1984 book review reddit

By George Orwell

George Orwell opens his stunning novel '1948' novel by telling the reader that the “clocks were striking thirteen”. If this isn’t an opening line for the ages, I don’t know what is.

About the Book

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

As new entrants into the world of 1984,  we are immediately introduced to the character of Winston Smith , a small, rough-skinned, sickly member of the Outer Party. He’s just arrived at his dreary apartment from work where he’s greeted by the blaring noise of his telescreen , a permanent installation in his home that works twofold. He watches it, and it watches him.

I found it disconcertingly easy to imagine, in our modern world, technology is utilized in such an all-encompassing, and eventually normalized fashion. The residents of London, Airstrip One , Oceania, are used to constant surveillance. It is how most of them have lived their whole lives and the majority would advocate for its continuous.

The totalitarian regime that reigns over Winston’s vile, cold and dirty futurist London, controls everything, right down to the thoughts in its citizen’s heads. At least, that’s what it would like. Luckily for we the readers, Winston Smith is not like the other party members, those he deems as mindless, brainwashed fools, devoted mind and body to the Party, Big Brother (the dictatorial figure/mascot of the regime who may or may not actually exist) and the principles of INGSOC (English Socialism). Through Winston’s perspective, we are allowed to experience his irritation, fury, and exasperation with the other Party members and the proles who live in the slums outside the city center.  

Daily Terrors in Winston Smith’s World

While explaining the terror he exists in, day in and day out, Winston takes comfort in the fact that the small space within his head is his own . That is until the Thought Police catch up with him. Everything else, what he does, says, and how he appears, is bent to the will of the Party.  

The first part of 1984 (which is divided into three sections) is an incredible achievement of world-building. Orwell sucks the reader right into the horrors of Winston’s world by moving through the minutia of his life. Winston is responsible for the re-writing of history, it is by his hand, (and he admits, likely hundreds of others) that newspaper articles are rephrased, remade, and created in order to cast the government in the best light possible.  

Perhaps the most chilling and shocking aspect of 1984 is the way that somethings, although noted by Winston as wrong and disturbing, have become commonplace. The rewriting of history is only one example. Winston lives in constant fear that someday, maybe that afternoon, or five years from now, he and Julia (a young woman with whom he begins an affair) are going to be “vaporized”. Death weighs heavily on Winston’s world and as a reader, I found myself experiencing some of that fear as well. Winston’s life, as he takes more risks, becomes at once rife with paranoia and incredibly, more commonly filled with moments of peace.  

The Drama of Very Human Characters

As a human being, Orwell writes Winston Smith believably. So much so I found myself having arguments with his character as he tried to come to terms with changes (such as when Oceania changed the superpower it was at war with) or when he was relishing in the knowledge the O’Brien was, in fact, a member of the resistance. It is easy enough, I found, to search for the same grains of hope Winston did within the second part of 1984.  

If I had to choose one moment from the novel that I know will stick with me, it is the scene in the room above Mr. Charrington ’s shop in which Julia and Winston are musing over their shared, doomed fate. They say to one another “We are the dead” and in mimicry of their conversion, Mr. Charrington (who is revealed to be a spy for the Thought Police) calls out from behind a photo, “You are the dead”. Utterly chilling, even now, recalling that moment I find myself experiencing something of what these two characters felt.  

It is the culmination of the previous two parts of 1984  in which Winston waits to be caught, captured, and tortured. Now, he and Julie both know and the reader knows, that this is the end. He is surely going to be dragged off to the Ministry of Love and tortured to death. Perhaps he’ll be released on a temporary basis, as other “criminals” have been. But, there is no getting away from the Party. It sees, hears, and knows all. At this moment, it caught up to Winston Smith. All his vague hopes for the future vanish.  

The Concluding Pages of 1984

The last section of 1984 felt like looking behind the curtain. There was a great deal of satisfaction finally knowing what goes on within the Ministry of Love and it was just as horrifying as I imagined. They engage in all forms of torture, mental and physical.  

When I first read the section in which Winston is forced to confront his greatest fear in Room 101 I found myself surprised by how complex, knowledgeable, and conniving the Party was in its research into Winston’s life and weak points. Thinking back on it now, it couldn’t have been any other way. Of course, O’Brien was working as a double agent, of course, the Party knew all along what Winston and Julie were doing and planning, and of course, in the end, they got what they wanted—for Winston to love Big Brother.  

1984 Book Review: George Orwell's Stunning Novel

• Writing Style
• Lasting Effect on Reader

1984 Review

1984 is a book that you’re going to remember. From its opening lines to the various revelations about the Party and it’s means of governing its citizens a reader is met with constant twists and turns. Each one is more disturbing than the one before it. You would not be wrong if while reading  1984 you found yourself drawing comparisons between contemporary/historical society and the world that Winston Smith lives in. This book is just as relevant today as it was when Orwell finished it in 1948. One reading does not do this novel justice. On the second, third, or even fourth time that one learns about Emmanuel Goldstein, Big Brother, the Ministries, and every other memorable element of the book, more is revealed.

• A plot that keeps the reader guessing–incredibly engaging
• Original, yet relatable characters
• Disturbingly relevant
• Big Brother verges on a caricature
• Readers are left hanging without a definite conclusion to the novel
• Misogynistic undertones that go unaddressed

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

I just finished reading 1984 by George Orwell. It is my first reading (I’m 76), and all I could think about was today’s sociological and political events. It was scary being so foreboding in 2022 having been published in 1949! At times I had to stop reading. My heart hurt; my mind grew fearful; my sense of reality began to melt! Read it! I plan to read it again!

Thanks for the comment Linda!

It’s remarkable how Orwell’s work, conceived in 1949, echoes so loudly in today’s world, stirring fear, concern, and reflection.

It’s definitely worth reading it again.

George Orwell

George Orwell is remembered today for his social criticism, controversial beliefs, and his novels ' Animal Farm ' and '1984'.

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Critic's Notebook

Why ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read

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By Michiko Kakutani

• Jan. 26, 2017

The dystopia described in George Orwell’s nearly 70-year-old novel “1984” suddenly feels all too familiar. A world in which Big Brother (or maybe the National Security Agency) is always listening in, and high-tech devices can eavesdrop in people’s homes. (Hey, Alexa , what’s up?) A world of endless war, where fear and hate are drummed up against foreigners, and movies show boatloads of refugees dying at sea. A world in which the government insists that reality is not “something objective, external, existing in its own right” — but rather, “whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.”

“1984” shot to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list this week, after Kellyanne Conway , an adviser to President Trump, described demonstrable falsehoods told by the White House press secretary Sean Spicer — regarding the size of inaugural crowds — as “alternative facts.” It was a phrase chillingly reminiscent, for many readers, of the Ministry of Truth’s efforts in “1984” at “reality control.” To Big Brother and the Party, Orwell wrote, “the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.” Regardless of the facts, “Big Brother is omnipotent” and “the Party is infallible.”

As the novel’s hero, Winston Smith, sees it, the Party “told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” and he vows, early in the book, to defend “the obvious” and “the true”: “The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s center.” Freedom, he reminds himself, “is the freedom to say that two plus two make four,” even though the Party will force him to agree that “TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE” — not unlike the way Mr. Spicer tried to insist that Mr. Trump’s inauguration crowd was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,” despite data and photographs to the contrary.

In “1984,” Orwell created a harrowing picture of a dystopia named Oceania, where the government insists on defining its own reality and where propaganda permeates the lives of people too distracted by rubbishy tabloids (“containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology”) and sex-filled movies to care much about politics or history. News articles and books are rewritten by the Ministry of Truth and facts and dates grow blurry — the past is described as a benighted time that has given way to the Party’s efforts to make Oceania great again (never mind the evidence to the contrary, like grim living conditions and shortages of decent food and clothing).

Not surprisingly, “1984” has found a nervous readership in today’s “ post-truth ” era. It’s an era in which misinformation and fake news have proliferated on the web; Russia is flooding the West with propaganda to affect elections and sow doubts about the democratic process; poisonous tensions among ethnic and religious groups are fanned by right-wing demagogues; and reporters scramble to sort out a cascade of lies and falsehoods told by President Trump and his aides — from false accusations that journalists had invented a rift between him and the intelligence community (when he had compared the intelligence agencies to Nazis) to debunked claims that millions of unauthorized immigrants robbed him of a popular-vote majority.

Orwell had been thinking about the novel that would become “1984” as early as 1944, when he wrote a letter about Stalin and Hitler, and “the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible führer.”

Decades later, in the 1970s, “1984” would frequently be cited as holding a mirror to the Nixon administration’s duplicitous handling of the war in Vietnam and its linguistic, “Newspeak”-like contortions over Watergate (like the press secretary Ron Ziegler ’s description of his earlier statements as “inoperative”).

In his 1944 letter, Orwell presciently argued that “there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark.” And in “1984,” the word “science” does not even exist: “the empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles” of the Party.

This sort of marginalization in “1984” speaks to some of the very fears scientists have expressed in response to reports that the Trump administration is scrutinizing studies and data published by researchers at the Environmental Protection Agency while placing new work on “temporary hold.” Similar concerns about an Orwellian consolidation and centralization of government media control have been expressed over administration efforts “to curb the flow of information from several government agencies involved in environmental issues,” and the possibility, as Politico reported, that the new White House might also try to put its stamp on the Voice of America, the broadcasting arm that “has long pushed democratic ideals across the world.”

Of course, all of these developments are being constantly updated, with regular flurries of news and denials and counterdenials — a confusing state of affairs that itself would not have surprised Orwell, since he knew the value of such confusion to those in power.

Another book, published two years after “1984,” also made Amazon’s list of top 100 best sellers this week: Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951). A kind of nonfiction bookend to “1984,” the hefty philosophical volume examines the factors that fueled the perfect storm of events leading to the rise of Hitler and Stalin and World War II — notably, the power that centralized storytelling can exert over anxious populations suffering from the dislocations of history, by offering scapegoats, easy fixes and simple cohesive narratives. If such narratives are riddled with lies, so much the better for those in power, who then succeed in redefining the daily reality inhabited by their subjects.

“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst,” Arendt wrote, “no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” This mixture of gullibility and cynicism, Arendt suggested, thrived in times rife with change and uncertainty, and was exploited by politicians intent on creating a fictional world in which “failures need not be recorded, admitted, and remembered.” In this world, 2 + 2 does = 5, as Orwell noted, and the acceptance of bad arithmetic simply becomes a testament to the power of rulers to define reality and the terms of debate.

A despairing vision to be sure, though Christopher Hitchens pointed out that Orwell’s own commitment in his life to continually seek “elusive but verifiable truth” was a testament to human tenacity and “that tiny, irreducible core of the human personality that somehow manages to put up a resistance to deceit and coercion.”

Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani

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Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’  — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

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Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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1984 by George Orwell, book of a lifetime: An absorbing, deeply affecting political thriller

The novel creates a world so plausible, so complete that to read it is to experience another world, says jonathan freedland, article bookmarked.

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So much of it has entered the language, becoming a settled part of our common cultural inheritance, that it's easy to forget that 1984 was ever a book at all. From Big Brother to Doublethink, the landscape of the dystopia George Orwell created in 1949 exists in the minds even of those who've never picked up the novel. It has become a shorthand for totalitarianism, for the surveillance state, for the power of the mass media to manipulate public opinion, history and even the truth – and, in the process, has allowed people to forget that it remains a story to be read.

Even those who manage to look beyond its place in the folk memory, and do it the honour of assessing it as a novel, rarely see it for what it is – which is a political thriller. Not just a political thriller, but an exemplar: the very model of the form. It does what every novel in the genre should do – combining the illumination of an intriguing idea and the telling of a cracking story. When people discuss 1984, they tend to talk about Orwell's achievement of the former – his fully realised portrayal of life under a brutal one-party dictatorship – but when people read the book, as I did as a young teenager, what holds them is the fate of its protagonist, Winston Smith, his lover Julia, and their doomed attempt to taste freedom. The book succeeds because it is no manifesto, but an absorbing, deeply affecting story.

It has its defects, of course. Generations of young readers, and not just them, have surely yearned to skip at least some of the treatise by Emmanuel Goldstein, the Trotsky-esque dissident and public enemy whose forbidden work comes into Winston's hands. But little of that matters. The novel creates a world so plausible, so complete that to read it is to experience another world. And what higher goal can fiction reach for than that? And yet it rests on that simple, two-word question on which most political thrillers are built: what if? Orwell asked himself what Britain would look like if it fell prey to either one of the totalitarian creeds that dominated the mid-20th century. From that basic inquiry, 1984 was born.

Robert Harris's Fatherland sprung from asking, "What if Britain lost the war?" Michael Crichton created Jurassic Park by wondering, "What if we could bring dinosaurs back to life?" My new novel asks, "What if China dominates the world? What will life be like?" It's not only journalists who should be in awe of George Orwell. Anyone embarking on a political thriller should look to 1984 – to see how it's done.

Jonathan Freedland's new novel 'The Third Woman' is published by HarperCollins

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Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Secker & Warburg

Genre: Dystopian, Science Fiction, Satire

First Publication: 1949

Language:  English

Major Characters: Winston Smith, Big Brother, O’Brien, Emmanuel Goldstein, Tom Parsons, Syme, Julia

Theme: Totalitarianism and Communism, The Individual vs. Collective Identity, Reality Control, Class Struggle,

Setting: London in the year 1984

Narrator: Third-person omniscient

Book Summary: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

1984: A Novel, unleashes a unique plot as per which No One is Safe or Free. No place is safe to run or even hide from a dominating party leader, Big Brother, who is considered equal to God. This is a situation where everything is owned by the State. The world was seeing the ruins of World War II. Leaders such as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini prevailed during this phase. Big Brother is always watching your actions. He even controls everyone’s feelings of love, to live and to discover. The basic plot of this historic novel revolves around the concept that no person has freedom to live life on his or her own terms. The present day is 1984.

The whole world is gradually changing. The nations which enjoy freedom, have distorted into unpleasant and degraded places, in turn creating a powerful cartel known as Oceania. This is the world where the Big Brother controls everything. There is another character Winston Smith, who is leading a normal layman life under these harsh circumstances, though hating all of this. He works on writing the old newspaper articles in order to make history or past relevant to today’s party line.

He is efficient enough in spite of hating his bosses. Julia, a young girl who is morally very rigid comes into the fore. She too hates the system as much as Winston does. Gradually, they get into an affair but have to conceal their feelings for each other, as it will not be acceptable by Big Brother. In Big Brother’s bad world, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

Book Review: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighr is an astonishingly good book which practically (almost single-handedly) created and defined the ‘dystopian novel’ genre. This is undoubtedly the definitive dystopian novel which stands astride the genre like a colossus – head and shoulders above the rest.

Written in the year 1948 and first published in 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was originally designed as a satire of Stalinism. Like many of his contemporaries, George Orwell was distraught by the Soviet Union’s increasingly totalitarian interpretation of communism. The Soviet Union would collapse in 1991, of course, and communism plays a marginal role at best in today’s world. So how come Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is currently enjoying a resurgence of popularity? How come it feels more and more relevant in a world dominated by capitalism rather than communism?

The fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is under complete control of The Party and its mythical head, Big Brother. Privacy no longer exists: “ Big Brother is watching you ” – always. Data is collected, minds are molded, consent is manufactured. So-called “ telescreens ” monitor every facial expression and record every spoken word, tirelessly looking for “ thoughtcrimes “ while simultaneously broadcasting a never-ending stream of propaganda. No other source of information is available, so the loss of privacy comes with a loss of history and political agency.

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

The Party is even in the process of developing what it calls “ newspeak ,” a stripped-down, ultimately impotent version of the English language that – through the reduction of grammar and vocabulary – renders subversive ideas unthinkable. Until “ newspeak ” takes over, “ doublethink ” ensures that those little inconsistencies between reality and the claims made by Big Brother (claims such as “ ignorance is strength ” or “ freedom is slavery ” or “ 2+2=5 ”) do not feel problematic in the slightest.

And even if they did, fabricated telescreen reports on what is portrayed as a brutal global war keep the masses in a perpetual state of fear that makes rebellion highly unlikely. Conveniently, this pseudo-war can also be used to justify the elimination of civil rights and liberties. And if there is someone somewhere who somehow manages to resist all this propaganda and surveillance (someone who, like our protagonist, manages to think an independent thought), Big Brother takes the old iron fist out of his pocket and enforces conformity through imprisonment and torture.

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

In today’s world, the scope, sophistication and effectiveness of propaganda and surveillance have long surpassed anything George Orwell could have imagined in 1948. It is not the Communist Party that controls those endeavours, of course, but largely commercial enterprise (with a little help from the politicians it buys).

1984 by George Orwell portrays, with what now seems like terrifying accuracy a near future extreme totalitarian society and it is a novel that is as pertinent today as never before. In an age of ‘ fake news ’ ‘ counter-fake news ’ where truth is increasingly in question, a commodity to be perverted according to need, George Orwell’s 1984 reads like an increasingly and frighteningly accurate portrayal of what was then – a possible future and now a possible present.

Orwell’s concepts of thoughtcrime , doublethink , newspeak , sexcrime , the thought police , along with the wholesale and habitual use of propaganda, the deletion and re-writing of the news/history (‘ he who controls the future controls the past’ ) – historical revisionism, is all just so brilliantly conceived and executed and lest we forget,  George Orwell wrote 1984 in year 1949. If it had not been so brilliantly executed, 1984 by George Orwell would undoubtedly have become very clichéd, tired and dated over the subsequent decades – which quite clearly it hasn’t.

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

1984 is now so embedded at such a fundamental level in our culture, it is now almost impossible to imagine an absence of 1984 – itself a paradox considering the subject matter and themes of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. The concept now so oft used as common parlance of something being ‘Orwellian’ – surveillance and control.

What George Orwell has created in Nineteen Eighty-Four (once again and along with Animal Farm ) is simply one of the greatest short novels in the English language ever written, let alone one of the most influential – both in literary and cultural terms. The characters of Winston, Julia and O’Brien, Room 101, the surrounding events, the world of Oceania, Ingsoc and the Party remain seared into the readers’ memory with startling effectiveness long after the last page has been turned.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is an outstandingly (in every sense of the word) powerful, thought-provoking, compelling, engaging portrait of an all too feasible near future. Parallels in history are clearly there to see – the National Socialism of Hitler, the Communism of Stalin to name but two – showing us the absolute feasibility of such a world. The way that Orwell writes of the manipulation and creation / management of mass hysteria, the instillation and perpetuation of xenophobia and the unquestioning and blind allegiance to the ‘Party’ has such a feeling of authenticity and is all done so effectively and unbelievably well.

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

I cannot overstate the brilliance of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, nor emphasise the power that this novel increasingly has, though perhaps to say that 1984 by George Orwell is quite simply a work of modern literary genius will go some way in conveying how truly great a novel this really is.

George Orwell’s 1984 paints a horrifying picture of a world that could so easily be – an intelligent portrayal of and warning against the evils of totalitarianism and extreme authoritarianism of any kind. But it is so much more than that, along with providing us with such a great central story – a story not solely about power, corruption and lies, but also about love, truth and the human spirit, Nineteen Eighty-Four works on so many, many levels. George Orwell’s 1984 is absolutely, unquestionably and unequivocally essential reading.

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• Read TIME’s Original Review of <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i>

Read TIME’s Original Review of Nineteen Eighty-Four

G eorge Orwell was already an established literary star when his masterwork Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on this day in 1949, but that didn’t stop TIME’s reviewer from being pleasantly surprised by the book. After all, even the expectation that a book would be good doesn’t mean one can’t be impressed when it turns out to be, as TIME put it, “absolutely super.”

One of the reasons, the review suggested, was Orwell’s bet that his fictional dystopia would not actually seem so foreign to contemporary readers. They would easily recognize many elements of the fictional world that TIME summed up as such:

In Britain 1984 A.D., no one would have suspected that Winston and Julia were capable of crimethink (dangerous thoughts) or a secret desire for ownlife (individualism). After all, Party-Member Winston Smith was one of the Ministry of Truth’s most trusted forgers; he had always flung himself heart & soul into the falsification of government statistics. And Party-Member Julia was outwardly so goodthinkful (naturally orthodox) that, after a brilliant girlhood in the Spies, she became active in the Junior Anti-Sex League and was snapped up by Pornosec, a subsection of the government Fiction Department that ground out happy-making pornography for the masses. In short, the grim, grey London Times could not have been referring to Winston and Julia when it snorted contemptuously: “Old-thinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc,” i.e., “Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.” How Winston and Julia rebelled, fell in love and paid the penalty in the terroristic world of tomorrow is the thread on which Britain’s George Orwell has spun his latest and finest work of fiction. In Animal Farm (TIME, Feb. 4, 1946,) Orwell parodied the Communist system in terms of barnyard satire; but in 1984 … there is not a smile or a jest that does not add bitterness to Orwell’s utterly depressing vision of what the world may be in 35 years’ time.

Decades later, as the real-life 1984 approached, TIME dedicated a cover story to Orwell’s earlier vision of what that year could have been like. “That Year Is Almost Here,” the headline proclaimed . But obsessing over how it matched up to its fictional depiction was missing the point, the article posited. “The proper way to remember George Orwell, finally, is not as a man of numbers—1984 will pass, not Nineteen Eighty–Four—but as a man of letters,” wrote Paul Gray, “who wanted to change the world by changing the word.”

Read the full 1949 review, here in the TIME Vault: Where the Rainbow Ends

LIST: The 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time

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1984 (Orwell)

1984 George Orwell, 1949 ~ 300 pp. (varies by publisher) Summary In 1949, on the heels of another literary classic, Animal Farm , George Orwell wrote 1984, his now legendary and terrifying glimpse into the future. His vision of an omni-present and ultra-repressive State is rooted in the ominous world events of Orwell's own time and is given shape and substance by his astute play on our own fears.

As the novel opens, we learn that in year 1984, the world has been divided into three states: Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia, all of which, it is said, are almost continually in battle with one another. This world structure has come about following a nuclear war which took place sometime in the 1950's. In the state of Oceania, a revolution has resulted in the rise of an all-seeing figurehead known only as Big Brother, and a secretive group of individuals referred to as The Party. Under this regime, basic freedoms of expression—even thought—are strictly forbidden. History and memory are actively erased and rewritten so as to support the omnipotence and infallibility of The Party and its pronouncements. To this end, the State even employs its own language, Newspeak, and its own thought process, Doublethink.

It's against this background that we are introduced to Winston Smith, a low-level Party member (not to be confused with the elite group which surrounds Big Brother) who works in the Ministry of Truth. His job here, paradoxically, is to destroy and rewrite news articles and State facts and figures so as to align them with the most current views of The Party. A resident of Airstrip One—formerly London, England—Smith lives in a world devoid of even the simplest liberties. In this repressive society, where thoughts themselves can be ascertained and monitored, Winston finds himself alone and in quiet "revolution" against Big Brother. Boldly, he even goes as far as to write his own thoughts down on paper— a crime worthy of abduction by the Thought Police.

Early in the novel, Winston meets Julia, another worker at the Ministry of Truth, whom he has been watching from afar. Secretly, the two begin a love affair. This liaison inspires Winston to indulge his ever-growing obsession with revolution, and he and Julia begin to discuss, however implausible, ideas for the overthrow of The Party. Winston's eventual (and inevitable) capture at the hands of the Thought Police leads to his purification and re-education by inner Party members

Orwell's strict attention to detail and realistic description of a world thirty-five years ahead of his own add validity to 1984, and make its larger conclusions all the more frightening. Even today, the novel remains a bleak and shadowy forewarning of what might someday occur. ( From Penguin Classics—cover image, top-right .)

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Book Review

• George Orwell
• Fantasy , Science Fiction

Readability Age Range

• Secker & Warburg were the original publishers, but now it's published by many publishers, such as Signet Classic, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group
• Prometheus Hall of Fame Award Winner, 1984

Year Published

1984 also known as Nineteen-Eighty-Four written by George Orwell has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine .

Plot Summary

Winston Smith works as a clerk in London, the chief city of Airstrip One in the provinces of Oceania. The dystopian nation where Winston lives is ruled by the Party, a totalitarian regime whose key phrases include “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength.” The face of Big Brother, the Party’s figurehead, graces posters on every wall and street corner; the signage warns: “Big Brother is Watching.” Inside every home and workplace, telescreens monitor individuals to ensure their behaviors, facial expressions and even dreams show no indication of dissension. Children are urged to spy on their parents and turn them in for any action that might indicate Party disloyalty. The Party has created its own language, newspeak, that is constantly evolving to eliminate words that don’t promote their orthodoxy. They also preach “doublethink,” where people must believe two opposing thoughts at once if the Party requires it.

Ultimately, the Party seeks to control reality, believing whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the present controls the past. Government offices, like the one in which Winston works, ensure that any unsavory information about the past is wiped out and rewritten in all publications. The old information is then destroyed as though it never existed. One moment, Party members believe they are at war with the nation of Eurasia. A moment later, they’re told they’ve always been at war with Eastasia, and they are compelled to believe it. Individuals caught rebelling against the Party vanish and are written out of history, becoming “unpersons.”

Winston, unconvinced that the Party is right, begins to rebel in subtle ways. He starts an affair with a co-worker named Julia. He also seeks out a man in his office named O’Brien, whom he believes to be working for the rogue anti-Party group, the Brotherhood. O’Brien gives Winston a book that explains the Party’s tactics. The book talks about the importance of three people classes (in Oceania’s case, the Inner Party, the Outer Party and commoners called proles) and the power struggles between nations that are necessary for keeping these classes intact.

Shortly after Winston has read the book, he and Julia are arrested at their love nest. O’Brien, an operative for the Party, turns them in. He is also Winston’s chief persecutor over the time he spends in prison. Winston is starved, beaten and physically tortured. Worse than that, however, is the mental anguish inflicted to convince him Big Brother and the Party are right. O’Brien explains that the martyrs of old died clutching their beliefs, but that the Party would not allow anyone to die unconverted. In session after session, O’Brien tries to convince Winston that reality exists only in his own mind. If Winston tries hard enough, he can make himself believe what the Party preaches. Winston is finally sent to room 101, where each prisoner meets his deepest fear. Winston’s is rats. When faced with the prospect of being eaten alive by them, he betrays Julia and begs O’Brien to torture her instead of him. Eventually, Winston is completely brainwashed into loving Big Brother and sent back into the world where the Party finds him completely harmless. He encounters Julia once more. They confess their betrayals and no longer have any interest in one another.

Christian Beliefs

The narrator says the proles would be allowed to practice religion if they’d shown any signs of wanting or needing it. A man is imprisoned partly because he allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a Kipling poem he was revising for the Party. O’Brien’s book likens the Party to the Catholic Church in that one does not achieve membership by inheritance but by opting in.

Other Belief Systems

A woman in Winston’s office cries out that Big Brother is her Savior. Winston tells O’Brien that the world was uninhabited for millions of years. O’Brien objects, saying it is only as old as we are. O’Brien says people could control the laws of nature, such as gravity, if they tried hard enough. He believes power can only be truly asserted when it is done through pain and humiliation. He says God is power, and Party leaders control life, so they are the priests of power. Only in a group setting is power found, he believes, and individuals are infinitely malleable. Winston says he doesn’t believe in God but believes there is something deeper in man, perhaps man’s spirit, that will defeat evil.

Authority Roles

The Inner Party consists of the elite Party members, those who rule and are allowed life’s luxuries. They go to great lengths, including maintaining a constant state of war, to ensure they remain in power. Big Brother is the Party’s figurehead, always watching the actions of Party members. O’Brien will not tell Winston whether Big Brother is a real person, only that he will never die. O’Brien tricks Winston into thinking he (O’Brien) is a dissenter, then betrays Winston. O’Brien shows occasional tenderness in the midst of torturing Winston. He exudes a sense of wisdom and confidence in his beliefs about the Party that intimidates Winston.

Profanity & Violence

The word d–n appears half a dozen times. A woman in prison calls someone the f-word along with b–tard . The Party urges its members to develop passionate, violent tendencies. It televises bloody events, such as a little boy’s arm being blown off. It holds daily and annual Hate festivities to stir the masses into frenzies where they desire to kill or injure others. In one such Hate moment, Winston fantasizes about tying Julia naked to a stake and shooting her full of arrows before raping her and cutting her throat. Adults and children alike revel in the violence of the Party’s monthly public hangings. After a bombing, Winston sees a severed hand and kicks it into the gutter. He tells Julia he’s sorry he didn’t shove his wife off a cliff when he had the opportunity. Winston and Julia tell O’Brien they will do whatever is necessary for the Brotherhood, including distributing addictive drugs, giving others sexually transmitted diseases, throwing sulfuric acid in a child’s face or otherwise killing people. Prisoners, including Winston, are beaten and bloodied until their teeth come out (or are yanked out). Winston is starved and beaten on numerous occasions with fists, boots and steel rods. He often rolls around in his own blood and vomit. As O’Brien prepares to torture Winston with rats, he says the creatures sometimes attack the head and the eyes first and other times burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue. In terror, Winston begs O’Brien to let the rats tear off Julia’s face or strip her flesh to the bones rather than doing it to him .

Sexual Content

The Party does not permit its members to marry for love or have sex for pleasure. They look upon sex as a “disgusting minor operation” and train people this way from childhood. Young Party members are urged to join the Anti-Sex league. Party leaders are working on a scientific way to abolish the orgasm altogether; they want that level of excitement and energy reserved for pro-Party sentiment. They fear losing control if men and women are permitted to form passionate relationships. Winston talks about his wife’s rigidity and sexual “submission” to him so they could produce a child. He details a sexual encounter with an old prostitute.

The proles have no restrictions on sex and are even granted divorces. The Party produces pornographic, astrological and sensational literature and films for the proles in the Pornosec department. Julia worked there for a while, an indication that the Party felt she had good character.

Winston dreams of Julia flinging off her clothes. Later, they begin a secret love affair. She confesses she’s had many and tells him she wants nothing to do with purity, virtue or goodness, but wants to be corrupt. For both, the affair is as much about rebellion against the Party as it is about sex and relationship. He comments on her breasts and about nakedness in general, and they have sex a number of times.

After his capture, Winston wonders if he’ll be sent to a prison camp. He’s heard they allow homosexuality, prostitution and illicit alcohol use. He confesses (dishonestly) to sexual perversion when he is being tortured.

Discussion Topics

Get free discussion questions for this book and others, at FocusOnTheFamily.com/discuss-books .

Additional Comments

Alcohol: Party members drink a sickly, oily spirit called Victory gin, which burns like nitric acid going down but eventually makes the world look more cheerful. When Julia and Winston visit O’Brien at his home, he gives them wine, a drink reserved for Inner Party members.

Smoking: Winston and other Party members smoke poorly made Victory cigarettes. One of Winston’s co-workers smokes a pipe.

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Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not their literary merit, and equip parents to decide whether a book is appropriate for their children. The inclusion of a book’s review does not constitute an endorsement by Focus on the Family.

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Classic dystopian novel about life under constant scrutiny.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

George Orwell's 1984 is one of the most influentia

Despite his failings, Winston Smith finds the cour

The protagonist, Winston Smith, has been beaten do

Oceania exists in a constant state of war, so viol

Winston Smith and his younger lover, Julia, engage

Citizens of Oceania are forbidden from using objec

Members of the Party are encouraged to smoke Victo

Parents need to know that 1984 presents an unblinking portrait of life lived under constant surveillance and stands as one of the great dystopian satires of the 20th century. Author George Orwell also wrote Animal Farm , a satirical allegory about the abuse of power.

Educational Value

George Orwell's 1984 is one of the most influential satires of the 20th century. Its vocabulary has become part of everyday discourse, from "Big Brother" to "Thought Police" to "doublethink." Its themes remain especially relevant at a time of when personal privacy is at a premium and when governments large and small manipulate language to promote their own particular ends.

Positive Messages

Despite his failings, Winston Smith finds the courage to keep a diary, take a lover, and think of working to overthrow the Party and Big Brother.

Positive Role Models

The protagonist, Winston Smith, has been beaten down by decades under the all-seeing eye of Big Brother. Nevertheless, he finds the courage for small acts of rebellion. As he begins to take bigger risks, he becomes more likeable, until the reader is rooting for him against all odds.

Violence & Scariness

Oceania exists in a constant state of war, so violence is a daily part of life. Bombs rain from the sky. Disgraced members of the Party are executed for their supposed crimes. Worse is the emotional violence inflicted upon a populace constantly under surveillance and forced to report the slightest infraction. Winston Smith is tortured in the Ministry of Love, in scenes that are physically wrenching, but there are still worse things that await him in Room 101.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Winston Smith and his younger lover, Julia, engage in an illicit sexual relationship, presumably away from the attentions of Big Brother. The description of their lovemaking is not explicit, but there is no doubt that theirs is a thoroughly adult, physical relationship.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Citizens of Oceania are forbidden from using objectionable language, but a few "hells" and "damns" slip out.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Members of the Party are encouraged to smoke Victory cigarettes and Victory gin, but no one really seems to enjoy them. The poverty-stricken Proles partake in alcohol consumption as a form of "entertainment" provided by the Party.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Where to read, community reviews.

• Parents say (20)
• Kids say (78)

Based on 20 parent reviews

Theme of Sexual Freedom

What's the story.

In a dystopian future where nuclear war has divided the world into three repressive superstates, middle-aged Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in the superstate of Oceania, in the city called Airstrip One (formerly London). He has no hope of escaping the watchful eye of Big Brother until he meets Julia, a younger woman who persuades him to sneak away with her and become her illicit lover. Even though he knows they will be caught, Smith cannot imagine what awaits him once he is captured and taken to the Ministry of Love for interrogation.

Is It Any Good?

Narrated with infinite precision, 1984 is one of the most famous dystopian satires in the English language. Its vocabulary -- "doublethink," "Big Brother," "down the Memory Hole," "Thought Police," "unperson" -- has become part of popular culture. Winston Smith's quest for freedom under the gaze of all-seeing, all-knowing Big Brother still resonates strongly today, when privacy is hard to come by and governments adopt intrusive policies, supposedly to keep their citizens safe.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how being constantly watched and listened to affects how people conduct their lives and what it does to their mental states.

1984 is an inversion of 1948, the year in which Orwell began writing the novel. What historic events were happening in the world at that time, and how might they have influenced the construction of 1984? Is the future Orwell imagines completely made up, or is it based on real-life situations?

Three slogans adorn the entrance to the Ministry of Truth: WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. How is it possible for anyone to believe such paradoxical statements?

Orwell includes "The Principles of Newspeak" as an appendix to the novel proper. Why do you think he wanted to include this information? Why is the control of language so important to the Party in the novel? Can you give examples of how authority figures today manipulate language to their own advantage?

1984 is considered a classic and is often required reading in high school. Why do you think that is?

Book Details

• Author : George Orwell
• Genre : Literary Fiction
• Topics : History
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Plume
• Publication date : June 6, 1949
• Number of pages : 368
• Last updated : January 15, 2019

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Book Review – 1984, by George Orwell

George Orwell’s 1984 is a grim read that tells of a future in which something has gone horribly wrong in society resulting the extreme oppression of the citizens of at least one super state. It might be most famous for exploring the idea of technological mass surveillance but at its core it is a book about power.

To best understand the book it helps to understand a little about the circumstances in which it was written. Released in 1949 it was written during the immediate aftermath of WWII as the Iron Curtain descended over Eastern Europe and Stalin tightened his grip on power. It was also a time when communism was spreading globally, particularly in Asia. The threat of global war was renewed however this time with the prospect of nuclear weapons.

This was also a time when the old European empires were in rapid retreat, the seat of Western power had shifted to the USA and Britain had yet to develop its own nuclear weapons. Britain was also struggling to recover from WWII economically.

George Orwell himself was a disillusioned socialist. Deeply committed to socialist economics  but strongly opposed to communism and its totalitarian tendencies, especially Soviet style communism under Stalin.  

The effect of all these personal (Orwell), national (Britain) and global anxieties are reflected in the story. However, while socialist revolutions were the vehicle used to explain how the political structure of 1984 emerged, the central themes of the story would still work if a different ideology was used, i.e extreme oligarchical capitalism. It is a book about political power crushing the lives of individuals so all that is required is a mechanism to concentrate extreme political power in the hands of a few at the expense of an increasingly disempowered general population. What matters is the relentless accumulation of power for power’s own sake.

1984 is told from the perspective of Winston Smith, a low-level party member who works in the “Ministry of Truth”. Winston’s world is one in which there is no objective truth, only party approved “facts.” The classic example of which is requiring citizens to believe “2 + 2 = 5” despite knowing it being demonstrably false. 1984 explores the throne of lies upon which totalitarian oppression sits. In the party’s view, every “fact” is malleable, one of several possible truths. Which one is true at any one time depends upon which best suites the purposes of the party.

The best example of this is the global war that has been running for decades between the three super states that exist in 1984. At any one time Winston’s nation is at war with one and allied with the other. Winston observes that every few years the allegiances suddenly switch for no apparent reason but the official history is that the allegiances have never varied. Winston begins to doubt the war’s existence and since it is never directly observed by the reader, he might be correct. He begins to suspect that the war might simply be another party tool to maintain social unity. United against a common enemy.

“War is Peace”

The threat of a global war against two rival super states over time enables the party to force the citizenry to tolerate ever more pervasive attacks on their individual freedoms in support of the war effort. To do otherwise risks losing the war and being enslaved by foreign invaders. Only total loyalty to the party can avert this fate.

“Freedom is Slavery”

This leads to doubts about the very nature of Winston’s world beyond Airstrip 1 (formerly the United Kingdom). No other parts of the world are directly observed or objectively documented as foreign trade and travel do not exist in 1984. It is possible that only the United Kingdom has succumbed to such brutal totalitarianism and now exists as an isolated hermit state. Or the world could be exactly as described by the party. The point is that Winston (and by extension the reader) have no way of knowing. Objective truth is buried.

“Ignorance is Strength”

The true horror and genius of 1984 isn’t the mass technological surveillance. Rather it is as a cautionary tale (rather than a discrete prophecy) showing glimpses of a disfigured, tortured, grotesque society that exists in our near future and is a clear descendent of our own. One in which technology is exploited to the detriment rather than the benefit of humanity.

This is a story about totalitarianism and the disturbingly simple but powerful ways to gradually and increasingly enslave an entire population, which is why it remains relevant. The party’s methods are written right there above the front entrance to the Ministry of Truth:

“War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength”

About the author: Chris is an Associate Editor at Grounded Curiosity and a currently serving Australian Army officer. Building on a multi-discipline engineering background, his passion is technological development and PME. Chris’ work has previously appeared on Grounded Curiosity, Strategy Bridge and The Cove.  Find him on Twitter .

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1984 | George Orwell | Book Review

After a long time, I got my hands on something that wasn’t about the affairs of the world or decoding Tharoor’s onerous and demanding vocabulary while finding my way out to the conclusion of the book.

But little did I know that those 300 pages made more sense than any philosopher or great thinker ever did with his narratives about the world and its astounding power politics. And to make it as dramatic as fictions are, it sure wasn’t ‘your average fiction’.

George Orwell’s 1984 has been a timeless classic , yet there is something contemporary about it. Fascinated by its constant appeal for so many generations, I decided to take part in the conspiracy myself. Completing 100 pages a day of an ebook didn’t feel like an achievement till I did not reach the appendix of the work.

The impact of the book was so that the thought of it didn’t leave my head for hours and hours throughout the day. It felt as if it was written in this time and age and was so close to the living reality that it felt worth not escaping.

The paradox in Winston Smith’s life was one thing that would leave you gazing at the screen for days straight. While his sheer capability of comprehending the concept of real freedom was noteworthy, it was remarkable to witness the dilemma his mind was going through while trying to differentiate between reality and illusion that was constantly present because of the intense stare by Big Brother’s eyes and the invisible curve under his moustache which was inevitable to ignore.

The features were so definite that the presence of Big Brother felt almost real. His impressions were literally present in every form and everywhere, be it physically (or mentally).

Every object, living or dead, witnessed Big Brother everywhere, in the form of the posters and advertisements and telescreen and songs and Hate Hours organized by the party and the development of kids into Spies in their blue uniforms and so on. It was a never-ending trail of praises for Big Brother and his ideology of state control.

It’s left unsaid if Big Brother existed in reality or not, but every single movement and every single breath of the people were guided by his words “Big Brother Is Watching You”.

Winston Smith’s efforts to face his dilemmas and accept the reality around him made him understand his disliking for the state and its despotic ministries.

DESPITE TRYING HARD ENOUGH TO STAND AGAINST THE REGIME, BUT WITH ALL CAUTION TO AVOID THE ARREST UNDER ‘THOUGHTCRIME’, WINSTON FAILS TO MOVE THINGS ACCORDING TO HIS PLANS.

The book takes you through a rollercoaster ride of sentiments, that a human brain can perceive and reflect, without breaking the flow of the story. From a supposedly brave love story which you root for, to the failure of Winston’s decision-making instincts, you feel vexed, dismay, betrayal, heartbroken, all at once.

In 1984, the narration is so overwhelming that you are left to absorb all those nail-biting endings that you were not prepared for. And all of this coming out of just a three hundred-page fiction leaves you amused.

It’s difficult to let go of the fact that a mere fiction, written in the 1940s has enough strength to make you realize that the existence of power play and human exploitation in the non-fictional world is in no way different from what Smith lives every day.

It is not just an anxious story about the state and the use of its unfair means to do as it pleases, but also about human relations with one another. A story where parents can’t trust their own children, a colleague can’t sit with another colleague, an individual unable to even think the thoughts of his liking, a story about extensive inequality, and a story of an utter betrayal by your own instincts that get you in the hands of your enemy, served as a fresh fish.

It’s a bird’s eye view of the world that lives amidst conformity and surveillance of the people, by people.

The conclusion makes you realize that Orwell was a child of his time who knew more than any other nearing generation of fully evolved human intellectuals. Or maybe he just wanted to be honest to the growing generation who was about to read his excellent work that portrayed a clear picture of human psychology and the greed for power behind the smokescreen of 1984.

It’s an uncompromising reminder for us to have a look at the present and ever-evolving global stage to understand what Smith meant when he said, “Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two is four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

It makes you wonder if the definitions fed to us about the ideals of constitutions from all around the world stand true on the face of it, or it was just another big work of few philosophers. This review is just a medium of appeal to anyone who hasn’t picked up 1984 yet, but it is on their wishlist, to give it a shot without thinking twice.

Can’t wait to read it? Buy your copy of 1984 using the link below.

Review by Jayashree Mishra .

Jayashree is 20 years old, and a student of Delhi University Political Science (Hons). She has been reading since grade 6th and like any typical teenager, her first ‘favorite’ author was Chetan Bhagat, and his book 3 Mistakes Of My Life was her first read. She considers admiring Bhagat as the first mistake in her life. She is currently more inclined towards the world of nonfiction and but Khalid Hosseini still remains her favorite.

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Julia by Sandra Newman review – a new Nineteen Eighty-Four

This ambitious retelling from Julia’s point of view gives Winston Smith’s lover the agency she lacked

F or decades, feminists have been pointing out undeniable limitations to George Orwell ’s work and life. As Deirdre Beddoe put it nearly 40 years ago, he was “totally blind” to the role that women “were and are forced to play”, and this insight is now being vividly fleshed out by other writers. Anna Funder’s recent Wifedom was a fascinating exploration of what it might have meant for Orwell’s wife Eileen to live in his shadow, while Sandra Newman’s novel Julia is an even more ambitious creation.

Here, Newman turns Orwell’s classic vision of the future inside out, and readers will find themselves gripped and surprised by what happens when the object of Winston Smith’s gaze looks back, and retells their journey into love and resistance. I began the book a little sceptical about whether a reimagining of Nineteen Eighty-Four would work as a novel in its own right. Fan fiction can rarely stand on its own, particularly when the source material is as precise and complete as Orwell’s. But Newman delivers on more than one level.

In the most basic way, Julia is a satisfying tribute act. Newman has deeply considered the language and culture of Orwell’s novel, which created its future setting by way of early 20th-century Britain, and takes us carefully through its familiar landscape. Indeed, these scenes are so well trodden for many of us that re-entering each one, from the grim windowless factory floor of the Ministry of Truth, to the fragile respite of the room above the junk shop, to O’Brien’s luxurious but threatening sitting room, can feel almost like encountering scenes from your own memories.

But as she probes his vision and moves beyond it, Newman also provides an imaginative and intellectual critique of Orwell’s novel. At the start of the second chapter, Julia signs out of her shift at the Ministry of Truth using the excuse “Sickness: Menstrual”, and immediately the novel travels into places where Smith could not and would not go. At the dormitory hostel where she lives, Julia’s connections with other women are revealed. These intimate and compromised relationships become the beating heart of the novel, and demonstrate how women’s lives under this totalitarian state inevitably differ from men’s at every point. Surveillance and loss of private life weigh differently on women, and the stakes – in terms of abuse, lack of physical autonomy, unwanted pregnancy – feel higher, even before the plot turns to its more deadly phase.

As she maps out this new territory, Newman forges a work that has its own emotional logic, and a character with her own vivid life. The portrait of Julia’s childhood is an ambitious mix of horror and freedom, and brings the reader to a deeper understanding of her gritty focus on survival. I was convinced by the way Newman maps Julia’s sexuality, how it is necessarily shaped by her constant experiences of voyeurism and abuse, but how she still courageously holds on to her right to pleasure.

I was also jolted, even shocked, by some of the decisions taken by this reincarnation of Julia. Because even though we think we know the plot, Newman takes an unexpected turn early on, and never stops surprising the reader. I’m unable to recount her best inventions without spoiling them, but by about halfway through, I began to feel more convinced by Julia’s responses to this totalitarian state than I had ever been by Smith’s.

Yet after that halfway point, the novel starts to weaken. The entry into darkness, into the Ministry of Love, does not have the power of Orwell’s journey. The torture chambers he imagined felt desperately real, built from accounts of survivors of gulags and concentration camps, so that even the unlikely creation of Room 101 became horribly convincing. Newman’s prison has something of the performative cruelty of The Hunger Games or similar recent dystopias, and her desire to win hope out of the darkness gradually leads her on to less convincing ground.

The book reaches what feels like an effective and sharply delineated denouement just over 50 pages before the end. Instead of ending there, however, Newman continues with scenes that bring Julia’s personal journey to a more dramatic conclusion. The shocking power of Orwell’s novel lay in his refusal to allow any crack in the totalitarian state where the light might get in. He discarded false hope regarding an individual’s effect on the system, and left the reader endlessly wondering what resistance means when there is no chance of success. Newman’s novel gradually turns into something like the replay of a video game, in which you are allowed to respawn as another avatar, to move through the same scenes with new lines, and get to a different place. This new trajectory is much less convincing than the original’s hard-won knowledge.

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Afterwards, however, the book stayed powerfully with me. Julia’s will to survive, her childhood experiences, her sensual joys, her relationships with other women, all make this a complex and empathic vision that stands up well beside Orwell’s original, and at many points enriches it.

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