My Take | What Orwell’s ‘1984’ says about the derelict state of contemporary Britain
- Reading the classic political novel, how might BN(O)ers choose between crumbling and ‘nothing-works’ Britain and ‘totalitarian’ Hong Kong?
A new novel called Julia is coming out. I think I will order it online. It sounds intriguing. Apparently it’s a companion piece to George Orwell’s 1984, but told from the perspective of Winston Smith’s equally ill-fated girlfriend. It was approved by the Orwell estate. In any case, the copyright period for the classic novel recently expired. The estate probably just bowed to the inevitable.
I read 1984 in high school. It didn’t make much of a political impression, but I did remember being shocked by Smith when he couldn’t stand the prolonged torture and screamed, “Do it to Julia!”
That has been, in a sense, a grim lifelong lesson for me. Death is easy. It’s easy to die for someone you love dearly. It’s something else to face primal fear mixed with physical pain. Sooner or later, everyone breaks and betrays. It all depends on your pain and fear thresholds. Mine, I think, are extremely low because I am a coward. At least with Smith, Big Brother had to torture him for a long time before breaking him by threatening him with deranged hungry rats. For me, you probably just have to show the instruments.
Later, when I was older, I much preferred and admired Orwell’s essays; his novels, not so much. The essays are his real masterpieces. I especially love his detailed instructions on how to make the perfect English tea. (Yes, it works, but it’s not my cup of tea, so to speak. I don’t drink milk.) You learn the famed Orwellian, allegedly British, “common sense” – which is actually very rare – that cuts through political or ideological drivel from his essays, not his novels, which have been popular and are heavily promoted mostly because of their Cold War ideology.
Given the current “woke” culture in Britain, and across much of the Western world, that sort of “common” sense is extinct, if it ever existed. There are fashionable intellectuals such as the late Christopher Hitchens and Jordan Peterson who have claimed to be his spiritual heirs but don’t believe the fakes!
Anyway, I have started scanning through 1984 quickly to prepare myself for Julia. Oh boy, how prophetic! Sorry, I am not thinking about that totalitarian stuff; I actually think Orwell has been anything but accurate about that. (Read Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spectre of Inverted Totalitarianism.)