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BOOK REVIEW: BIOGRAPHY

Orwell’s ‘1984’ was a warning, not a prediction
Two strange events took place in November 2016; Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 48th President of the United States, and George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984 , suddenly became a best seller again. Could event A be the cause of event B? The choice is for the reader to make, but for all intents and purposes, British critic Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (Pan Macmillan, 2019) may provide a helping hand to the investigation.
Lynskey’s book provides fascinating insights into the lead up to 1984 , starting from Orwell’s experiences fighting as a cabo in the Spanish Civil War, and moving on to visiting coal miners in North Western England and his life as a labourer in the kitchens of Paris—all of which combined allowed Orwell to pen his extravagant successes, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984. According to Lynskey, 1984 was the summation of Orwell’s entire body of experiences and is a key to understanding the machinations of our current world structure.
Orwell experienced that, although he was fighting for the Socialists, there existed an inherent disdain and partisanship between the different “types” of Socialists. He himself barely survived the wrath of the Stalinists, since he was part of the Trotskyist section. “I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never […] have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners,” Orwell writes in Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
Lynskey brilliantly elaborates on these ponderings in his analysis of 1984 ’s afterlife. Right after the release of the book in 1949, Conservative Americans declared it to be an attack not just on Soviet Russia, but the general Left. To refute this prevailing sentiment, Orwell responded that the novel wasn’t aimed at any particular form of government but rather, was a satirical jest aimed at the collectivist, totalitarian ideologies taking root among post-WWII western intellectuals: “The moral of the story […] from this dangerous nightmare situation is simple: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
Critics of 1984 would point to the numerous predictions which Orwell supposedly got wrong. The Soviet Union has collapsed, technology has liberated us, and things have generally turned out to be good. The underlying existentialist tone of the book is also allegedly that of a dying man struggling against his failed romance with Socialism.
But Lynskey elaborates that Orwell never intended the book to be a prediction; he purposed it as a warning. The novel wasn’t a result of a dying man harbouring bitterness (Orwell was a successful free-lance journalist, and spent a significant portion of his youth with the Socialist movement), but rather a Game-Theoretic au-revoir—a theme Orwell incorporated through a not-so-subtle exhibition of “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” in the novel’s final chapter(s).
Lynskey acknowledges that we do not necessarily live in a totalitarian system: “By definition, a country in which you are free to read 1984 is not the country described in 1984 .” But such can only be assumed for a handful of nations; and if any one particular lesson were to be taken out of 1984 (and Ministry of Truth ), it is that it doesn’t take long or much effort to deprive individuals of their autonomy.
A longer version of this article will be available online.
SM Shafqat Shafiq is a contributor to Daily Star Books.
DESIGN: Sarah Anjum Bari
The novel wasn’t aimed at any particular form of government, it was a satirical jest aimed at the collectivist, totalitarian ideologies taking root among post-WWII western intellectuals: “The moral of the story […] from this nightmare situation is simple: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
SM Shafqat Shafiq