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1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four | 
| Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 412
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 014118776X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780141187761
ASIN: 014118776X
Publication Date: January 29, 2004
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| Customer Reviews: Read 36 more reviews...
 Modern literature at it's finest! (Minor spoilers) October 30, 2008
Let's get the gracious comments out of the way... This is, without a doubt, the most ideologically-brilliant book I've ever read; so much so it's hard to believe this was written over 60 years ago. I just finished reading it on the bus this morning and, much to the oddity my friends, a cheeky grin was here all morning.
It has to be said though that the grin was built more on admiration for Orwells writing standards than the sad final sentence of the novel, for beneath the futuristic subject matter you may believe this entails lies a world of deception, propaganda, and violence - the harsh realities of a world that ceases to re-write history.
I'm sure from the other reviewers you've got the jist of the plot. In a 3rd person narrative, we see life around the protagonist Winston; a worker for the Ministry of Truth in the year 1984. Though Winston is a 'Party-Hater' (he secretly rebels against the way society is run) his job is to endlessly take documents from the past and present, and to simply re-write them to suit the needs of the party. And those needs can change at any time; whether it be who fought who in a battle, or why the sky is blue.
The roots of this diabolical society lead to 'Big Brother', who throughout the novel, remains a mysterious leader; a "face" on posters and TV, as its to anyone's guess whether he is indeed real or manifested by The Party (the name of the centralised government). All The Party want is Political power - and with millions of people in 'love' with Big Brother, they have total control on what they hear, see, and should do.
The novel is split into 3 main chapters; Part I, Part II and Part III, each separating important moments in the story, while sub-chapters allow you to bookmark the book easily. Orwell's division of these Parts is particularly clever; Part 1 can be seen as a more progressive, atmosphere builder, while Part 2 engages excitement and romance, leaving the thrilling Part 3 as a brutal and, sometimes, cringing section that you never want to end.
What I love about the novel is that while Orwell has superbly boxed most questions, the story also creates questions that have no answer. Is Big Brother made up? Was Julia a member of The Party? Was Mr Charringtons shop a means of exposing party-haters? Without wanting to expose the spoilers the story, their are so many themes which can be analysed; the sign of a clever writer, particularly as Orwell was ill for most parts of the writing.
The accuracy to which this book is written is also astounding; the fact such modern ideals are highlighted is incredible. Orwell uses one of his Party character's (O'Brien) near the end of the novel to highlight the collapse of the Nazi party, and the beginning of the Cold War, though of course in the story, Winston is forced to believe that the Big Brother society is perfect in every way; surpassing any previous controversial party in the past, which of course O'Brien highlights. As far as I could read, their were only two sections I scratched my head at... Firstly, Winston in Part 2 with Julia explains how a particular field they were laying near had an Atomic Bomb dropped on it "30 years ago". Of course, we all know that it would take over 50 years just for it decontaminate, with the ozone not clearing for over 100 years... The second was quite simple; O'Brien explains how The Party will go as far as to destroy the humans orgasm in an attempt to rid of feeling/love for others. Yet in the same chapter, he explains that babies will be taken from their mothers at birth... How would the babies be conceived then? I'm sure theirs some explanations.
Though the novel sets out to highlight the strong hold of the party, it is the affect it has on poor Winston, who is described as "the last 'real' man alive". He is broken down from an sane, healthy man who remembered his past and despised the party, to a baby like state as he is forced to believe in the ideals of The Party through brutal means. I believe "the mirror" scene to be turning point in the book; such emotional narrative that breaks Winston into little pieces.
It would be easy to ramble on further, but I'd only spoil the story. Cut long story short this is one of the best novels I've ever read - Orwells language is so straight to the point, while his ideology, particularly his chapter on Goldsteins vision of the party, is stunning. If the Labour Party of now want to stay in power, then feed this to the Secondary Schools - not books that are 100 years out of date!
 Universally relevant September 12, 2008
It is tempting with the `wisdom' of the twentieth century to dismiss as irrelevant a book guilty of false prophecy. However the achievement of George Orwell's masterpiece is not to be found in the accuracies of his predictions, but in its warning about the danger of power unchecked and the lengths to which those in power will go in order to remain there.
We are presented with a vision of the future (now our past) in which the world is divided amongst the totalitarian superpowers of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Our story is set in a London controlled by `The Party' - who presence is felt by the ubiquitous Big Brother and its enforcement arm the Thought Police; told through the figure of Winston Smith: a lonely and silently dissident low-level member of the regime, who embarks on a prohibited sexual affair with a fellow party member, plots to work against `The Party' for an underground revolutionary movement called `The Brotherhood', only to discover he has been set up by Thought Police and is subsequently subjected to imprisonment, torture and eventually the destruction of his individuality.
The structure of the plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four is basically a series of pieced together clichés and most of the characters descend into caricature, but it is never intended as a character study or a work of great literary merit or storytelling; the merit of the work is found in Orwell's handling of the mechanics of totalitarian control. At no point does Orwell try to assess the character of such a state and how it develops, but his genius is found in the way he handles methods of political control and taking these to a fantastical extreme in order to present the terror of uninhibited state control. In fact the real ingenuity of Nineteen Eighty-Four lies in the political weapons Orwell attributes to `The Party': newspeak, Big Brother, thoughtcrime, doublethink and many others.
Moreover, Orwell is particularly adept at exposing the political lie and how governments use this to enslave its citizens. The concept of the mutability of the past, whereby the past is continually falsified through physical record and the practice of doublethink (which involves the power to hold in one's mind simultaneously two contradictory beliefs, and accepting both of them) in order to demonstrate the omnipotence of Big Brother and `the Party', executed with horrifying perfection by the regime is the highlight of Orwell's achievement. Here Orwell demonstrates to us the fragility of objective knowledge and the process by which governments could (and in some cases do) distort reality. The servitude the citizens of Oceania find themselves in is not physical in its nature (since very few things are physically prohibited), but a mental imprisonment (thought crime being the only culpable act, as one of Smith's fellow prisoners bluntly puts it in Part 3). Through the process of falsifying what is considered objective fact in conjunction with doublethink, the means of intellectual liberty are denied since the concepts we take as given and infallible such as truth, reason and justification can no longer be relied upon. During Winston's interrogation, O'Brien (`the Party' incarnate) says to him `it is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it should be.' This appears to be the key point of Orwell's message, that freedom is attached to thought and absolute freedom is the freedom to be incorrect.
Orwell rams this point home even further in the concept of Newspeak. This is a language devised by `the Party' that reduces all speech to simple monosyllabic words or short combinations of these. Whereas in the language we use a particular concept may be covered by any number of words (e.g. the concept of good is covered in English by seemingly limitless adjectives), the aim of the creators of Newspeak is to reduce concepts to single words that contain both its affirmative and negative and therefore removing the need for antonyms for one (e.g. the word good, an affirmative, becomes an negative with the affix `un', so the opposite of `good' becomes `ungood' therefore removing the need for `bad' and its various synonyms). The mechanics of the new language are too complicated to discuss at length here (and the novel has as an appendix a short essay on Newspeak) but the idea Orwell entertains in this concept is that if thought is in some sense dependent on language (certainly the two coexist, although the relationship is unlikely to be one of dependence), then by reducing the capacity of language then the capacity of thought, or free thought, itself is curtailed. If language is simplified according to ideology and the means to express certain concepts such as freedom, justice, truth and love are removed, then, Orwell reasons, these concepts disappear altogether. Newspeak, then, is the ultimate weapon against human intellectualism and the liberty of the individual.
Orwell's message is a dramatic one, a warning against all kinds of power: it provides us with reasons to be suspicious of any regime and politician that seeks power and disguises its real aspirations behind propaganda and claims to be serving the greater good. As O'Brien tells us `The Party' seeks power not as a means, but as an end: `One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship...The object of power is power.' The danger and future as Orwell saw it as summed up by O'Brien is: `If you want to imagine a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.'
It is this resonant and rallying cry in favour of maximal personal liberty and the curbing of political power, in spite of it lacking the subtlety of Kafka's The Trial or the penetrating wit of Huxley's Brave New World, which will make Nineteen Eighty-Four a book of universal appeal and significance for many generations still to come.
A complex, haunting masterpiece August 29, 2008
The first thing to remember about '1984' is that Orwell wasn't trying to predict what life would be like in 1984, or even in 2008. If the book is any good, it's not because it's an accurate picture of life as we know it. It is, however, a pretty faithful depiction of life in a totalitarian society; little happens in the book that didn't really happen in Germany between 1933 and 1945, or in many of the Eastern bloc countries between 1917 and 1989.
The second thing to remember is that Orwell was not against socialism. He described himself as a believer in "democratic socialism", and he was one, which is something that socialists who don't believe in democracy but in party discipline have never forgiven him for to this day. The horror of '1984' is not the horror of life in a socialist society; Orwell was a supporter, albeit a wary one, of Britain's post-war Labour government. The book is about life in a society which is entirely politicised - where there is nothing that doesn't relate to the political ends of the administration. There have been such societies, they still exist (hello, North Korea) and what Orwell was suggesting is that our own could become one too, if we aren't careful.
Winston Smith is not a mouthpiece for Orwell. Winston is more sentimental, more naive and more bourgeois than Orwell, or at least than the 'Orwell' persona (Orwell the man is not always to be identified with the persona he adopted as a non-fiction writer). '1984' is not a straightforward novel about two sensitive people in an uncaring world, and nor does it suggest that a totalitarian society is just a matter of a lot of CCTV cameras. It is deeper, darker and weirder than that. Simple-minded right-wingers have claimed that the book is an attack on socialism as such, but that's obviously wrong. Authoritarian left-wingers are enraged by the book's distrust of revolutionary shibboleths. It will go on being read as long as it seems to say something to us about the kinds of government we most fear and hate.
Worth a look August 5, 2008
Its amazing this book was wrote in the forties. Its very modern and alot of what George Orwell wrote come true, very worrying. Maybe not his best work, still a classic though. Sixty years later and 1984 is still going strong. He has, in my opinion wrote better books but I would definitely recommend this book. Orwell's last masterpiece.
The greatest dytopian novel? Certainly the most influential. August 4, 2008
The book that gave us 'Orwellian', 'Room 101' and 'Big Brother', but it gave us so much more.
Orwell's final and greatest novel is a wonderful combination of important ideas expressed in simple language. It is an easy read and can be read in a short time, but will remain with you long afterwards. It challenges you to review how you interact with society and most importantly the state.
One of the major themes that is often overlooked is that which examines why we are good or bad. Is it because we want to be good or is it that we are afraid of punishment if we are bad.
Another interesting theme is the use and abuse of language, Orwell believed that the very language one uses influences how one thinks. He examines how, by the restriction of language, the state can restrict ideas.
Of course Orwell wrote the novel as an examination of one possible future and it is both fun and frightening to compare his predictions with the course history has taken. Indeed, whole passages can leave you thinking "My God, he was right."
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