Orwell's great novel was published on June 8, 1949. On the eve of its 60th birthday, a number of British authors talk about its influence, and the influence of other books: Orwell's 1984 sixty years on.
It's certainly been an important book in my own personal and professional life. On my third or fourth reading, I finally understood that Winston Smith is not a hopeless fighter for freedom. He's just hopeless.
The entire bogus plot against Big Brother has been created by O'Brien, sending hypnotic messages to Winston through the telescreen: "We will meet in the place where there is no darkness." Winston's willingness to do anything to overthrow Big Brother shows that he has no more morals than O'Brien himself. Just as he had no loyalty to his own family, he has none to Julia.
Although one early reviewer (in a Labour newspaper) saw this aspect of the novel, most critics seem to have missed it. They needed a tragic hero, a convenient martyr to postwar Stalinism.
Orwell certainly was attacking Stalin (the Stalinists, after all, killed his anarchist comrades in the Spanish Civil War). But his real warning was to his own side, the decent left-wingers in Labour. The philosophy of Oceania, after all, is Ingsoc—English socialism, monstrously corrupted by its own willingness to win power at any price. (With Gordon Brown's Labour government now imploding, Orwell seems as timely as ever.)
Apart from the political message, the lesson I gained from this reading of Orwell was not to trust surface meanings in fiction, and not to expect stock responses (like rooting for the "hero") to be of much use. That was a valuable lesson for any writer.
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