Leonard Gaya's Reviews > Nineteen Eighty-Four

1948: Europe was only starting to recover from the slaughter of World War II. Nazi Germany had been crushed by the Russian army in the East and by the Anglo-American forces in the West. The totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Mussolini and Imperial Japan were defeated. Stalin was going strong. Franco was undisturbed. However, the war was not quite over: the victors, Russia on one side, the USA on the other, were now superpowers staring stonily at each other, their hands loaded with a new and deadly arsenal.

Orwell wrote 1984, right after Animal Farm, in this ominous post/cold/perpetual-war context, and many aspects of it are steeped in the horrors of tyranny, dehumanisation and disaster. Winston Smith, the wretched protagonist, lives in an alternate history where everyone is under constant surveillance (via “telescreens” and widespread denunciation). A place where propaganda, misinformation, history re-writing, language and thought manipulation, “reality control” (2+2=5) are pervasive tools to make every individual conform with the “Ingsoc” Party’s ideology. The result is a diehard totalitarian state, a perfect hell on earth, where individuality is “vaporised” at the whim of a spectral Big Brother and where even love is impossible.

Worth highlighting in the novel: the long interlude about “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” (II, 9) — inserted within a slightly incongruous romance episode — and the appendix on “The Principles of Newspeak” — written as if from an unknown point, far in the future, when the madness has eventually subsided. Both sections are stupefying. Yet, the last third of the book is probably one of the worst nightmares in literature: a prolonged torture and brainwashing session that plunges into utter insanity.

Erich Fromm’s afterword (included at the end of the Signet Classics paperback edition) rightly puts 1984 in perspective with its historical context and other works of speculative fiction, like Brave New World. Still, while Huxley’s satire is substantially ironic, almost jovial, the general tone in Orwell’s book is dismal, revolting, at times practically unbearable. At any rate, this novel has become one of the canonical landmarks of political dystopia. Hannah Arendt possibly read 1984 when writing The Origins of Totalitarianism a couple of years after Orwell’s death. Its influence after that, on works like The Handmaid’s Tale, is manifest as well.

Michael Radford’s heartrending film adaptation is very faithful to the novel. But my favourite film “free-adaptation” remains Brazil by Terry Gilliam. Blade Runner, too, borrows much of its 2019 Los Angeles architecture from 1984’s Miniluv pyramidal building descriptions.

The days of Hitler and Stalin are long gone now. Even so, almost a century later, in a time of political paralysis and corruption, where the most prominent “doubleplusgood duckspeaker” politicians of the world make ample use of a new form of newspeak and doublethink; in a time of threatened privacy and increasing digital surveillance and mindfuck, Orwell’s prophetic warning is as relevant as ever.