My book report: It depends on you
Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's '1984,' New York, Doubleday, 2019
Is this a good time to re-read Nineteen Eighty-four? It's always a good time, unfortunately, because we live in the world he warned about. Dorian Lynskey brilliantly explicates the book's origins and its long afterlife, once it escaped the author's control and became a part of the environment. It's everything you need to know about its literary origins, Orwell's formative experiences in the Spanish Civil War, his propaganda work for the BBC during World War II, and his life-shortening struggle to complete the book on a remote Scottish island. Every day someone tries to conflate democratic socialism with Soviet-style communism, so we shouldn't be surprised that Nineteen Eighty-four is claimed by everyone from libertarians to the Labour Party. Orwell would object.
Until her death in 1980 Sonia Brownell Orwell, widow and literary executor, fended off most attempts to exploit the book, from tee shirts to video games. Then the floodgates opened, and we got Ridley Scott's bizarre Apple commercial for the 1984 Superbowl, kicking off the era when millions watch the game solely for the ads. The year also saw Michael Radford's film starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, followed by Lorin Maazel's underwhelming opera version. Then there were works "inspired" by the book, though people like Nam June Paik and Terry Gilliam asserted that they didn't need to actually read it. David Bowie tried to write a musical, but lost interest. Lynskey notes every Orwell-inspired TV show, album and dystopian novel except Pink Floyd's The Wall, which always struck me as set in a kind of near-Oceania. For those who have no time to re-read the book, he helpfully adds a chapter-by-chapter precis.*
And then the bit we've been waiting for: Big Brother reborn as Big Blubber. "It must be said that Donald Trump is no Big Brother," he writes. "...He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the discipline, intellect or ideology." I guess we got lucky there. The book concludes with the sentences Orwell dictated on his deathbed: "The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don't let it happen. It depends on you." Our luck is running out.
*Only once did I yearn for more details. There is a photograph of H.G. Wells and Orson Welles in a San Antonio radio station in 1940. Information, please!
Is this a good time to re-read Nineteen Eighty-four? It's always a good time, unfortunately, because we live in the world he warned about. Dorian Lynskey brilliantly explicates the book's origins and its long afterlife, once it escaped the author's control and became a part of the environment. It's everything you need to know about its literary origins, Orwell's formative experiences in the Spanish Civil War, his propaganda work for the BBC during World War II, and his life-shortening struggle to complete the book on a remote Scottish island. Every day someone tries to conflate democratic socialism with Soviet-style communism, so we shouldn't be surprised that Nineteen Eighty-four is claimed by everyone from libertarians to the Labour Party. Orwell would object.
Until her death in 1980 Sonia Brownell Orwell, widow and literary executor, fended off most attempts to exploit the book, from tee shirts to video games. Then the floodgates opened, and we got Ridley Scott's bizarre Apple commercial for the 1984 Superbowl, kicking off the era when millions watch the game solely for the ads. The year also saw Michael Radford's film starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, followed by Lorin Maazel's underwhelming opera version. Then there were works "inspired" by the book, though people like Nam June Paik and Terry Gilliam asserted that they didn't need to actually read it. David Bowie tried to write a musical, but lost interest. Lynskey notes every Orwell-inspired TV show, album and dystopian novel except Pink Floyd's The Wall, which always struck me as set in a kind of near-Oceania. For those who have no time to re-read the book, he helpfully adds a chapter-by-chapter precis.*
And then the bit we've been waiting for: Big Brother reborn as Big Blubber. "It must be said that Donald Trump is no Big Brother," he writes. "...He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the discipline, intellect or ideology." I guess we got lucky there. The book concludes with the sentences Orwell dictated on his deathbed: "The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don't let it happen. It depends on you." Our luck is running out.
*Only once did I yearn for more details. There is a photograph of H.G. Wells and Orson Welles in a San Antonio radio station in 1940. Information, please!
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 4:37 PM
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