Ryan's Reviews > Julia

This is a weird reinterpretation of 1984, and a shadow of the original book, but 1984 was such a good book that even a shadow of it is still pretty good.

There were some solid callbacks to the original book, and some specific plot elements which made sense on their own. There was much more focus on "personal" failings and crimes (sexcrimes, informing) and especially the internal psychology of informers than in the original 1984.

The somewhat gratuitous torture and gory details are probably just a modern take on the story -- unfortunate, but any dystopian novel today would take that route. We are a fallen society.

The biggest problem of Julia is how by reinterpreting both Julia and Winston (protagonist of original book) into kind of banal losers, it removes an inspiring anti-authoritarian figure. While this might be realistic, the purpose of fiction, especially libertarian fiction like 1984, isn't purely to present the most plausible possible characters -- showing unrealistic but inspirational characters motivates people in the real world to take (much smaller) actions themselves. Somewhat ironically, Julia has a far more optimistic (although ambiguous) ending than the original 1984 in spite of this.