Unrelentingly bleak, George Orwell’s novel 1984 defined the dystopian genre. It’s depiction of a totalitarian state echoes down the decades.
With a setting more memorable than any of the characters, Orwell’s dictatorship controls every aspect of its citizens lives. It corrupts language itself, manipulated into Newspeak. Truth is the first casualty. Every utterance of the state is propaganda.
Against this, the individual has no rights. To doubt, to question, is treason; thought crime, prosecuted by the Thought Police. This surveillance state of fear and paranoia far surpasses anything of the Soviet system of the post-war period. Orwell’s declining post-war Britain becomes Airstrip One, an outpost of Oceania, one of three perpetually warring superpowers. War justifies control, it demands patriotism and obedience.
Big Brother is watching you
Dominated by the paternalistic Big Brother, whose image and pronouncements saturate daily life, the state is inescapable. The figurehead of state, the centre of a cult of personality, Big Brother many not even exist. He is an all-consuming idea, demanding absolute loyalty and total sacrifice.
And who is Orwell’s protagonist? Winston Smith, an everyman. Winston, after the Great Englishman, Churchill, and Smith, as common a name as you can find. Smith is an office drone in the state machine of propaganda, the Ministry of Truth, where yesterday’s truth becomes today’s treason, where nothing is fixed. History is revised daily.
Smith begins to keep a diary – a forbidden act. He begins a loveless affair with party apparatchik Julia. Under suspicion, Smith is captured and tortured by party enforcer O’Brien. Smith is no hero. His sad, shallow rebellion quickly collapses. Crushed by the wheels of state and his own cowardice, he betrays himself and Julia. Smith’s moral disintegration ends with his willing submission. The instant he acknowledges his love for Big Brother, is his execution (spoiler).
Orwell the master
Orwell’s mastery of English prose illuminates his depth of thought. He picks apart politics, ideology, language, the very nature of reality as we understand it. His disillusion with politics of very shade informs every line.
Precise and direct, his ideas leap off the page. From the slogans of state:
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
to the mechanisms of control:
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
Alongside Animal Farm and lesser remembered works such as Coming Up for Air, 1984 rightfully puts Orwell in the forefront of political novelists. It is an undisguised political wake-up call that is as relevant today as when published in 1949.