1984

The reason for the delay is that I got carried away. As well as 1984, I read Huxley's Brave New World, and Orwell's Animal Farm, and having got carried along on a wave of old classics, also read Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Meanwhile I watched a fine movie, All About My Mother, which may not seem to provide any connexion to those novels, but which will be discussed alongside them, below, after I have dealt seperately with each. So, to 1984.

The further through the novel I progressed, the more I was reminded of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which may, of course, be no accident. What is interesting about the novel is not only how realistic Orwell's distopia seems, but also his examination of the mechanism by which it gains acceptance in the minds of party members, through "doublethink." That it takes determined presence of mind to reconcile oneself to an unappealing totalitarian state, from which there is no hope of escape, is an insight which suggests an angle on the question of the cupability of the 'ordinary man' living under such a state.

The fate of the 'proles' is interesting in this regard. Not obliged to tow the ideological line, they do not have to submit themselves to 'doublethink,' and, provided they are not distinguished by intelligence, have relatively little to fear from the Though Police, or the civil police. Not granted the awful Imperial Gin, they drink beer in the pub. It seems a far less bad life than that of the party member. Perhaps we are to pity the ignorant mob, but political conditions seem to affect their lifes in a far less insidious way than that of party members.

Ignorance is perhaps the salient factor. After all, Winston's troubles are rooted in the fact that he is concerned with an abstract idea of the truth, a concept tied closely to his perception of his own personhood and sanity. As he worries about the effect of the obliteration of evidence on the ontological status of the past, I was put in mind of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and the passage in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, where the link of the physical place and artefact to the identity of the protaganist suggests the material role of material objects in the creation and reinforcement of personal identity. Given Orwell's concern with the documentary record, the infamous 'dodgy dossier' also sprang to mind.

1984 is both a cleverly constructed, gripping novel, and a fascinating insight into the worries of the time at which it was written. While I wouldn't want to overplay the hackneyed 'continuing relavence for today,' it is also true to say that in the 'information age' the novel raises pertinent questions about the relations between power, information, identity and memory. It has taken me a surprisingly long time to get round to reading this novel, and I find it difficult to explain why, but to anyone who has thought about it but never quite bothered, I would suggest it is worth the modest time investment.

The what and why

Having recently finished Roberto Bolano's 2666, which made me think about how transient even my personal memory of the novels I have read is, I decided that writing about what I read would provide an enjoyable record, and hopefully help me to find more interesting books to read. I may come back to things I have recently read, but will begin with the novel I am currently reading, namely Orwell's 1984, which oddly I have never read.

Anyway, I'm halfway through, so I shall finish it and report back soon.