Intro:
I recently finished listening to the unabridged audio book version of 1984. My mother had recommended that I read this book ages ago and so finally at long last I’m familiar with the contents of it. Overall, I enjoyed the book and can see why it has earned its place in the pantheon of pop-culture. It is well written and reads like a precisely executed thought experiment that drags the reader over every nook and cranny of the first person humanistic experience of the main character from amoral start to finish. From that standpoint every later homage is quite pale in comparison. I assume there is no need to worry about "spoilers" with such an old book. I didn’t even mind the unhappy ending, but I did have one significant complaint that I thought I would share.
Perhaps 3/4ths of the way into the book, the main character, Winston, and his secret girlfriend, Julia, are solicited to join a rebellion by a secret agent of the thought police, O’brien. They are asked a long list of the things they’d be willing to do in order to help the revolution against the infamous political entity, “Big Brother.” Bizarrely they are willing to basically become terrorists. They have no qualms about hurting innocent men, women, and children to achieve their goals. Granted, I recognize this pays off later in the book when Winston is being “rehabilitated” and he is asked if he believes he is morally superior to the evil political party (they play the recording of this conversation back to him to remind him that he is just as bad as they are). However, up until that point I had actually empathized with Winston and this sudden jaw dropping confession of his would have made continuing that theme the equivalent of cheer leading for Osama Bin Laden. I could justify it as an extreme subjective human reaction in relation to their extreme life experiences under the tyranny of the thought police, but that turned the book into a pure anthropological exercise where it‘s just information about the fucked up things people do. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted to care about Winston and Julia, and from then on, I really couldn’t. That was very disappointing and I was very close to not bothering to finish the book. Yes, I get it that it ties into the theme of being completely lost to subjective limbo land, but it’s like going “full retard” as explained in the Ben Stiller comedy, Tropic Thunder (link). You just don’t do that if you expect the audience to connect.
I had another complaint but I double checked myself and realized I was mistaken. O’brien gives Winston a copy of the scandalous revolutionary book supposedly written by the imaginary anti-Big Brother savior, Goldstein. It’s a rather sterile description of the political and sociological circumstances of the era and how they came about that the evil party doesn’t want you to know about. At first I thought Orwell has Winston read from the book and then re-read the same chapter from the book in its entirety, but it seems I jumped to conclusions. He does re-read a 2 minute excerpt from chapter 1 (which is plenty of time to get angry when you don't have the ability to skip ahead easily with an audiobook), but not the entire chapter. He skips to chapter three and reads that, then reads all of chapter 1 to Julia later. Since there is so much reiterating in the book it is easy to let your mind wander, come back, and still have a pretty good idea of what is going on. So it appears I just got confused.
In my opinion 1984 just isn’t even feasible. It’s an over-developed hyperbolic metaphor for what direction to ultimately avoid. It doesn’t mean you could ever possibly actually get there even if you wanted to. How in the world do you really control the orientation of every single neuron in a human population even when the most efficient part of your society is the thought police? Reality does matter and just getting people to believe certain things is not enough. A good portion of the time it is easier to get people to believe things if those things are actually true! It’s just impossible as though even our most collectivistic societies can accurately be described as a literal meta-organism. That only goes so far no matter how China and North Korea may try. It seems obvious such solipsistic dictatorships have serious conflicts with reality (that result in little oversights like chronic food crisis). They are clearly dysfunctional and fundamentally at odds with the basic premise of the persistence of human ego. They can test all the nukes they want, but otherwise they are rotten to the core in so many other ways, imploding is inevitable. Winston struggled to articulate this point while being tortured in the book and was ridiculed by O'brien for it, but I highly doubt any country will ever be able to attain that brand of systemic perfection as Orwell envisioned it.
Outro:
Anyway, I do recommend the book despite my main objection above. If you like any of the dystopian rip offs like THX-1138, Equilibrium (which I am ashamed to even mention), V for Vendetta, and many others, you should probably check this classic out.
Ben
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