1984

Warning: this gives away the ending of the book.

I thought I knew this book without having read it. I was wrong.

The setup

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, and his job is to change the past.

Whenever the Party says something today, the records of the past have to agree with it. Winston rewrites old newspapers, corrects old predictions, and erases from the records people who have become inconvenient to have existed.

Every home has a telescreen: it both broadcasts and watches. It cannot be switched off.

Winston starts keeping a diary. This is forbidden.

Then he starts a relationship with Julia, which is forbidden too. They meet in secret for a while. Then both of them are caught.

Not the part most people talk about

Everyone talks about the surveillance. What stayed with me was the language.

There is a language called Newspeak, and its aim is not to increase the number of words but to reduce it. Each new edition of the dictionary is thinner than the one before.

The logic is this: if there is no word to express a concept, that concept cannot be thought. If the word "freedom" disappears, the demand for freedom cannot be made either, because there is no sentence left to make the demand with.

If there is "good," there is no need for "bad": "ungood" is enough. Instead of "excellent," "doubleplusgood."

At the end of the book there is an appendix on Newspeak, and it is written in the past tense. That means the regime it describes has come to an end at some point. This detail is the book's only crumb of hope, and most readers do not notice it.

The reverse is true too

I thought about this section for a long time after reading it, because its reverse told me more.

Finding a name for something is the first step toward knowing what to do with it.

For years I had no word to describe myself. There was lazy, there was scattered, there was careless, and all of them were wrong.

On the day I found the right words, those things did not get smaller. But something could now be built on top of them: a thing with a name can be searched for, asked about, explained to someone else.

Orwell describes this from the opposite direction: take the word away and you take the thought away. I lived the same mechanism in the straight direction, and that is why this section stayed with me.

Doublethink

This is the book's second big idea, and I think it is more disturbing even than the language.

Believing two contradictory things at the same time and not knowing that they contradict. Genuinely believing a lie while telling it, then forgetting it when necessary, then forgetting that you forgot.

This is exactly Winston's job: while changing the past, he must not know that he is changing it.

What Winston does is small

He keeps a diary.

All he does is record what happens. But this is the thing the system finds most dangerous, because the system is constantly rewriting the past and a written record contradicts it.

It did me good that keeping a record can be a form of resistance. I write anyway because I cannot trust my own memory; in Orwell writing has another function, but the feeling is the same: what is not written disappears, and a different story comes to take the place of what disappeared.

The book inside the book

In the middle there is a long section: pages of excerpts from the forbidden book. It explains theoretically how the system works: why there is perpetual war, why there are three blocs, why there is hierarchy.

Slow and dry. I skipped it and came back later, and I lost nothing.

We find out afterward that the Party wrote that book too. So even the opposition is manufactured.

The ending

Winston is caught. O'Brien interrogates him, and this section is the hardest part of the book.

O'Brien is not just trying to convince him; he wants him to truly believe. A confession is not enough, obedience is not enough. He has to love.

In Room 101 Winston is confronted with what he fears most, and he breaks: "Do it to Julia," he says.

In the end he is released. He sits in a café, drinks gin, and truly loves Big Brother.

The resistance does not win. There is no heroism. There is no escape.

I think the book would not have lasted this long if it had a hopeful ending. But reading that last section was not easy, and I will not read it again.

A book known without being known

Many of its concepts have passed into everyday language: Big Brother, Thought Police, doublethink, Orwellian.

For this reason people assume they know it without reading it.

When you read it, it turns out to be a different book: slower than expected, more detailed, and far more concerned with language. There is also more everyday poverty than you would expect: bad food, bad cigarettes, clogged sinks.

It was written in 1949. Orwell died the following year.

Around three hundred pages.