1984 Revisited

This week marks the 60th anniversary of one of the twentieth century's most important books - George Orwell's 1984.

In The Independent Andrew Johnson talks to other authors, including Robert Harris, Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett, about it and about other reads that are particularly important to them.

(What are your memories of it? It's one of the books I've revisited several times since I first read it when I was at school in the '70's.)

Paul Owen on The Guardian blog points out that the plot was ... erm borrowed ... from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, published in English in 1924, and which Orwell himself reviewed.

But maybe it's all right in the end. Johnson concludes :

... it is extremely doubtful Zamyatin's book would have come to fill the unique place Orwell's work now occupies. Nineteen Eighty-Four is an almanac of all the political ideas no "right-thinking" person would ever want their government to countenance, and the word Orwellian has come to signify a badge of shame intended to shut down any movement in that direction – with an imperfect record of success.

Orwell the Blogger

Give a big welcome to a new blogger - a British author by the name of George Orwell who wrote, among much else, Animal Farm and 1984.

Well yes, I know that he actually died in 1950, but the clever folks who set up the Orwell Prize for political writing seem to have brought him back to life again by publishing his diaries online, at the rate of one blog post a day.

According to the BBC Tadio 4 website (where you can find podcasts of Orwell's son Richard Blair reading extracts) :

The diaries, written from 1938, cover the descent of Europe into war, as well as Orwell's travels in Morocco, following his sojourn in Catalonia, fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

But Orwell wrote about other issues beside politics :

... (he) was also interested in travel, food - and even slugs. ... he even includes newspaper clippings of sloe gin recipes.

Another famous dead author blog you might enjoy is that of the famous C17th diarist, Samuel Pepys, which I think is great enhanced by the use of hyperlinks to explain all the references. (This is, I think an example of digital literature working far better than the print version.)

These diaries seem to suit the medium so well that I have no doubts that if these guys were around today, both would have been happily blogging away!

Confessions of a Book Reviewer

In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-grown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers away because the wastepaper basket is already overflowing, and besides, somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills it is possible that there is a cheque for two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay into the bank. There are also letters with addresses which ought to be entered in his address book. He has lost this address book, and the thought of looking for it, or indeed of looking for anything, afflicts him with acute suicidal impulses.

I came across a reference to this piece by George Orwell in a comment left on the Guardian blog the other day, and it tickled me, as a sometime book-reviewer. (No lah, thankfully don't see much of myself in it - apart from the bit about the lost cheques!) And although it was written in 1946 there is still more than a grain of truth in it, especially :

The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews — 1,000 words is a bare minimum — to the few that seem to matter. Short notes of a line or two on forthcoming books can be useful, but the usual middle-length review of about 600 words is bound to be worthless even if the reviewer genuinely wants to write it.

Sadly 600 words is the limit we are all to often told to write to in the local press, and it is very difficult as Orwell says, to do a decent job in that few words.

Reds Under the Reads Beds?

Malaysian writers worried that Special Branch might be taking a more than healthy interest in their writings, might be comforted to know that some very famous British authors also suffered close scrutiny from the authorities.

It's long been known that Animal Farm and 1984 novelist George Orwell was under MI5 surveillance, but the extent to which this was true did not come to light until yesterday when papers which included details of surveillance in the 1920's and 30's were made public at the National Archives in Kew.

The Guardian comments on the officers':

... spectacular ability to misjudge what they saw. ... The obtuseness of some exasperated their superiors.

One officer even concluded that Orwell must have communist views because:

He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours.

But, of course, Orwell wasn't the only one to attract the attention of the spooks for suspected communist activities. Another case that recently came to light when National Archives material was released was that of poet W.H. Auden (whose centenary was celebrated earlier this year). MI5 supected that Auden had links with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two diplomats who were recruited as spies by the KGB.

And even children's author, Arthur Ransome, was watched closely in the 1920's and 30's by MI5 as it was feared he was a traitor working for Moscow. The Swallows and Amazons author had married Trotsky's secretary and has travelled widely in the Soviet Union for British newspapers.

All were eventually cleared.