I dropped out of school and chose my own reading list, which was heavy on history and pulp fiction and short on modern fiction. The fact that I did not choose to read anything by George Orwell serves as a strong argument against reader choice among teens. Never-the-less, I am still glad I waited until I was in my early forties to read it; and even more glad that I finally reread it at age 50 with a critical eye. Orwell is not an entertaining writer, and I was a meathead of the first order and would have yawned him into the oblivion that he warned us of. Also, reading dystopian fiction after you have lived a few decades as an adult brings a stark clarity to the reading experience.

My original title for this review was ‘The Beauty of the Destruction of Words’ from page 52. But on page 198 Orwell outdid himself as the fictitious author Emmanual Goldstein in ‘The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism’.

George Orwell, 1949

The Signet paper pack edition from 1977, 328 pages

The author uses oppressive blocks of text, deconstructive diction, and a host of dehumanizing behaviors drawn from Soviet and Nazi population management, to imagine a starkly bland dystopian London. I remember news casters celebrating the passage of 1984 with decrees that George Orwell had been wrong; that we were living freely forever in a bright shining America—had avoided his muddy social purgatory. I must say that those rosy announcements dampened my interest in reading the book.

From where I sit, and where every modern journalist quivers in fear of the forces of Global Homeland Security, I would venture to say that Orwell was precisely 30 years off the mark. Granted the world is much more brightly packaged than he could have imagined. But, in many ways, the use of language and television to control the mindless masses—indeed to render them mindless—is much more highly advanced than he suggested, working from 1930s fascist and communist models as he was.

This novel concerns Winston Smith, a low level functionary toiling away meaninglessly at the Ministry of Truth, wondering all the while if there is an opposition force that secretly seeks to undermine the government as god, deified as Big Brother. Much of Winston’s musings concern the use of language to control the world that oppresses him. Even his fantasy life has been circumscribed by the monolithic state.

The middle portion of the book is dedicated to Winston’s brief secret flowering as an actual human being along with his secret girlfriend Julia. One of the most vivid scenes has Winston reading a forbidden book in bed with Julia, cozy in their secret rental room. All through their agonizing affair doom hovers over their hopes, which they dare not hold onto too desperately, knowing that they will be caught and punished. It is during this portion of the book that the reader realizes that Orwell was graying the first third of the narrative to numb the reader into a Winston-like frame of mind. Winston and Julia become touchingly human, and even dare to dream and wonder; another narrative setup, for the soul-crushing conclusion.

Along with terms such as doublethink and newspeak, familiar to those who have not read the book, are terms such as The Ministry of Peace [War Department], which echo our own bending of the language [Department of Defense] to shore up our phony national narrative. A pervasive ‘Fourth Generation’ type of continuous war braces the super-state against any internal threats. This aspect of Orwell’s work; the realization that technology would permit postmodern governments to wage continuous war against phantom outside menaces in order to keep the mind-numbed masses focused on a vague external threat rather than the real enemy at home, is the most chilling of the many insights he had into our time.

The closing portion of the book descends into horrific insanity, as we begin to appreciate the totality of dehumanizing oppression that awaits any people who live under a political regime headed by a charismatic leader and sustained through pervasive surveillance and the threat of force.

Through his blocky version of the prose narrative, a clear insight into totalitarian political methodology and a dark view of establishment intellectuals in the British mold, Orwell managed to craft a society that was as dead and filthy on the surface as ours is at its core. His gift for specific predictions was nowhere near those of London in The Iron Heel. But his grasp of how a society might manage the systemic eradication of family, love, spirit, hope, and dignity far surpassed anything that occurred to London. 1984 is a sort of sour, left-handed allegory of a future that the author suspected would be loathsome, and that we, sitting like Winston before our own enlightening ‘telescreens’, call home.