Orwell's Victory
by Christopher Hitchens
Penguin $130
'THIS IS NOT A biography, but I sometimes feel as if George Orwell requires extricating from a pile of saccharine tablets and moist hankies; an object of sickly veneration and sentimental overpraise, employed to stultify schoolchildren with his insufferable rightness and purity.' So writes the firebrand Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens in his latest literary non-fiction work in the wake of his appraisals of former United States president Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa.
The joy of Hitchens is that even when, as in this case, he comes to praise his quarry, he can still be relied upon to vilify sycophancy, should anyone suspect that Hitchens might be going soft. His style recalls the incorrigibly vitriolic Julie Burchill, and also echoes the somewhat mellower Orwell himself who, as Hitchens writes, 'would never appear to have diluted his opinions in the hope of seeing his byline disseminated to the paying customers'.
Nor is Hitchens' analysis of Orwell diluted by wordiness. Hitchens squeezes as much information into this 150-page book as a slack analyst might over twice the distance, covering how the Left repudiated Orwell while the Right tried to co-opt him, his ambivalence towards America and Britain, his blacklist of Cold War communist writers, the inferiority of his novels compared with his non-fiction work, and attacks on his attitudes from legion sources.
The book purports to exonerate Orwell from what Hitchens calls the 'sheer ill will and bad faith and intellectual confusion that appear to ignite spontaneously when Orwell's name is mentioned in some quarters'. The author succeeds, making the Orwell-bashers that he corrals look ridiculous.