1984

George Orwell

1949

Well, is it 1984, or not? Winston Smith, the PoV character reckons that it is (+/- a couple of years anyway). The Party had been in power ever since the early fifties at least and had so insinuated itself into the lives of the inhabitants of Airstrip One and the rest of Oceania it might as well have been around for ever.

Winston knows quite well how malleable the past is for it is his job to make sure that the predictions of the Party actually match the cold realities of the present, for the Party and Big Brother can not be seen to be wrong. The other major constant of Winston's world is the continuing war between Oceania and EurAsia. In one memorable scene, the enemy swaps between one word and the next and all the laboriously prepared bunting had to be removed for surely only saboteurs led by the foul Goldstein could have caused so much confusion! Goldstein is one of the constants in the lives of the Party faithful, the Hate Figure of the Party as Big Brother is its epitome of Devotion.

Discouraging sex for any purpose except the strictly neutral purpose of reproduction, even this is not allowed to bind parents with children as the youths are enrolled in the Junior Anti-Sex League and rewarded for informing against their parents at the earliest possible age.

Into Winston's loveless life comes the forbidden Julia. At first fearing she was an agent of the dread Thought Police, and seeing the red sash of the Junior Anti Sex League round her (ever so shapely) hips, all he can do is admire her from afar until that fateful day she slipped a note into his hands declaring her love for him. Then followed a mad passionate love affair.

Eventually, though, the lovers become enmeshed in the web of O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party who also claimed membership ion the mysterious Brotherhood.

He it was who came for them finally in their secret love nest where they think they are hidden from the Thought Police's omnipresent telescreens.

Deep in the Ministry of Love's Dungeons, Winston's body is put through all the expected tortures and is broken though he is left with his mental defiance of the Party and love of Julia. However, there lay ahead the mysterious Room 101 where one learnt what one would really do to be saved from one's worst fears...

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Although having found a number of disturbing correspondences between Huxley's Brave New World and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in their mass culture ideals overwhelming the individual, this book, too, has its echoes in the contemporary culture. Although New Speak's attempts to reduce the language in order to deny even the possibility of ThoughtCrime has not really occurred, we tend to see a similar effect in today's culture of spin where such a plethora of different words are used to refer to the same thing that they lose their real meanings. Various elements of the novel have found their way into near mainstream culture, most particularly DoubleSpeak and Room 101, which has been awarded the accolade of being a popular TV series, though the purpose of the TV series is somewhat different from MinLove's!

Unlike either BNW or F451, 1984 is undisputedly a dystopia and was written as George Orwell was busily falling out with his former Comrades in the Socialist scene. Like BNW, there is no possibility given that the society presented within the novel is capable of being overthrown (one suspects that if an American author had written this, it would either have ended with Winston and Julia leading the Proles to a Glorious Capitalist Revolution, or dying defiant to the end in Min Love's torture chambers ;-)). And if you doubt the ability of Oceania to cut itself off from the rest of the world, then you might like to consider that even today, many, if not most Americans reckon that they can obtain all the diversity they require within the bounds of North America (the fact that Canada and Mexico are separate countries does not always register...).

I have heard it said that the technology required to spy on the citizens of Oceania is a little too overt, with the massive telescreens and Winston and Julia's belief that they could not be spied upon in the forest glade (this latter is just their belief - we don't have any evidence they were not spied on), but in my opinion, the overt nature of the spying is part of the point.

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