Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell (or Eric Arthur Blair, to use his real name). Like it or no, this is probably one of the most important books of the twentieth century, and is well worth a read. Written during the late forties, a dark and mysterious time following the end of the Second World War, and thus the start of the Cold War (for a bit of context), the story concerns the life of a middle aged worker named Winston Smith in the not too distant Dystopian future of the year 1984. The world has changed much in the past thirty years, and Winston is living under the thumb of a shadowy authoritarian regime, known as the Party, who constantly monitor the lives and activities of all its citizens. The catchphrase here is ‘BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU’, referring to the quasi-divine leader of the Party, Big Brother. All information is controlled by the Party, and history is being completely rewritten to enforce the benevolent and omnipotent view of their regime. Any deviation or rebellion against the Party or its principles is punished with absolute severity – the perpetrators disappear, and are written out of existence.

The main thing to note about the story is that it is pretty basic. Winston is not happy with this state of affairs, lives a dangerous life of trying to maintain a private rebellion against a regime who scrutinises his every move. He becomes involved in a secret relationship with another worker in the Party, who also hates the regime, until they are eventually discovered, arrested, and imprisoned. A large part of the book consists of the details of the nightmare world that Orwell has created, following Winston as he goes about his normal working life, and exploring the underlying principles that govern the regime, namely the ideology of Doublethink and the new language of Newspeak. It would be folly for me to try and explain these things here, because they are difficult things for me to sum up, and Orwell spent an entire book explaining how they work – though he explains it brilliantly. 

It is almost as if the novel is about the world of 1984, and Winston and the other characters only exist in order to better demonstrate how it all works, but that would be doing injustice to them. Winston is not a hero, whom the reader can be assured will eventually triumph, but an ordinary and flawed man who is all too aware of the futility of his beliefs, but clings to them anyway. The story is very simple, but no less potent because it shares the bench with an all-important setting.

And what makes the thing more striking is the ending. Now, I’m going to have to spoil the ending in order to outline one of the great strengths of this work, but I justify this by saying that the plot is not the reason you read this book. Even before I read the book I knew what happened at the end, and on my second read through it was no less traumatising to see it all happen over again. It’s quite clear right from the start that Winston is doomed to failure, an idea reinforced time and again throughout the body of the story, until at the end, after torture, psychological warfare and brainwashing, he gives up, accepts the horrible world for what it is, and learns to love Big Brother just as everybody else does. Just to know this does not ruin the book, because it is about the way in which this horrible Dystopian future can exist, and nothing drives this home better than the utter bleakness of the ending. If Winston had somehow been able to ignite a revolution, that would eventually overthrow the Party and restore a better world, it wouldn’t have been half the book that it turned out to be. 

The thing is that this book is the final and possibly greatest work of George Orwell, a brilliant man who was clearly committed to his idealist politics and the wonderful ideas of freedom, truth and justice. His other best remembered work, Animal Farm, is a demonstration of how the best intentions can be undermined and usurped, and Nineteen Eighty-Four is a continuation of this theme. It is as though the writer had considered the worst future he could imagine, a world of continuous war, never ending slavery, and psychologically conditioned ignorance, and then worked out how such a system could possibly exist, carry out its will and justify its means. He had just lived through a time that saw the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, systems which had caused more death and suffering than ever before witnessed in human history, but systems which were nevertheless based on a warped sense of logic. He foresaw the next few steps, and what it had yielded was a world of unimaginable horror, where lies, war, torture and starvation could be justified under the names of truth, peace, love and plenty. This book is a warning, plain and simple.

Nineteen Eighty-Four might be seen as outdated. It is a mid-twentieth century novel written about a year that came and went nearly thirty years ago. The generally human-driven technology and methods in Orwell’s book look a little old-hat when viewed sixty years on, and the ideological forces that shaped the world of Orwell and would shape the world of his novel have apparently all but disappeared.

 But complacency is foolish. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a mere straight-faced warning against Joseph Stalin, but on how an entire population can be deceived, manipulated and exploited. Truth is subjective, people are malleable. Winston was broken, forced to abandon everything he loved and believed in, just as anyone could be, or has been. And with the advancement of technology, a world that is governed by screens more than it ever was in Orwell’s day, isn’t that more terrifying than ever? If you’re reading this, you’re staring at a screen; I’m staring at a screen, we can’t get away from these bloody screens! There’s also a webcam above the one I’m staring at, and the fundamental premise of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that there are screens you watch, but which also watch you. Sure, you only use a webcam or the internet when you want to, but how long before a government or a corporation make it mandatory to have them on permanently? After all, just this year in 2013 we’re seeing a whole generation of video games consoles that won’t work without constant internet connections. We can’t escape, and we never know for certain who could be watching, and what they know about us.

This doubtless sounds paranoid, and I don’t think we’re in an Orwellian world, at least not yet. And if we are heading towards one, then at the moment it’s a Capitalist one, and not a Stalinist one, a world which sees people as no more than consumers and markets, land and homes as nothing more than property, leaders desirous of accumulating money rather than pure power as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Then again, the shared power of elite communities as envisioned by Orwell, that’s definitely a thing that’s happening – power can only be accumulated among groups of people, and to see the world governed by committees of rich people who only ever get richer, Orwell definitely foresaw that.

Okay, I’m going to have to finish this up. I’m getting more paranoid by the second. The Thought Police might be after me one day. But definitely read Nineteen Eighty-Four; you might see that I’m just working myself up over nothing. Or you might take Orwell’s warning seriously, see that though the actors and scenario may change, the underlying principles stay the same.