C10| Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
T
HE YEAR 1984came and went a
generation ago, and the clocks did
not strike 13. Big Brother’s face
doesn’t stare down at us from giant
posters. Masked police do not appre-
hend citizens guilty of thoughtcrime. England
hasn’t been renamed Airstrip One, and Party
slogans like “War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery”
and “Ignorance Is Strength” are not plastered on
the walls. It would seem that the terrifying vision
of George Orwell’s iconic novel remains a fiction,
safely shelved between “Brave New World” and
“The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Yet Orwell never intended “Nineteen Eighty-
Four” to be a prophecy. What he conceived was
a satire. As the writer Martin Amis once said,
“Novels don’t care whether they come true or not.”
Orwell died in 1950, the year after “Nineteen
Eighty-Four” was published, but he left us with a
few remarks about his intentions. “I do not believe
that the kind of society I describe necessarilywill
arrive,” he wrote, but “that something resembling
itcouldarrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas
have taken root in the minds of intellectuals
everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas
out to their logical consequences.”
These lines sound almost valedictory, yet Orwell
habitually downplayed his achievements, including
his last and greatest novel. “I ballsed it up rather,”
he confided to a friend after a desperate sprint to
get the words onto paper. Orwell drafted “Nineteen
Eighty-Four” while ignoring fatal symptoms of
tuberculosis on the Isle of Jura in the Scottish
Hebrides. His diaries from those years describe
simple rustic pleasures like the number of eggs
produced by the hens as well as more ominous
hints of the illness that would kill him at age 46.
But how safe are we from Orwell’s vision after
all? You could ask a resident of North Korea—not
that he or she could safely reply. Closer to home,
whether we live in an Orwellian nightmare has
always been a question of ideology. What exactly
is an alternative fact? Does the NSA’s surveillance
state keep us safe from harm or mirror the tele-
screens and Thought Police? When British Prime
Minister Boris Johnson suspended Parliament,
was he subverting democracy or enforcing the will
of the people?
These are not rhetorical questions. Orwell, who
had firm views on lies, privacy and England, not to
mention a fighting way with a pen, would have had
a few things to say on all three topics. Yet the prac-
tice of claiming “St. George” to support one’s argu-
ment has always been a dubious business. To drape
one’s position in Orwell’s moral authority—or to
crow about his predictions that didn’t come true—
is to miss his broader value as a fearless thinker
whose ideas remain vital and raw.
On the 70th anniversary of the publication of
“Nineteen Eighty-Four,” two books by British crit-
ics document the novel’s sources and celebrate its
enduring impact. Dorian Lynskey’s “The Ministry
of Truth” is best described as a literary bibliog-
raphy. Mr. Lynskey, a London-based writer on
music, film and politics, spends the majority of his
BYMICHAELO’DONNELL
book tracing the novel’s antecedents, from the
dystopian novels of H.G. Wells and Edward Bel-
lamy, to its legacy in the music of David Bowie and
in films like Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men.”
“Nineteen Eighty-Fourremains the book we turn
to,” Mr. Lynskey writes, “when truth is mutilated,
language is distorted, power is abused, and we
want to know how bad things can get.”D.J. Taylor’s “On Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the
brisker and more focused volume, and a better
choice for those wishing to read about Orwell’s
novel rather than around it. Mr. Taylor, a novelist,
critic and biographer, more ably balances the
cultural footprint of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” with
the story of its writing. The definitive account of
Orwell’s life—his work as an imperial policeman in
Burma; time spent tramping among the poor; the
death of his idealism as a soldier in the Spanish
Civil War; and his late-blooming literary success—
is that of Bernard Crick (1980). But Mr. Taylor here
covers the highlights, giving both an overview of
Orwell’s career and a survey of his greatest literary
achievement.
The Tehran Conference of 1943 supplied the
germ of an idea for “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Herewere Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin beginning to
divide up the world into postwar spheres of influ-
ence. In Orwell’s imagination these three zones
became Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. His note-
books show that he built the novel around political
themes rather than characters or story lines.
Leader worship, the death of objective truth, the
falsification of records and a utilitarian compressed
language called Newspeak: all appeared as the
foundations of a world characterized by propa-
ganda and fear.
Orwell used his newspaper columns to flesh out
the ideas that his novel—tentatively titled “The
Last Man in Europe”—would explore. In one
article, writes Mr. Taylor, Orwell suggested that
“totalitarianism’s most terrifying quality is not only
that it instigates atrocities, but that it seeks to con-
trol ‘the concept of objective truth’ and thereby
manipulates both past and future.” This theme
would take form in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” when
Oceania periodically shifted from fighting one of its
two enemies to fighting the other. Past alliances
and rivalries instantly disappeared: “Oceania was
at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always
been at war with Eurasia.”
Different political movements have claimed
Orwell according to their needs. During the Cold
War, the right championed him for his opposition
to communism. More recently, amid protests of
the invasion of Iraq, the permanent-war aspect
of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” resonated. Today the
book’s depiction of an assault on facts has shaken
readers, as has its portrayal of the mob as a tool
of demagoguery. Mr. Lynskey draws a parallel
between chants of “Lock her up!” and the Two
Minutes Hate, a mandatory gathering of Partymembers that, Orwell writes, channels “a continu-
ous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and inter-
nal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abase-
ment before the power and wisdom of the Party.”
These are powerful echoes. But Orwell has an
even broader value, which transcends any given
political crisis. George Orwell possessed three
signal virtues, each of them rare and almost un-
heard of in concert. They are judgment, courage
and clarity. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out in
“Why Orwell Matters,” Orwell’s judgment was right
on the great political questions of the 20th cen-
tury: imperialism, fascism and communism. He
had the courage to say so, even when it meant
breaking with his countrymen (imperialism) and
his comrades (communism). And Orwell had the
talent to make his arguments in prose as clear as
a windowpane, with his biases and flaws on display
for all to judge.
Messrs. Lynskey and Taylor perform a service
by keeping Orwell in our field of vision not merely
as a shorthand or an adjective but as a thinker
whose currency is principle rather than doctrine.
He chose decency over partisan dogma. He made
a habit of facing unpleasant facts. And if he ab-
horred one thing above all others in public life or
in literature, it was lies. These two books are valu-
able in their own right, but their greatest service
may be to send readers back to the source mate-
rial. Not that Orwell needs a publicist. “Nineteen
Eighty-Four” is said to have sold 40 million copies.Mr. O’Donnell is a lawyer in the Chicago area.
His writing has appeared in the New York
Times, the Atlantic and the Nation, among
other publications.BOOKS
‘There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.’—GEORGE ORWELL
An Enduring Vision of Tyranny
‘WAR IS PEACE’ U.S. troops during exercises on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 1950.
FRANCIS MILLER/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGESOrwell’s novel remains the
book we turn to when truth is
mutilated, language distorted,
power abused—and we want to
know how bad things can get.The Ministry of Truth
By Dorian Lynskey
Doubleday, 355 pages, $28.95
On Nineteen Eighty-Four
By D.J. Taylor
Abrams Press, 194 pages, $24
HERE’S A GOOD ONEfor you,
as the days shorten and the
winter chill descends and an
engrossing novel is just what’s
called for. Andrew Miller’s
“Now We Shall Be Entirely
Free” (Europa, 410 pages, $19)
begins in 1809, when the British
officer John Lacroix is brought
back to his Somerset estate,
having been severely wounded
in Spain during a retreat from
Napoleon’s French Army. Lacroix
gradually recovers in body but
not in mind. Rankled by some
repressed memory from the war,
he abruptly resolves to go
wandering, choosing the Scottish
isles—“Albion’s own savage back
room”—as a serviceably remote
and unknowable destination.
Meanwhile, in Spain, a non-
descript corporal named Calley
has become enmeshed in a
matter of top-secret statecraft.
While running from the French,
a ragged band of British soldiers
carried out a massacre of Spanish
civilians, an incident that threatens
to turn the allegiance of Spain
toward the French. To mollify
the junta while keeping the scan-
dal out of the news, higher-ups
dispatch Calley to assassinate
Lacroix, the officer he claims
ordered the atrocity. To bear
witness to the extralegal killing,
a Spanish soldier named Medina
accompanies him on the manhunt.
So the novel plays out an
exciting inadvertent cat-and-
mouse chase, as Lacroix aimlessly
travels north, pursued by his ex-asperated executioners. He even-
tually washes up on an island
colonized by an outcast group
of “Phyrronists,” or “free livers,”
who have fled the customs and
dogmas of the mainland. His at-
tachment to this eccentric tribe—
particularly to a woman named
Emily—both returns him to the
cares of the world and makes the
promised reckoning with Calley
all the more urgent.
Mr. Miller strikes an impres-
sive balance between adventure
and atmosphere. As in a good
thriller, madness bubbles
beneath the surface of the
scenes, especially those involv-
ing Calley, whose version of the
massacre grows less reliable as
his monomania for finding
Lacroix intensifies. “Even the
most sensible people have an
edge of lunacy to them, like fat
on a cutlet,” Lacroix observes
early on.
But while the threat of
violence keeps the story’s wheels
in motion, its greatest pleasures
owe to its unhurried, ambulatory
pacing. Mr. Miller takes his time
describing the parallel journeys
to the Scottish wilderness, and
as he fills the chapters with rich,
scenic details he disperses the
fog of secrecy obscuring past
events. “The thought...had
touched him several times since
coming back from Spain,” he
writes of Lacroix, “that we are
not private beings and cannot
hide things inside ourselves.
Everything is present, everythingin view for those who know how
to look.” Freedom arrives in this
lush and satisfying novel not by
way of escape but from a final
confrontation with the truth.
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s
1948 novel“The Corner That
Held Them” (399 pages, $16.95),
happily reissued byNew York
Review Books, takes place
across the 14th century in
the Benedictine convent of Oby,built upon the yielding soil of
the fenlands of eastern England.
What miracles and marvels
befall this isolated place of faith,
you ask? Very few, unless sub-
sistence itself is miracle enough,
and perhaps it should be. In the
fashion of a historical chronicle,
Warner records the daily chores
and disputes that occupy Oby’s
nuns. Paradoxically, money is
central to all of it, for tithes
must be collected and alms must
be distributed and funds must
somehow be secured to pay for
the completion of the convent’s
spire. Leadership passes along asuccession of prioresses, some
goodly, some tyrannical, all over-
matched. In the midst of the
Black Death, life is inherently
tenuous and is accounted less
important than the perpetuation
of rituals. “The extravaganza of
death that was sweeping their
world away suggested no
changes to them except the
change from being alive to being
dead,” Warner writes. “They
kept to the Rule, punctually
offering God his regular service
of prayer and praise.”
In one typically vivid passage,
Oby’s priest takes a “hawk’s eye
view of his world” and notices
its fundamental randomness and
fragility. Warner’s perspective is
similarly vast, but she also has a
hawk’s killing instincts, capturing
with bone-dry wit the absurdist
human comedy of convent life.
The priest, for instance, is an
imposter, a passing beggar who
pretended to be of the cloth and
to his amazement found himself
installed at Oby because the
position needed filling. “There
is pleasure in watching the
sophistries of mankind,” Warner
observes in this unsparing yet
deeply humane work, “his
decisions made and unmade
like the swirl of a mill-race,
causation sweeping him forward
from act to act while his reason
dances on the surface of action
like a pattern of foam.”
In a contemporary spin on the
bird’s-eye view of things, half of
Jokha Alharthi’s“Celestial Bodies”(Catapult, 243 pages, $16.95)
is narrated from the cabin of an
international airliner, a vantage
from which an Omani business-
man, Abdallah, thinks back upon
his life and troubles. Some of
his reminiscences alight on his
abusive father, Sulayman; others
on his arranged marriage to
Mayya, who bore him three
children but has never come to
love him. Woven into his strato-
spheric reveries are brief chap-
ters from the perspectives of his
and Mayya’s family members,
providing a counterpoint to his
regrets as well as a somewhat
dizzying picture of the changes
modernity has imposed on
Oman across three generations.
Many of those changes are
reflected in the treatment of
daughters and the traditional
customs of marriage, making the
novel a kind of Islamic relative
to “Fiddler on the Roof.” The
political realities Ms. Alharthi
elaborates are eye-opening.
Abdallah’s father made his
fortune selling slaves, a trade
that was only outlawed in Oman
in 1970. His daughter, London,
is a successful physician, an
outcome unimaginable mere
decades earlier. “Celestial
Bodies” was awarded this year’s
Man Booker International Prize,
and if its piecemeal narrative,
translated into colloquial English
by Marilyn Booth, is difficult to
assemble into a coherent whole,
the glimpses it provides are
bright and illuminating.A Napoleonic Game of Cat and Mouse
THIS WEEK
Now We Shall Be
Entirely Free
By Andrew MillerThe Corner That Held Them
By Sylvia Townsend WarnerCelestial Bodies
By Jokha AlharthiA shell-
shocked
English
officer
seeks
solace in
the
ScottishHebrides.
Little
does he
know his
past is
pursuing
him.FICTION
SAMSACKS