labour government, could be corrupted, then any system of thought could be.
Orwell makes little attempt to portray the Airstrip One of 1984 as a genuine functioning society. (There seems to be no manufacturing, for example.) The sordid realism of the first part of the novel gives way to fantasy as we learn more about how Oceania, the Party and Airstrip one are supposed to function, and especially after Winston Smith, the unheroic protagonist, is arrested by the Thought Police. There are occasional nods at world-building: we learn that the currency has become the Dollar, that the Party HQ is in New York, there are plausible extensions of the civilian and military technology of his day, but fundamentally the novel describes a society and a system that, like Swift’s Lilliput, could never actually exist, or if it did could not last long. Not only does the Party seem to spend most of its time pursuing and killing its own members, and then destroying every record of their existence, but as an institution, it seems to be collectively mad. During Winston’s interrogation by the sinister O’Brien, it becomes clear that, in spite of the latter’s practical power and intellectual dominance, it is O’Brien, not Winston, who is insane, trying to convince him that the stars are just lights in the sky, that the sun goes round the Earth, and that he himself could levitate if he wanted to. Dreams play quite a role on the novel, and the last part of it is best understood as satire recounted as a kind of terrifying nightmare, with the typical irrationality of the unconscious world
Indeed, the Party is not so much a government (we hardly see any governing) as a sadistic structure that kills, terrorises and destroys just because it can. The control of the Party is absolute and uncontested, so the manufacturing of conspiracies and the show-trials and the mysterious disappearances can only be a kind of sadistic game. Like much else in the book, the identity of those who take the big decisions is never revealed, nor how they arrived in their positions of influence, and the decisions themselves follow no logical pattern at all, and almost seem designed to damage the Party and stop it working properly.
Here, perhaps, we approach the fundamental target of the satire: what happens when absolute power is wielded arbitrarily, by those for whom power is everything. The origins of Orwell's depiction of power are complex, but the two things that stand out are that it is unaccountable and that it is mysterious. There are no rules and laws in Oceania, just conduct which is likely to get you arrested, tortured and executed. But whilst you might be arrested for not shouting loudly enough, or not paying attention during a talk, or for something you were reported as saying in your sleep, the actual charges will be an arbitrary list of crimes of treason, espionage etc, to which you will confess, after torture if necessary. Because there are no laws there is no guilt, and because there is no guilt there is no innocence. Because you never know which detail of conduct is punishable by death, and because there is no process and no appeal, life consists largely of waiting for the chopper to fall, as one day it will. This sense of arbitrary cruelty (oddly reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland) comes partly from the Stalinist show-trials of the 1930s, where the accused regularly confessed to crimes they could not possibly have committed, but also to the unwritten but tyrannical rules of conduct enforced in Orwell's preparatory school which he attended from the ages of 8 to 11, and the hyper-conformist world of the expatriate community that he had experienced in Burma. If you have ever been told by a senior manager that "I hear that some people regard things you are reported to have said in the past as having problematic overtones. Don't you think you should seek voluntary counselling?" you have a faint idea of what this entails in the novel.
Indeed, the Party and the Ministry of Truth remind us these days of some gigantic, nightmarish, incompetent HR Department in a terminally dysfunctional organisation, with its endless boxes to tick, targets to meet, incomprehensible instructions and compulsory “training”. Above all, there is the surveillance. The idea that the activities of every worker, let alone every citizen, could be surveilled in real time must have seemed wildly exaggerated to Orwell’s first readers. Now we take it for granted. But Orwell (and the Party) knew that surveillance is best sub-contracted, such that everybody watches everybody else. Thus, children in the novel are enrolled in the Spies, literally recruited to spy on their parents and other adults, and report anything suspicious. This is part of a plan to eventually abolish the family, and sex differences, and have children from test tubes. So one of the minor characters in the novel is reported to the Thought Police by his children for apparently muttering aggressive remarks abut Big Brother in his sleep. For the Thought Police (as for the Church, which is partly its inspiration) there is no distinction between thought and deed: speech is violence.
The third way of seeing 1984 is as a political novel. It first needs to be emphasised that the genuinely political novel is a genre almost unknown in English literature. Oh, there are plenty of novels set in the world of politics and government, from CP Snow to Gore Vidal. But there are almost none that deal with politics and political ideas as such, and are set around major historical events. That’s partly because the British and American political tradition is very different from that of countries like France, Germany and Italy, where domestic political violence and even civil wars and violent changes of regime have been the rule until surprisingly recently. Oddly, it’s historical novelists who have written most perceptively about politics and power: Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell comes to mind, and I’m sure Orwell would have appreciated it. But there is no equivalent in English of the books of (say) Victor Serge (whom Orwell knew), of Alberto Moravia in Italy or even the books of Balzac and Zola dealing with the political crises and wars of the previous century.
But then Orwell, for all his ostentatious Englishness, was a very European writer. His mother was half French, he read the language fluently and seems to have spoken it fairly well, and he met and learned from European political exiles of all sorts, both at home and during his time in Spain. He therefore had access to political cultures and vicarious experiences that few other English writers had: moreover, he was actually interested in politics as politics, and participated in it. Orwell was particularly influenced by his friend Arthur Koestler, whose Darkness at Noon, about Stalin’s show trials, was one of Orwell’s inspirations. (Whilst it’s often regarded as “the other” political novel in English, Koestler was born in Budapest of a Jewish family, and wrote it first in German.)
So we can see 1984 as an extended fictional treatment of the problem of Power, and especially what it does to those who want it and acquire it, and what it means for society when an amoral, non-ideological ruling class manages to take complete power. (Winston joined the Party after all: he didn’t have to.) Oddly, Orwell’s vision is not so far removed from that of his near-contemporary JRR Tolkien, who also wrote about the temptations of power. There’s a huge apparent gulf between the Tory Catholic anarchist and the agnostic Socialist anarcho-syndicalist, but they had a shared suspicion of those who seek power, and what power does to those who seek it. 1984 is in some senses a depiction of the Shire a generation later, if Sauron had won.
The last way of seeing 1984 that I want to propose is as a surrealist, post-modern novel. Now it’s trivially true, of course, that Orwell was writing after the Surrealist movement had peaked, and before the first post-modernists arrived, and it’s also true that he was not trying to do the same thing as either of those schools. But the similarities are unmistakeable. From the opening lines of the novel where the clocks are striking thirteen, there is a persistent sense of detachment and unreality to the novel. It takes place in the “unreal city” of London, where landmarks have been repurposed—as the surrealists repurposed everyday objects—and everything seems jumbled up. Words have become symbols, often to be understood as the opposite of what they are supposed to be saying. Everyone seems to walk everywhere —there is no mention of public transport—but London is an enormous city and some of the journeys that Winston and others make seem to flash by. It’s impossible, in fact for some of them to have taken place in any reasonable time, except by teleportation. It’s as if the actual London where Orwell had lived is slowly dissolving. Even the language of Newspeak—essentially a parody of old-fashioned telegram language—can acquire the haunting strangeness of symbolist poetry.
The dreamlike atmosphere of the book is reinforced by the many references not only to actual dreams and memories, but to religious allegory. Indeed, the book can be seen as a kind of inverted history of sin and redemption. Winston (whose family name Smith makes him a representative of the universal, an Everyman, or Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, itself presented as a dream) is the single “lost sheep” of Luke Chapter XV, over which the shepherd takes so much trouble. Otherwise, the enormous effort devoted to investigating and trapping Winston (“seven years” says O’Brien, the equivalent, with his black garb and Irish name, of a Catholic priest.) Otherwise, the plot of the novel is impossible to explain in realist terms.
The most interesting and frightening part of the world of 1984 though, is not the brutality or the poverty but that fact the inhabitants live in a genuinely post-Truth society. It’s often assumed that the Ministry of Truth is just about lies, and indeed that’s part of it. But really, the Ministry, and Winston’s own job, are about saying what the Truth is. Truth is literally what the Party says, and when the Party changes its mind, Truth changes. In ways that the deconstructionists could never have anticipated, the Party practises Truth simply as a function of Power. (“God is Power” says O’Brien at one point.) And the Party (or at least O’Brien) shows every sign of believing that this is literally true. Not just the present but the past is infinitely malleable, and the Party’s control over all forms of media—of memory, really—gives it total control of reality. Thus, the slogans of the Party weirdly anticipate post-modernist discourse. “Freedom is Slavery” for example, could have come from a book by Foucault or Marcuse, who argued in different ways, you will remember, that oppression and power dynamics never go away but are simply expressed in ever more subtle forms, until tolerance itself can be a means of control. So what looks like freedom is in fact slavery. But the reverse is obviously also true: what looks like apparent slavery can actually be reinterpreted as freedom. (Here we recall that religions, and even some political ideologies, have said exactly this.)
No wonder Winston feels the ground giving way beneath him. Because if there is no objective Truth, there is also no objective Reality, in the eyes of the Party. O’Brien denies that any objective reality exists at all and asks Winston how he can dispute that. He can’t of course. Some of O’Brien’s discourse is so reminiscent of Buddhist and other demonstrations of the emptiness and unknowability of things that you have to wonder whether Orwell encountered Buddhism in Burma, or for that matter the via negativa in Catholic theology. But whereas those were methods of reaching ultimate truth, in 1984 they are just mechanisms of political control. If the Party says that for some purposes but not others 2+2=5, then that is how it is. Ironically the Party would have agreed with existentialists like Camus that the world is inherently meaningless, but that didn’t stop them imposing a meaning on it, and if you didn’t like it there was always the alternative of a bullet in the back of the head. It is this sense of having all meaning in life kicked away from underneath him that does more to destroy Winston than any amount of physical violence.
And finally, and as a consequence, we have no idea whether anything in the book is actually true. Unreliable narrators existed before 1984 (Tristram Shandy, for example, which Orwell certainly knew), but what Orwell produced was a book in which literally nothing can be trusted. For a start, everything takes place through Winston’s consciousness, and all reported speech, all interpretations, memories and speculations are his. Yet he’s the first to confess that he doesn’t remember very much about the past, and may be wrong about the present. He’s not sure of his age or his year of birth, and he’s not even sure what year it actually is. There may or not be a war in progress against either Oceania or Eurasia. The rockets falling on London may be genuine or they may deliberately sent by the Party. Big Brother may or may not exist. The Brotherhood may or may not exist either, and Goldstein (who may or may not exist) may or may not be its leader. The Book certainly exists, but its status is completely uncertain: was it written by the Party, as O’Brien says, and does it tell the terrible, sordid truth (or Truth?) And what would be the point of that? Or was it written by the Party but is much of it nonetheless untrue? Or is it really a dissident book by the Brotherhood (or someone?) and in that case how true is it, and why on earth would the Party allow copies to circulate? Could Julia have been a member of the Thought Police, sacrificed by them for some obscure reason? Is O’Brien really a member of the Brotherhood, obliged to sacrifice Winston for some other obscure reason? Could the whole story take place in some terrible nightmare, rather than in the real world? The fact that there are no answers to these and similar questions, and indeed no answers are possible, helps to account for the vertiginous sense of fear and disorientation which characterises the book.
This is supposed to be a review, so let me close with a few words about why 1984 is a good book, and why you should read or re-read it. Now that we have left its Cold War origins far behind, we can see that Orwell’s book correctly identified tendencies already visible in his time, and which have become much more evident today, but which are not political in the partisan sense of the term. But Orwell was not just plucking random ideas out of the air to help in world-building and scoring a few lucky hits in the prediction market. He had a very clear idea of the trends he wanted to satirise: the de-politicisation of politics and the rise of an amoral political class interested only in power on one hand, and the increasing use of social and technological surveillance and control techniques on the other. Because he was fundamentally right about both points, 1984 has survived as a terrifying satire that continues to speak to us today. So we have the Two Minutes’ Hate (Serbia, Iraq, Russia, Iran, who next… ?) the Junior Anti-Sex League is already well established, I was at a university last year which had notices saying RAPIST WE CAN SEE YOU, and encouraging students to report each other for offences of thought or expression, books and music are now produced artificially, employers can now survey even the faces of their employees in real time … and it goes on. But unlike a lot of speculation about the future, Orwell’s is based on a consistent intellectual vision, drawing in part on his own experiences, and his own practical knowledge of politics. It’s satire, but with every passing year it reads more and more like a slightly surreal version of reality. That is the reason 1984 has lasted and will last, and why you should read it if you haven’t already, and read it once more if you have.