1984 Review
1984 was always one of those books I kept putting off and left on the back-burner. Although I knew I’d always have to read it. Given its reputation in the dystopian and sci-fi genres of fiction there was no way I was ever going to pass up on it.
And so I ended up reading it within a couple days this week, less than what it typically takes me to get through a three-hundred-page novel. The plot, once it gets going, is a compelling roller-coaster ride through some pretty dark places.
Winston Smith is an everyman living in London—or at least some semblance of the London we know. The city is overrun by the Party, which does away with anyone who challenges it, and is constantly at war with either Eastasia or Eurasia. Orwell merges the planet’s continents into three sub-sections constantly at odds with one another—Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia. Any presently warring opponent is considered to have “always been” the opponent. History is changed at all times so to reflect the present. The past essentially ceases to exist, because it is constantly being re-written to reflect the present.
Smith, like so many others in this book, aids in warping the events and relics of the past so as to favor the present. It is unsavory, and rather a bit too real now in 2022, when we think about what is happening on a global level.
Orwell gave us something very technological for its time when first published in 1949. The surveying screens that are some radio-TV hybrid pick up on behaviors of everyone who owns one (what does that make you think of?), Winston Smith included. Scenes involving Smith being tested and tortured inside some closed-off government hospital are intense. His personal thoughts and feelings are squashed out of him at the expense of the relationship with the woman he loves, along with anything else that resembled his life before.
It is a difficult story to get through, as it preys upon what we now understand to be a shaky relationship between technology, government, and senses of privacy. And remember— this was published 73 years ago. The future Orwell wrote about was not 1984, but rather a provocative warning signal for the times we are in now. Turn on any given news network and you get an idea of the Orwellian societies that characterize certain parts of the world.
This is a relevant and highly engaging book; you ought to read it.
