It's Thursday, everyone! You know what that means! It's book review day!
Since I am still working on the Dark Tower series, and I want to review the rest of them as a full series (I reviewed the first one here), I am choosing an old, but very important, read to review instead. In honour of my wedding anniversary earlier this week, I chose a book that has been seeing a rather timely increase in popularity.
For today's book review I am reaching way back in my "awesome books" stash for a true classic that has been seeing a lot of press in the last few months: George Orwell's 1984.
Don't get me wrong, I love that this one (and Handmaid's Tale, another favourite, which is in a similar boat) is having a popularity resurgence, as I think it is an important book, one of those "everyone-must-read-it" ones.
Don't love the reason why, though.
But I digress.
My husband and I read a book together. It takes months, but while camping, or on vacation, or sometimes just before going to sleep at night, one of us will read to the other. Right now we are reading Name of the Wind, but the very first one that we read together was 1984.
I was in university studying to become a high school English teacher, and I had never read it.
I know, crazy, right?
He thought this was completely unacceptable, and so, on our first camping trip together, he started reading it to me.
I have mentioned before that I was never really a huge fan of science fiction. Well, maybe if I had read this earlier, I would have been.
As The Sound of Music goes, "Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start." This novel has an incredible opening. It was maybe the first time I felt an opening sentence reach up and slap me.
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
Woah.
Right from the beginning, we get thrown into a world different from our own, yet similar enough to be truly terrifying.
We meet Winston, a man who works in the Ministry of Truth, rewriting and reshaping history. To escape the screens that watch you every second of every day ("Big Brother is Watching!"), Winston begins keeping a diary, an act punishable by death.
One day, he catches the eye of Julia, a dark-haired girl who he believes is an enemy. She hands him a note, with the words "I love you" on them. He arranges a meeting in the countryside, away from the screens. They meet, fall in love, and carry on a romantic affair (also punishable). Together they develop their hatred for Big Brother and the Party, and revel in their hidden love.
If you have not read this, stop reading now. I feel silly giving spoiler warnings for a classic, but there you have it.
Did you go away?
Good.
Everyone else still with me?
Also good.
Okay, carrying on.
Winston and Julie trust O'Brien, an Inner Party Member, who they believe is secretly working with the Brotherhood, an organization fighting to bring down Big Brother. They confess their love, and he assures them support and welcomes them into the Brotherhood.
In their little love alcove, Julia naps while Winston reads a book by the Brotherhood's founder. When they hear a noise, they find a telescreen behind a painting; they have been watched all along. They are arrested and separated, locked away alone and without windows for days. Then O'Brien shows up, but not to rescue Winston - to torture him.
Here a lot of people reading are outraged that O'Brien betrayed them. They clearly made a mistake in trusting the wrong person! Well, yes, they should not have trusted O'Brien, but he had been watching Winston, we find out, for seven years.
Let's all stop for a moment and appreciate the intensity of that. The Party - the government - was watching this worker for seven years.
O'Brien tortures Winston for months. The Party wants Winston to break, to truly accept, in his mind, doublespeak. Winston is to fully accept, without question, to Big Brother and The Party. In other words, if the Party wants you to believe that 2 +2 = 5, then Winston should not consider any other answer possible. And then, if the Party changes its mind that 2 + 2 = 11, then that is, of course, the only possible answer.
“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
Winston resists (yay Winston!) until he is taken to a room designed to put prisoners in direct contact with their greatest fears. Winston's fear, rats, causes him to shout out at the last minute to do this to Julia instead.
Thus, Winston is broken.
He clung to his humanity this whole time, but with that betrayal, he gave up the last shred. The Party wins, Big Brother wins.
At the end of the book, the reader sees a completely altered Winston. He thinks as he is supposed to, he acts like he is supposed to. He has seen Julia, who has also betrayed him. He sits watching telecreens, truly loving Big Brother.
The ending, like the beginning, slapped me. No happy ending? No "screw you" to the Party, no ultimate show of individuality? Big Brother won?
Of course, Big Brother won. That was the point, wasn't it? Or part of the point, at least. Orwell isn't trying to give us an optimistic ending, because that says, "It will all work out." With the ending that Orwell gives us, he says, "Things might go very badly. We should stop that."
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
There is also the role of Newspeak. Orwell believed that we can only have ideas if we have the words for those ideas. So, by controlling words and language, the Party could control the people. Therefore, "bad", which is a dangerous word expressing thought and sentiment and strong feelings, was eliminated, instead replaced with the word "ungood".
The importance and power of language cannot by argued against.
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
Within this book, a work of words, Orwell holds up the importance of language as the last - perhaps the only - way to corrupt and restore.
If you want to see a change, do like mothers everywhere have told screaming toddlers, and USE YOUR WORDS.
Or lose them.
How terrifying is that?
How terrifying is it that, without the words to think, to act, to feel, we don't get to do that anymore? We become citizens of a world in which:
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
We love complacency, don't we? Orwell (and Bradbury and the like) imagined a world where the vast populace was entirely reliant on screens, where much of the first world chose easier complacency over speaking up and arguing against.
I wonder what they would think of us now?
1984 has, as I have already said, seen a resurgence of popularity. When phrases such as "alternative facts" are being used by government and government representatives in recent months, it hasn't taken many to find the flashing neon sign pointing out the link to doublespeak. What are alternative facts other than saying 2 + 2 = 5?
This book is on my list for options for independent novel studies for my students, and it is always one of the highest chosen, and highest rated.
While the reasons that people are turning to this classic more and more now are discouraging, there is something comforting when people look at the world around them, and pull up a book to make it make sense.
Orwell's hero, Winston, is not particularly likable. He is cowardly, frail, sickly even. He doesn't particularly like women, save Julia, and is as far from the dashing, brave rogue of film and page that we have come to expect.
Which is probably why he is so compelling. We could not identify with a powerful man in a book about a loss of power. When there is something, some hint at a dystopian future in reality, it is easy to sit back and let those brave heroes save the day. But Winston was not a brave hero. He fell into his situation, and did not feel like he had many other alternatives.
He doesn't even win.
And that's the point. We read the book, and reread it, and study it, and debate it, because we see Winston's struggles as being worth it, even though he doesn't ultimately win.
His story, fiction though it may be, is told.
And the point is, he tried.
And that is something with which we can, maybe, hopefully, identify.
Have you reread this popular classic since its recent resurgence? What do you think of the role of literature to make sense of reality?
I'd love to hear your comments below, or contact me through my contact page (it's not just a clever title!). And while you're there, don't forget to subscribe to my monthly newsletter! I have a pretty cool piece coming up in the next one that I am very excited to share with you!