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BooksJuly 31, 2019

Review: everything you never knew about George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four

Guest writer

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Londoner Dorian Lynskey usually writes about music for big mastheads like the Guardian and GQ. His latest project, The Ministry of Truth, is something completely different – and fascinating, writes Orwell fan Mark Broatch.

In the months leading up to the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four in June of 1949, George Orwell talked down his novel. In letters to friends he called it a “beastly book”, “an awful book really”, and “a good idea ruined”. He thought it would have been better had it not been written under the influence of tuberculosis – the disease that would kill him within months. He told his publisher that “it isn’t a book I would gamble on for a big sale”. (Animal Farm, his surprise-hit earlier novel, had already earned him the equivalent of £400,000.) Nineteen Eighty-Four would go on to sell millions of copies, be translated into dozens of languages, and indelibly change literature and society.

Orwell always undersold his novels, says Dorian Lynskey in this outstanding “biography” of the book. This was due to Orwell’s “tangle of modesty, expectation management and genuine self-doubt”. Burmese Days “made me spew”; Coming Up for Air was “a mess”. He believed himself to be a failure, at home with defeat, says Lynskey. His publisher noticed that he “never liked being associated with anything that was too powerful or successful”. Friends nevertheless thought him destined for greatness, including Arthur Koestler, author of the 1940 anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon, who bet five bottles of burgundy that Orwell would have a bestseller within five years. Animal Farm beat the deadline by a year. The success of that novel, a satirical allegory of Russian history from the 1917 Revolution until mid-WW2, meant Orwell – largely a jobbing journalist and reviewer – could devote himself to writing books.

The Ministry of Truth‘s first part explores Orwell’s life, loves and losses, his ill health and writerly struggles, philosophical and financial. All the influences and experiences that fed the novel are here too in fine-grained detail: his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, which informed his view “that political expediency corrupted integrity, language and truth itself”; wartime Britain under threat of the Luftwaffe’s bombs and serving in the Home Guard; and working in the talks department of the BBC’s Indian Section, a key inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s propaganda and bureaucracy and Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth; as well as his pen to pen combat with HG Wells, and the stirring ideas of Koestler, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution.

As for the development of the novel itself, elements like Ingsoc, the three super-states and the Two Minutes Hate were there from 1943 or 1944, says Lynskey, along with the basic idea of a subversive writer, a significant conversation and an affair. The back half of the book was always going to incorporate arrest, torture, confession and, as usual with Orwell, failure. But important elements, such as telescreens and Big Brother, an amalgam of characters blurred with Hitler and Stalin, arrived later.

Then there’s the writing. Orwell’s wife Eileen had recently died, leaving him a single father to the adopted Richard, as had his mother and older sister. Racked with illness, he decamped to an isolated, electricity-free house on the Scottish island of Jura, with his sister Avril, his housekeeper and Richard, and set about feverishly working to finish the novel.

The second part of The Ministry of Truth covers the book’s impact and aftermath. Orwell was admiring of Kipling for having introduced phrases to the language. Many who have never read Nineteen Eighty-Four nevertheless know exactly what is meant by doublethink, Newspeak, the Thought Police, unperson and Room 101 – and the much-misused term Orwellian.

Its impact wasn’t immediate. In 1954 the BBC’s broadcast of a two-hour adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four drew seven million viewers, about one in seven of the population. Prior to that, its impact was “marginal”, reckoned the Times, though the book had already sold probably a million copies. “Not that marginal, then,” notes Lynskey.

The book in fact cast a gigantic shadow over the future canon of dystopian fiction. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (though he specifically cited Darkness at Noon), The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood called it “speculative fiction of the George Orwell variety”), Brazil, V for Vendetta, Big Brother the TV series and Black Mirror. Its effect has been felt in the cultural comprehension of Edward Snowden and NSA surveillance, the nightmare of deepfakes, and of course on to China (“any reference to Orwell’s book is scrubbed from the internet”), Trump (“he has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the discipline, intellect or ideology”) and Putin. The book meanwhile ensured the world had lost its appetite for shiny, happy utopias, with the exception of BF Skinner’s Walden Two and Huxley’s Island, which depict perfect worlds you’d never want to live in.

Lynskey has read everything to do with Orwell, his novels, letters, reviews. But he’s read many of his subject’s contemporaries and rivals too. The author is largely a music writer, and was perhaps drawn to the subject – he doesn’t say – because of David Bowie’s intense interest in making a musical of Nineteen Eighty-Four, before Orwell’s widow Sonia kyboshed that idea. He is particularly good at dropping in just one or two apt quotes, never slowing the narrative with the trove of material he has sifted. The Ministry of Truth gives an excellent sense of events elsewhere, providing a political, social and literary context that’s sometimes missing from such accounts.

My appreciation should come with a disclosure: George Orwell and I have something of a history. Worn paperbacks of Nineteen Eighty-Four, We and Brave New World sit on my bookcase, as well as the likes of Homage to Catalonia. So taken by Nineteen Eighty-Four was I that I even have a copy of the Fascimile, an expensive hard-bound assemblage of surviving manuscripts published in 1984. As part of a postgrad degree years ago I wrote long, doubtlessly febrile essays about Orwell’s novel and other dystopias. Still, I marked half of this book for quotation as a result of the many things I wasn’t quite aware of, such as the title – the 1948-1984 idea is a myth; it was originally called The Last Man in Europe – and The Appendix Theory, which allows a hugely different interpretation of events.

Is Nineteen Eighty-Four ultimately pessimistic about humanity’s prospects? My 1983 version ends with him writing with his finger in the dust on the table “2 + 2 = ”. In the original, and in all versions since 1987, says Lynskey, it was “2 + 2 = 5”. Big Brother had won; all hope was lost. No one has explained whether it was a late change by Orwell, or a strange printing error. The eerie 1984 Michael Radford film, with John Hurt as Smith, Richard Burton – persuaded out of retirement for the role and just a short distance from his own death – as O’Brien and Suzanna Hamilton as Julia, is probably the most famous screen version. It ends with Winston writing “2 + 2” and stopping. Radford felt it would be too dark without that doubt.

Despite Sonia Orwell’s staunch resistance to suspected travesties over the years (they married months before his death; she died in 1980), many adaptations of the book have been made, including film, TV and theatre versions, even an opera and ballet. A Paul Greengrass film was mooted for this year, but nothing has come of that. No rock musical has arrived; perhaps the Eurythmics’ ‘Sex Crime’ soundtrack* of the Radford film – engineered, says Lynskey, by Richard Branson’s Virgin Films, which had pumped $US6m into the film – is punishment enough.

Like Animal Farm before it, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been championed and condemned, subverted, co-opted (most egregiously by Steve Jobs’ Apple Mac ad) and misunderstood. Orwell – the pathologically honest atheist socialist – has been embraced by conservatives, liberals, socialists, anarchists, Catholics and libertarians. He could be “rash, hyperbolic, irritable, blinkered and perverse”, says Lynskey. But he always questioned his instincts, prejudices, motives. In an article, Why I Write, Orwell noted: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand.” Orwell argued that authors jostle four major motives: ego, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. He decided that the fourth had propelled his best work in what would be the last decade or so of his life, and declared he wrote because “there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention”.

Just 19 days after Orwell’s death, Joseph McCarthy would tell an audience that he had a long list of communists working in the US State Department. “I always disagree when people end by saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism,” Orwell said. “It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself.”

The 70th anniversary of the book’s release “falls at a dark time for liberal democracy, no doubt,” writes Lynskey in his afterword. “Yet around the world, millions of people in the ‘reality-based community’ continue to push back against the Medium-Sized Lie, to reaffirm that facts matter, to fight for the preservation of honesty and integrity, and to insist on the freedom to say that two and two make four. For them, the book still has much to offer.” Orwell was more interested in psychology than systems, says Lynskey, so every cognitive bias, prejudice and trick that lets injustice gain the upper hand is on show in the novel. As he wrote in his preface for Animal Farm, liberal values “are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort”.

Huxley’s biographer Sybille Bedford expressed the view – in the year 1984 – that instead of the binary dystopian paths of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, we had entered the age of mixed tyrannies. She meant, says Lynskey, that modern seekers of power would use “whatever combination of coercion, seduction and distraction proved most effective”. The book does not, it should be noted, predict surveillance capitalism, in which huge private companies capture and dominate our lives by way of our online social and buying behaviour, with our complicity.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a prophecy, Orwell insisted. A satire, a parody and a warning, but not a foretelling – and definitely not a howl of despair from a dying man. In his last months he explained that he wrote the book not to “bind our wills but to strengthen them”, writes Lynskey. He told his publisher: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare is a simple one. Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”

The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, by Dorian Lynskey (Picador, $37.99) is available at Unity Books.

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BooksJuly 29, 2019

‘I am leaving you’: Michelle Langstone writes her heart out to Haruki Murakami

Michelle Langstone

Contributing writer

Tired of his tropes and infatuations, Michelle Langstone writes about her waning love for the writings of Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

I left you behind with a note that said “Free to a good home. No longer wanted.” Blunt, perhaps, but that’s how it is when love runs out. There isn’t room for sensitivity when it’s an acrimonious separation after many years of infatuation. The afternoon heat in Vietnam brought rain. The windows were blurred with it, and the flashing of red brake lights from taxis and scooters on the street beyond where I left you made it seem like I was walking away from the scene of an accident.

You wrote something once. Well, you wrote a lot of things, but you wrote something about love and you nestled it like a treasure to be found and thieved and coveted; read again and again in the pages of a book you called Kafka on the Shore. The words were monuments to love, and I built a city around them, dragging stone and glass and timber like a faithful labourer.

“Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.”

I think it was the last time you showed your heart to me like that. Your love came in hot in your early works, you were giddy with the intensity of feeling you had to share. All your early words carried the mysteries of connection. Sputnik Sweetheart, Norwegian Wood – they were drenched in it. And then you became busier with strange towns and jazz and cats; women wanted you, or they wanted something else, or they couldn’t speak about their longing but you sensed it. Sad women and students divorced from themselves. Pale women with dark hair occupied you. I wore my hair like a curtain and wondered if you’d like it.

I once lay in bed with a man who was listening to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle on audiobook. He lived with his mother, and she had gone to work on a night shift, so we lay in the cheap sheets in the dark, listening to the story I’d read so often, narrated in an accent that was not American nor British, but existed in a strange vacuum of indistinguishable origins. After the part where you made yourself a simple meal and poured a small glass of beer, you masturbated. I think you’d visited the mysterious well in the neighbouring prefecture, and were at sea in your apartment again. I think that was the order of things. I’ve lost count of those simple constructions, and where they belong, but you were always thoughtful over a meal. We listened to the narrator tell us that you gave yourself a methodically restrained and efficient handjob, and then we had sex. I remember thinking there was some kind of power in that, that I was somehow linked to you forever, by virtue of sexual gratification. I say you because it is you, isn’t it? I go looking for you in every book and I find you instantly. You’re there in a simple meal of grilled chicken and rice with spring onions, you’re there in a lazily-spinning record in a room high in a house, you’re there with your hand on it after a perplexing incident. You gave it a tug more times than I can count, and I wonder if you ever considered restraint.

You always had a thing for breasts. It’s impossible for you not to comment on them, and I forgave you at first because I was young and I loved the thrill of thinking breasts were worthy of such attention that they made it into nearly every single one of your books. I suppose I thought it was part of what made your writing so alluring — that unashamed gaze on the female. Once I even justified it was a link to your jazz records, to the round shape of them, some kind of motif, something you’d done intentionally to imprint the shape of your world. Honestly, I cringe that I indulged you.

It grew tired. By the time 1Q84 came around to bludgeon us with its weight and girth, your women were practically sex dolls, and I could trace their outline in the air, even if I’d never know what they were thinking or feeling, or what their heart was like, or if they’d had dreams, once. I left you behind in the height of this breast mania, in Killing Commendatore, where you’d often contemplate your sister’s growing bosom with the lofty musings of a philosopher. She was dying of some kind of affliction that apparently would beset you with psychological issues for the rest of your adult life, but don’t let that stop you describing their budding form, buddy.

Here’s something, Haruki. You changed translator with your book Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I don’t know why you did that, but I felt it immediately, and it didn’t sit well on me. It was like pulling last winter’s trousers from the cupboard and finding them suddenly ill-fitting, as if they had been made for someone who had no bottom, no curves to speak of. Your voice was lost to me, held just back, as if you existed through a thick pane of glass and I could still see you, but no longer hear you. You always had an elegant way of tangling feeling with practicality, and it was dazzling because you brought Japan with you in your coat pockets, and showed it to me, this formal, structured existence filled with intense and secret passion.

I think that’s where it all unravelled. You changed, or perhaps I did. Your coat got baggy, and you let the fabric stretch and become misshapen. Nobody stopped you. I remember being excited that Kafka on the Shore was a bit heftier than usual, because it meant more time in your company. When 1Q84 arrived you were a companion I enjoyed in more measured doses. It was fantastic, and fantastical, but it was flabby. Colourless Tsukuru was, well, pale. It was pasty and cumbersome and I didn’t know what the hell was going on, even though I still loved you. There were strains of Norwegian Wood that I’d let out a breath for, when I encountered them, and feel relieved you were still there, before I began to drown in the swathes of vague words again.

I picked up Killing Commendatore from the bookshop, where I’d reserved a copy, and I felt tired just looking at it. I put you on a shelf intending to read you, and I picked you up and put you down many times and I felt irritated that you asked so much from me. I chose you to come with me to Vietnam because I thought being farther away would help me to connect with you again. I thought we’d have a nice holiday together and remember why we loved each other. You put me over my hand luggage weight allowance. You hurt my shoulder, jammed in my handbag like that. My wrist ached from holding you up, like I’d given myself too many post-meal handjobs. You went on and on about your sister’s breasts and you were blank-eyed and bloodless about your casual lovers and the perfunctory sex you were having. There was the mystery of a painting in an attic, there was a strange cairn of stones and a ringing bell in the night and a man with white hair. Someone made a bingo card of your ‘youness’, did you know that? Every box, something we’d come to know and expect from you. I think I collected the set before I was halfway through the damn thing, it was so full of your tropes. You made ham sandwiches this time, and while I applaud you broadening the scope of your simple meals, the only time ham sandwiches sound appealing is when Enid Blyton writes about them. Look her up – she can give you a good adventure without causing RSI.

I don’t really want to read about two men listening to classical music for a hundred pages. I don’t really think you can justify a 700-page book, even if you are a legend. Remember when you came to the Auckland Writers Festival and the event sold out and we were giddy for you? Remember when that audience member asked the best question ever recorded in the notoriously fraught ‘question time’, which was approximately “Do you think cats really have magical powers?” and you smiled benignly and said “It is just a cat” and we all applauded and laughed and glowed with your pragmatism, even as we secretly hoped you’d have said yes. Even as we recalled how many times we’d looked carefully at our own moggies, hoping they might say something.

Even though you can describe the stillness of a scene like you paused the world just to show me, even though your love of running reminds me of my dad, even though your devotion to music is so deep that it creates a soundtrack for every sentence you write, and even though the way you write about longing is as if you have drawn blood from me and examined it under a microscope, I am leaving you. Think of it as a cooling-off period, and a chance for us both to come back to ourselves. Perhaps, down the line, we might make another go of it, but I won’t promise you that.

As much as it hurts, I think it’s better if we don’t have any contact, so I’m sorry, but I don’t want to hear from you for a while. I’d prefer it if you didn’t write.

Killing Commendatore, by Haruki Murakami, is available at Unity Books (and, if you’re lucky, the foyer of the Hotel Grand Saigon).