A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
1984
George Orwell
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
Anybody else involuntarily play Tina Turner in their head every time they hear “1984”? I wish I didn’t, because I had this damn song blaring in my brainpan every time I picked up the book and I still have no idea what it’s talking about. I suppose “We played out an all-night movie role/You said it would last, but I guess we enrolled/In 1984” refers to Winston and Julia, and “They’ll split your pretty cranium and fill it full of air” seems pretty clear, but the rest of it is………strange. (As to why I am invoking Tina instead of David Bowie: my parents are Tina Turner stans, and hers is the version I grew up with.) Anyway, I said I’d never read this but then big things shifted in a big way and I started collecting as many of these kinds of books as I could lay my hands on and now I’ve read it so HA, joke’s on me, I guess. It didn’t even take me that long to change my mind, this is embarrassing.
The city is London and the year is 1984, or it’s a year that the Party has named 1984. There’s no way of knowing for sure when the past is fully malleable, but at the moment the Party’s line is that it’s 1984. Probably it’s always been 1984. In this present, the world’s power rests in three superstates known as Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, which are locked in a neverending war. England is also now known as Airstrip One for some reason, though London got to keep its name. The territories of Oceania – the Americas, the Atlantic Islands, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa – are ruled by a totalitarian cult known simply as the Party, which rose to power after an anti-capitalist revolt called the Revolution. The Party has now been in power for untold decades, and is divided into three main classes: the Inner Party, whose members enjoy capitalistic privileges of the sort that the Revolution was supposed to remove; the Outer Party, whose members are mercilessly worked in exchange for less money and fewer privileges; and the proletariats (“proles”), the peasant-like masses for whose benefit the Revolution supposedly happened in the first place. The Party rigidly follows a political system called English Socialism (“Ingsoc”), nominally under the leadership of Big Brother, a murky figure who serves as the Party’s mascot.
To enforce absolute loyalty among the Oceanic populace, the Party makes extensive use of telescreens, cameras, and hidden microphones, through which every Party member is zealously monitored 24/7. Any citizen who doesn’t appear to conform – or any citizen who seems overly intelligent – is arrested and purged (“vaporized”) by the brutal Thought Police, with any trace of their existence completely erased. In addition to the Thought Police, the Party uses four ministries to keep order: the Ministry of Truth, which retroactively rewrites published materials to conform to the Party’s ever-changing version of history; the Ministry of Peace, which oversees Oceania’s war efforts; the Ministry of Love, which tortures so-called “thoughtcriminals” until they fall into line with Party ideals; and the Ministry of Plenty, which oversees the rationing of food and other goods while maintaining a state-mandated level of poverty and scarcity. Citizens are further controlled through such extracurricular activities as the Junior Anti-Sex League and the Two Minutes Hate, a daily hatefest in which Party members are forced to reaffirm their hatred for Emmanuel Goldstein – chief enemy of the Party – and his followers, who are called the Brotherhood. In short, the Party’s main goal is to suck all the joy out of life in order to force its citizens to channel their unreleased energies into patriotic mania, and it has succeeded to an insanely disturbing degree. At this moment in time, Oceania is at war with Eurasia (it has always been at war with Eurasia), Eastasia is a good friend and ally, and anyone who doesn’t match the Party’s energy could very well find themselves accused of being a Eurasian spy.
Thus we are introduced to Winston Smith, an Outer Party paper-pusher who works in the Ministry of Truth and secretly hates the Party, though he does find great satisfaction in his work. He is thirty-nine and in possession of a varicose ulcer, moderately addicted to the cheap gin and cigarettes which are his only real luxury, old enough to vaguely remember his pre-Revolution life as an appallingly spoiled child but too young to really make sense of anything that came before the Party. His parents and sister died long ago, and his Party-assigned wife was so sex-repulsed that they eventually separated out of sheer embarrassment. He has no friends but knows enough about the neighboring Parsons family to be wary of their children, a pair of savages who – along with the rest of their generation – were groomed from an early age by a youth organization called the Spies, which trains children to report any suspected unorthodoxy from any Party member, especially among their own families. He is also somewhat friendly with Syme, another Ministry of Truth employee and a real fanatic, though he privately suspects that Syme is too intelligent to be tolerated by the Party; and he becomes obsessed with O’Brien, an Inner Party official who he believes might be a gateway to the Brotherhood despite a total lack of evidence.
Though he outwardly conforms to every major Party rule, Winston impulsively buys a diary from a little junk shop run by Mr. Charrington, an elderly prole, and begins to record the kind of thoughts that tend to get people vaporized. His thoughts become increasingly treasonous when he begins a passionate affair with Julia, an under-thirty colleague who also hates the Party but is politically apathetic and uninterested in a second revolution. Craving some sort of normalcy, Winston rents the bedroom above Mr. Charrington’s shop, and he and Julia begin to use the room as an escape from reality, though they both know the affair is not sustainable. Some time later, O’Brien secretly inducts Winston and Julia into the Brotherhood and lends them a copy of a mega-banned book titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which he tells them was written by Goldstein. Meanwhile, Winston’s sort-of friend Syme vanishes one day without explanation and is presumably vaporized, and the Party abruptly announces that Oceania is at war with Eastasia and always has been, forcing every Ministry of Truth employee to work extensive overtime to correct every record that ever mentioned the war with Eurasia.
Winston’s dreams of rebellion die a hard death when he and Julia are arrested by Mr. Charrington, who turns out to be an undercover agent of the Thought Police. Imprisoned in the Ministry of Love, they are horrifically tortured by O’Brien – also a member of the Thought Police, who lured them into the Brotherhood for the purposes of betraying them, and who wrote Goldstein’s book by committee – and forced through a “re-education” course in advance of their eventual executions. While awaiting his own torture, Winston observes a number of other prisoners coming and going, among them his neighbor Tom Parsons, who was turned in by his own daughter after she claimed she heard him muttering “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep. (I’ll admit that was a real surprise. I knew Parsons was probably going to end up in Miniluv, but I also thought it would be his son who did the betraying after the scolding he got for shooting Winston with a toy catapult.)
Though he refuses to betray Julia, Winston finally breaks when he is taken to Room 101, a special room whose torments are customized to every prisoner, and threatened with starving rats that almost eat his face. After denouncing Julia and swearing loyalty to the Party, Winston is given food and medical treatment and released into the public with a cushy job that pays well and requires almost no work, though with the understanding that he will be executed at some later date, entirely at the Party’s discretion. During a brief encounter, Julia – who was also released and is also now awaiting execution – admits that she denounced Winston during her torture, and they acknowledge that they are no longer in love. When all is said and done, Winston learns that Oceania has won a major victory over Eurasian armies in Africa (or says it has), and fully embraces his love for Big Brother.
I came into this book with the expectation that I would come out the other side with horrible crushing depression, and in this I was not deceived. But I also kind of liked it, or I did for the first two sections, and that was really a surprise. (Section 3 was long and boring, and I don’t think much of O’Brien’s writing. Frankly, I wish we’d seen less of it.) For some reason Winston’s story was hard to put down, which actually is a good thing when I was thinking it would be hard to pick up. It was harder to get through Winston’s time in the Ministry of Love – not because of any particular triggers, but because O’Brien’s insane nonsensical rhetoric was infuriating to read. Worse still was Winston’s fanboy admiration of O’Brien’s supposed intelligence, even though he knew the man was spouting nonsense. I would also have liked some explanation for O’Brien’s mind-reading, which is accurate to such a microscopic degree that it cannot be dismissed as a mere knack for reading facial cues.
On the other hand, the vagueness of the book and the world work better than I would ever have expected. There are a number of questions that do not need to be answered: whether Big Brother actually exists, or whether he was wholly fabricated by Party leadership as a quasi-religious figure in the absence of any state-sanctioned religion; whether (as I suspect, and as Julia also suggested) the bombs that keep falling on London are fired by the Party, to keep the people afraid and under control; whether Inner Party officials possess some sort of supernatural power, or whether the technology is just that good; whether Goldstein or the Brotherhood or even Eurasia or Eastasia truly exist. There’s no way of knowing any of this when Winston’s world is so insular, to the point that no one is allowed to speak any language other than English. Even standard English is on its way out the door: the official language of Oceania is Newspeak, a stripped-down English that sort of predicts netspeak. Nor do I feel shortchanged by the lack of answers, which after all is part of the point of the book. The ambiguity doesn’t hollow out the world, but it does add a quiet menace. Equally ominous is the lack of any sort of a pet: never once does Winston encounter a dog or a cat or even a caged bird, and it really makes me wonder if the Party eradicated all forms of animal companion, or if Orwell just didn’t see fit to mention any.
Predictably, I take the most issue with the misogyny, which I was prepared for but obviously still did not enjoy. In the beginning there is some self-awareness – Winston hates Julia upon first sight and fantasizes about raping and murdering her (which for some reason isn’t an immediate turn-off for her), though he is aware on a more rational level that his hatred is a petty gut reaction spawned by his perceived inability to sleep with her – but he also unequivocally blames women for allowing the Party to gain power, and the childbearing proles he encounters are to a woman exaggeratedly enormous. Which, yes, pregnancy and childbearing can cause permanent weight gain, and one would think the proles’ lifestyle and diet wouldn’t help. But every body is different, regardless of lifestyle, and no two bodies will follow an exactly identical path, and it is tremendously irritating that Orwell goes out of his way to depict every prole woman above a certain age as gross, monstrous, unnaturally swollen. Even more irritating is Julia’s bald declaration that she hates women, because I really wanted to like her. There’s no exploration of internalized misogyny; she simply hates women. (A trait she appears to share with Winston – was this meant to be cute?) I respect her for her small rebellions, but there’s not much to her character, and her love for Winston is baffling when he himself admits he’s an unappealing catch.
I don’t know if I’d really recommend this book, but I don’t not recommend it either. It is what it is, and it is depressing as shit, but I feel like we all know that. It isn’t as dense as I thought it would be; I appreciated the ease of the read, though given that I’ve also read and enjoyed Animal Farm I suppose I should’ve expected that in advance. We can’t all be Conrad, and thank heavens for that. Overall, the book is depressing, infuriating, thought-provoking, and all too recognizable, and, if I’ve taken nothing else away from this extremely grim satire, I definitely know this much: I never want to babysit those horrible Parsons children.
