Book Review: Nineteen Eighty-Four

When my friend, Brett, who looks after logistical things for the Tax Office, nominated Nineteen Eight-Four as the next book for Blokes’ Book Club, I was more than pleased. I was sure, for a start, that there would still be a copy on our shelves at home. (And there was.) Our household, albeit without much involvement from me, had been through an Orwell period, a few years back, and The Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out in Paris and most other Orwell creations had rested on coffee tables, lounge chairs and toilet floors as various of my close relatives had worked their way through the works of the man born Eric Arthur Blair.

I, in any event, remembered the book with great affection from having read it with anticipation more than thirty years earlier when the novel’s title could still be perceived as actively predictive.

The Penguin Classics edition which I read on this more recent occasion came with an introduction by Ben Pimlott, British historian and biographer, who died of leukemia in 2004. I eschewed the introduction until after I had, once again with much pleasure, read the book.

Pimlott’s thesis is that, the real 1984 having receded into the distance, the novel can be seen in a different light. This light reveals previously ignored artistic deficiencies including a scratchy plot, thin characterisation and cheap dramatic devices. Pimlott, however, finds enduring value for Nineteen Eight-Four as a master-piece of political writing, “a non-fiction essay about the demon power”.

I am only in partial agreement with Pimlott’s assessment. Certainly, one can be picky about aspects of the novel’s fabric and structure. There are areas where the narrative, on reflection, fails to convince. If Mr. Charrington, as he turns out to be, is a high ranking member of the Thought Police, does he spend his whole life in a proletarian district running a fairly unsuccessful antique shop to catch wavering party members? Or does he wait for a radio call and rush from his desk job to take up his undercover role? Equally, the beautiful Julia’s claim to have had multiple sexual experiences had left her remarkably untouched. Why hadn’t she, one might ask, seen her past lovers disappear into the Ministry of Love? And how did she avoid, up until now, such a plight, herself?      

These objections, however, seem petty. Nineteen Eight-Four is, first and foremost, a remarkably attractive love story. Thirty years later, on a second reading, I still massively loved Julia and her spontaneity. This was impossible love. It could but end in disaster. But still, Winston and Julia committed themselves to it with knowledge but without reservation. And, as lovers do, they constructed a tiny world of domesticity and intimacy even as they knew it would be torn apart.

Nineteen Eight-Four also works for me on the level of drama. Knowing the ending, I still hovered with trepidation wondering when the fatal blows would be first struck. On the first reading, the scene where the big sleep and the empty oil stove give way to loudspeakers and storm troopers must strike with the same force as the punch to the solar plexus that left Julia writhing breathless on the floor.

Pimlott also underrates the creation of O’Brien, the member of the Inner Party with whom Winston felt a connection, the man who, in fact, did understand Winston but who used that knowledge to create Winston’s personal version of room 101 with its cage of hungry rats. O’Brien is the human face of Big Brother, important both artistically and politically, reminding us that it is real people, often charming, sophisticated and cultivated, who commit crimes against humanity in the name of the State.      

As political essay, Nineteen Eight-Four still gains strength from its form as a portrayal of a dystopian future that now lies in the past. When 1984 still lay in the future, the novel’s predictions allowed one to gain greater understanding of the political environment by reflecting upon the extent to which the novel’s prophecies had hit or missed their marks. That ability of the novel to contribute is not diminished by the passing of its nominal chronological setting. Still, the novel talks to us about the society and the world in which we live.

East Germany’s Stasi files  continue to release their story of a world in which one’s friends and family and lovers might well be betraying a person, day after day. More recently and in a very different society, the idea of creating one’s own reality was strong in government as captured by Ron Susskind’s famous 2002 quote of a White House aide:

“The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”” (Emphasis added.)

Although Winston’s life as a party member recalls various totalitarian regimes that were part of history when Nineteen Eight-Four was being written in the late 1940s, Orwell’s portrayal of the life of the Proles is equally instructive for a 2010 audience. The managed but totally unquestioning focus of the Proles on sport, patriotism within a continuous war, and alcohol and gambling has its echoes in today’s Australia. What Orwell could not foresee was that the football commentator reading out sports betting advertisements, with alcohol advertisements at half time, works just as well in a society where most enjoy levels of material well-being that could not be imagined by an Orwell writing in post-war England as it worked in the quite Spartan and materially depressed conditions portrayed in the novel.

The psychological questions about Orwell’s portrayal are also instructive. My romantic appreciation of Winston and Julia’s great love causes me to rebel against their listless lack of interest in one another after their release. Despite room 101 having produced the deepest psychological betrayal by each of the other, surely their spirits can forgive and recall their past love. Equally, however, I have memories of reports of dictators’ releasing torture victims because the dissociated mental state of the victim drives a message of terror deep into the hearts of the members of the communities in which the victims live. Why should my romanticized Winston and Julia be any different, after their experiences in the Ministry of Love, than real people in today’s world who have similarly suffered?

The greatest psychological failing of Nineteen Eight-Four is not that Big Brother and the Party are portrayed as too cynical, too cruel or even too evil. The reverse is true. The character of O’Brien, in his dialogues with Winston, projects a Party and party members that, at the end of the day, are portrayed as more idealistic than any abuser of power in the real world of 2010.

At the mercy of O’Brien and the dial which allows him to send waves of painful electricity through his body, Winston rails about the possibility of an uprising that will dethrone O’Brien and his like. O’Brien batters every argument with an insistence that individuals do not count, that the Party will endure and that being part of this power structure was what drove O’Brien and his colleagues in the inner party. The love of power, albeit, based on evil and hate, would be enough, according to O’Brien, to cause the Party to endure for ever.

Vainly, I urged Winston to cry out that this was “bullshit”; that neither O’Brien nor anyone else in the Party was in it for anything other than what they could get out of it. O’Brien, Winston should have said, was not torturing him, Winston, for the love of an enduring rule of an abstract entity beyond his own life. He was in it either because he, like everyone else was afraid to do otherwise or because he wanted riches, material possessions and, more than likely, the ill-gotten ability to sexually exploit others. No doubt, if Winston had managed to do this, Big Brother, like the Colonels in Greece, apartheid in South Africa, and Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, would have collapsed under its own weight and Orwell would have had to complete Nineteen Eight-Four with a much less artistically satisfactory ending.

Much to my amazement and disdain, my colleagues in the Bloke’s Book Club did not love the novel. They struggled to complete it. They found it heavy going. Just as I have reached a time in my life when it is satisfying to sit around and complain that the whole place is going to hell in a hand basket because of the younger generation, I am distressed to discover that my own generation is, itself, full of Philistines.

Come the revolution …

Stephen Keim S.C.