Nineteen Eighty-Four

"In some parts of the world, people do not care about Nineteen Eighty-Four too much because they think it’s a thing of the past now that the Cold War has ended and the former Soviet Union has collapsed. But to Chinese intellectuals, it’s still very important for their understanding of what’s happening inside China. Nineteen Eighty-Four is seriously read in China by intellectuals, who see similarities between the world of George Orwell and present-day China, though they also know there are a lot of differences. Nineteen Eighty-Four describes a society of scarcity, and wherever you turn to, you’re being watched by Big Brother. It’s a little bit different in China because [contemporary China] is a society of abundance, and you probably enjoy certain personal freedoms."

". This is perhaps an odd choice for this list, but it’s just a brilliant book and I think fiction can explore human nature and the nature of government just as well as nonfiction. Obviously, it’s a story about the dangers of authoritarian states, drawing parallels with Communism , but if you reread it today there is resonance. For example, Orwell talks about the perpetual war that exists between these three super-states and which drives the economy – that tallies with the long war against Islamo-fascism that the War on Terror became. And propaganda is very strong in the book and they have this concept of ‘blackwhite’, which is the ability to accept the ‘truth’ the Party puts out, however crazy it might seem. Also there’s the concept of the ‘unperson’ in the book, people who have been erased from history. This has parallels with extraordinary rendition and Guantanomo Bay where people were ‘disappeared’. Some of what he was saying back in the 40s has so much resonance now. Orwellian has come to mean the kind of surveillance state we live in today, with all the CCTV. It’s not a prophetic book but it’s a warning. The language of Newspeak has given us wonderful words, the language the government brings in to replace English in the book. The one I really like is ‘doublethink’ which is reality control and holding two completely contradictory beliefs in one’s mind at the same time and accepting both of them. It’s such a wonderful description of the way human psychology works, particularly when we’re duped into believing completely ludicrous things by governments. These recommendations were last updated August 3, 2017."

"Most Orwell studies and Orwell biography in general is an exercise in teleology, in that you start with the achievement of Nineteen Eighty-Four and then you work backwards to try and isolate the various factors in Orwell’s life and previous writing that would have encouraged him to produce it. One of the fascinations about Nineteen Eighty-Four is how long it took Orwell to write it. He got the idea in November 1943 having observed the Tehran conference, which was when the Allied leaders Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. This was about 18 months before the Second World War ended, but already they were beginning to sit down and divide the post-war world. This gave Orwell his idea of what he calls ‘zones of influence’. The post-war world that he projects in Nineteen Eighty-Four is divided into three contending superpowers. In one of them, Oceania (based on London), Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth, and has the job of basically airbrushing people out of history. So, if particular politicians fall out of favor, they are literally to be expunged from the printed record of previous life. “One of the fascinations about Nineteen Eighty-Four is how long it took Orwell to write it” Like all the other Orwell heroes—and even like the pigs in Animal Farm , the novel written before Nineteen Eighty-Four —Winston rebels against what he sees as a corrupt, intrusive, authoritarian and autocratic system which is spying on him and controlling his life. These great extraneous forces that all Orwell’s heroes and heroines do something about; he rebels against it by having this love affair with Julia, ‘the girl from the fiction department’, as she’s called. He procures a copy of a great subversive book, Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Of course, it all goes wrong. Their cover is blown; the love nest they have above Mr Charrington’s antique shop in a very thinly projected version of post-war London is raided by the Thought Police, and he is taken to be re-educated. Like all Orwell’s other characters, he comes out having been defeated by the institutions and the mental landscape that he’s presumed to rebel against. It’s the most dramatic version of that sort of rebellion, or attempt to rebel, that I would argue lies at the heart of all Orwell’s novels. The real horror of Nineteen Eighty-Four , quite apart from the cage full of rats, is surveillance. Everybody is spied upon and invigilated to the point where there are telescreens sitting on the walls, observing your every movement. But also, through Newspeak, the artificial language developed to meet the demands of Ingsoc, Oceania’s leaders are trying to develop a linguistic process that will constrain thought. This is a really terrifying thing. It’s not so much that you are being spied upon—it’s that language is being systematically reduced and codified. The premise is that ultimately, you won’t actually be able to think independently because of the way language has been tampered with by the leaders. The idea is that famous quote, “to make windows into men’s souls,” meaning that everyone is constrained in ways they may not even know. In terms of how technology is working in our modern surveillance powers, it’s a terrifyingly prophetic book in some of its implications for 21st-century human life. Orwell would deny that it was prophecy; he said it was a warning. But in fact, distinguished Orwell scholar Professor Peter Davis once made a list of all the things that Orwell got right, and it was a couple of fairly long paragraphs, and it was really rather terrifying. In comparison with Orwell’s other books, it’s an odd novel. It took him such a long time to write. And there’s a hallucinogenic quality to it as well, a luridness that some medical experts have suggested has to do with Orwell’s health while he wrote it, because he was dying of tuberculosis while finishing it off. It has this ragged, end-of-tether quality that makes you wonder what the book might have been like if he hadn’t been so ill when he wrote it. In some ways, despite the number of drafts it went through, it still has a provisional quality—the sense that he’s still working his way to what he really thinks. I sometimes wonder whether it might have been a rather different book if he’d lived longer or been in better health while he was writing it. The hard left, the extreme left, disliked Nineteen Eighty-Four when it was published because they thought it was an attack on the Soviet Union. But Orwell said it was an attack on totalitarianism per se ; it’s as anti-fascist as it is anti-Communist. It was always assumed that once the sell-by date had passed, that once 1984 had come and gone, that the novel would lose its relevance. But in fact, that didn’t happen at all—if anything, it became even more pertinent to the national situation. It’s celebrating its 70th anniversary this year and it seems just as relevant to the world of the 21st century as it did to the world of the incipient Cold War in the early 1940s. “It’s a terrifyingly prophetic book in some of its implications for 21st-century human life” The other underlying theme to it that I would point out is that it’s often thought of as this great doomed love story of lovers Winston and Julia who’re rebelling against this terribly prescriptive regime that’s trying to shoot them down. But I’ve always thought that Julia was the honeypot; that she’d been put there to lead him astray and that she’s actually in league with his interrogators. One of the messages of Nineteen Eighty-Four , unfortunately, is that the people we love are in some cases calculated to betray us. It’s a very sparsely populated novel. It hasn’t got that great kaleidoscopic cast that some of Orwell’s books have. It’s a very claustrophobic, very introverted novel. Yet it’s not wholly without hope. The message is not 100% pessimistic—if there’s hope, it lies in the proles. There’s also the appendix about Newspeak, which is obviously written at some point in the future, when Newspeak is regarded in historical terms. You have the feeling that some kind of life has moved on and things have actually changed in the world of 1984 in which it was set. That ambiguity is not without comfort and not without hope. It was a huge phenomenon. It was an international bestseller; it was a Book of the Month Club selection in America; it sold huge amounts of copies. It made a lot of money which Orwell would never live to see because he was dying. He sat there on his hospital bed and when friends congratulated him on the success of the novel, he said, “Ah, but it’s fairy gold.” Even before he died, Orwell knew that as he saw it his message was going to be misinterpreted. He anticipated that it was going to be picked up and weaponized by the American right, which is what happened; the CIA started underwriting films of it and it was very much a propaganda weapon in the opening salvos of the Cold War. One of Orwell’s last acts, actually, before he died was to issue a statement saying that this was not intended simply as an attack on the Soviet Union, it was intended as an attack on any form of authoritarian regime that denies human liberty. But obviously there wasn’t anything he could do about that. For all this, it survived with almost universal enthusiasm. There are still people that dislike it on the grounds that it attacks the Soviet Union, one of our great allies in the Second World War. As a piece of propaganda, it still tends to unite politicians of pretty much all sides in favor of it. I suppose we see him as such as important figure . . . well, there are so many reasons. Obviously there is the extraordinary political impact of those two books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four , actually releasing out of the barrel a number of highly unpleasant but necessary truths about the way oligarchy and authoritarianism works in the mid-20th century, at a time when a lot of people were determined that those things shouldn’t be said. When Orwell was trying to get Animal Farm published in the mid 1940s, it was rejected by at least one English publishing firm because they had been recommended to turn it down by the Ministry of Information on the grounds that it was politically inadvisable, given that the Soviet Union were our allies. And Peter Smollett, the man who’d advised that the book be rejected, was actually a Soviet spy. That just shows you how convoluted the situation was in Britain in the mid-1940s. There’s also the simple fact of Orwellian style. There’s that famous remark of his: “Good prose is like a windowpane”—which is not something I wholly agree with, by the way. But as a stylistic influence, Orwell is hugely important. The plainness, directness, and immediacy of his style, the way in which he grabs the reader and places him in the world he’s writing about, were all enormously influential. If you look at the British writing of the 1950s and 1960s that followed, it’s absolutely drenched in Orwell’s influence. He taught whole generations that came after him to write. It’s not exaggerating the case to say that if you were going to erect a pantheon of the great British writers as currently conceived, you’d have Shakespeare , Dickens and Orwell . Those would be the three. That’s how much he has come to dominate the literary landscape of his time and afterwards."

"Similar to Sillitoe, with Orwell, there are a few books of his I could have chosen but there is something about 1984 that still lurks within society. It’s a story about people struggling against a system that is suppressing individuals and lacks all humanity, it just wants people to be slaves. I think, at times, we all feel like we’re in some sort of 1984 scenario to a greater or lesser extent. Particularly in some countries. Though here in the United Kingdom in 2018, it’s probably less so. It depends how deep you go into questioning things. I’m not one who personally goes around with conspiracy theories, but I think it’s good to see what the problem could be, in order to avoid the problem. And, I think the idea of the excesses of dehumanisation is well-captured in 1984. Well, the moment, near the end, where the main character, Winston Smith, says the most haunting line, “Not me. Do it to her.” That cowardice is a human imperfection. And then having to live with that. You wonder how many people would rise above it. Did you know George Orwell’s original title was ‘1948’? It was originally titled 1948, but the publisher said to him that was too close. They had to push it back, so he just changed it around to 1984. I’ve been in room 101, at the BBC, which he refers to in the book. He worked at BBC Radio and they still have all the rooms there that he worked in. So, it’s quite weird. There is a quote of George Orwell on the outside of the BBC building, “ If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.”"

"I think torture is not just the physical torture that we all associate with the word. It is also several forms of psychological and mental torture that can happen even on a massive scale. Of course 1984 came and went and we didn’t have the kind of dramatic tyranny George Orwell predicted. But, perhaps we didn’t have it in 1984 because of his book 35 years earlier. I think it does alert us to the danger of unfettered state power, which under any circumstance always ends up committing violations against individuals and particularly the kind of violation that we associate with the word torture."

"This is satire more in the Roman mode. The usual definition of satire is humour used to a moral end or purpose and there’s certainly a moral purpose to 1984 but it’s not funny really. I mean there is a certain dark humour to rewriting history and things going down a memory hole. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s eerily predictive of the sort of video camera surveillance world that we now live in. It would be interesting to update 1984 and make all of the things that Orwell foresaw more annoying than dangerous. Well, some of them do get pretty dangerous, but things like television that looks back at you turns out to be a real pain in the ass more than an instrument of government control. We’ve come into the world of 1984 but it turns out to be 1984-Lite . Sad in a way. Sad, but at the same time quite a relief. Sad, but a relief."

"This is the ultimate dystopia written by someone who wasn’t just one of the greatest of all journalists, but one of the most prescient. Orwell is of perennial fascination to me because, like Dickens , and a bit like me, he straddles the world of investigative journalism and fiction. He also deliberately chose to experience different levels of society, which I believe is essential for a novelist interested in the truth about the way we live now. He wrote this book in 1948, when he was dying of tuberculosis, in a great burst of passionate determination, because he could see long before other people where totalitarianism and communism were heading. Animal Farm had told it as a kind of dark fairy-tale, but this was the culmination. The intellectual dishonesty of the Left, which refused to see how evil Stalin was, is despicable, and Orwell was brave enough to stand up to his friends as well as his enemies. Orwell saw the death of the dream at first-hand in Spain. He was in contact with a lot of communists, and fought on their sides against Fascism but, as Stalin’s Russia gained power, he could see this dream of equality that so many idealistic and young people have shared leaves a nightmare, just like Fascism. Anything other than democracy and truth leaves the jackboot stamping eternally into the human face, as Winston realises. His hero Winston, named, of course, after Winston Churchill, is betrayed even by the one person he thinks he can totally love and trust. He is broken forever by Big Brother, and the novel’s horrendous ending – with the rat and the face and the thing that he most fears breaking his spirit – is unforgettable. 1984 is a novel that changed the world by warning it of the consequences of bigger and bigger blocks of power, more and more lies, and citizens being spied on by authority."

"I read this, like most people do, when I was in my mid-teens. At that stage I was a classicist and I had no thought of doing anything about Russian history. I think, looking back, this was the book which influenced me more than any other when I came to take up historical study, because of its astonishing insight into totalitarian regimes. “I think Orwell, without ever having gone to the USSR, really did understand it from the outside brilliantly.” And I think that one of the great things about Orwell’s account of totalitarianism is not just the tremendous power that 20th-century dictatorships have exercised, but also how sordid and squalid the living conditions are for many of the people there. And I’m impressed by how individuals, with any independence of mind, still managed to survive those conditions. In other words, the book looks at how order and disorder co-habit. And I think Orwell, without ever having gone to the USSR, really did understand it from the outside brilliantly. I think he did that probably from a lot of his personal experiences, particularly in Spain where he saw how the Spanish Communist Party acted on the orders of the International Communist Party. At the time they were going about exterminating their Communist and Socialist enemies. And he applied this knowledge to what he understood about Soviet foreign, and indeed internal, policy. When I read depictions of what a perfect Communist order would look like, written by Communists, all of the nasty underbelly of Communism is kept back. But, over the 1960s and 1970s, more and more accounts came out of the USSR concerning this picture that Orwell drew. People lived cheek by jowl with each other, and there was this extraordinary central power along with sordid demoralising social conditions. Most notably, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago went in the same direction. This almost became the main theme of Soviet literature."

"None of us love Big Brother, but we all know he is part of the family. Big Brother is like the uncle we don’t like who has to be invited for Christmas. The question is: How do we live with Big Brother without him ruining our lives? Nineteen Eighty-Four described, in 1948, what the modern surveillance state was going to look like. At the time, J Edgar Hoover was creating that surveillance state. He is the man who invented the fingerprint file. Every camera that stares down on us in Washington, New York and London, and every bit of biometric data collected on us, is a tribute to Hoover. The greatness of Orwell’s book is that he saw it coming and described it in terms we could understand. What Orwell foretold in Nineteen Eighty-Four was already happening as the book was being published. And that is what my history of the FBI, Enemies , is about. Like I say, we’re relatively new at this. We’ve only been at this in a serious way since World War II. The lessons of Sun Tzu are 26 centuries old and we’re only just internalising them. So give us a chance. Also, to know your enemy you must talk to him in his own language. Nowadays that might be Arabic or Pashto or Chinese or Urdu. We don’t speak those languages very well. We want everyone to speak English. We want everyone to look like us, think like us and be like us. That isn’t a very good cultural climate for producing successful intelligence, nor for the enduring projection of power. In the introduction to Enemies I point out that [US statesman] Alexander Hamilton, writing in 1787, said almost exactly the same thing. We have to have liberty and security. They are opposing forces and there is a constant tug of war between them. We strive to strike the right balance. I would argue that over the last three years we’ve been getting it less wrong than we once did. Have we been attacked in a serious way? No. Have we created any new secret prisons? No. It was the FBI who reported the abuses in Abu Ghraib. It was the FBI director, Robert Mueller, who stared down George W Bush and told him to scale back electronic eavesdropping. Robert Mueller is an ex-Marine and also a great respecter of civil liberties. He has said that he is not going to go down in history as the guy who won the war on terror but took away our civil liberties – because that would be a pyrrhic victory. When the FBI makes mistakes under Mueller, it admits and corrects them. He and the people he reports to must strike the balance between liberty and security every day. Lately, we’re doing a pretty good job. There will always be mistakes. Getting the balance precisely right is extremely difficult and, like democracy itself, is a work in progress."