Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

Being one of those texts which appeals to the slack-minded and hyperbolic, I managed to avoid reading Nineteen Eighty-Four until I turned 30. The book and its terminology is ingrained enough in popular culture that I felt like I already knew the story, but there remains much to appreciate. Orwell had the surprising ability to predict events that he would not live to see, such as a surveillance obsessed government, endless, pointless wars, and the gradual breakdown of the citizen's personal privacy. However, drawing parallels between the socialist turned totalitarian dystopic regime of Oceania, Ingsoc, with our modern day governments is old hat and I was more interested in the representation of moral dilemmas concerning what it is to be human and individual. Here the book shines as it explores and critiques the simplicity of humankind and their susceptibility to domination from superior intelligent forces.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a disillusioned everyman working at the Ministry of Truth, reinventing past newspaper scraps to conform with present ideologies. At the start of the novel he already hates the party and its omnipotent figurehead, Big Brother. He sets his own demise in motion with the act of writing a politically subversive diary and forming a forbidden sexual union with another party member. Their tryst is inevitably uncovered, and the pair are separated for torture and mental reconditioning. It was a very bleak and entertaining world to immerse oneself in for a couple of days, but some parts were too belaboured and I wasn't keen on the invented Newspeak language.There's no denying the monumental impact of this book, and I'd recommend it to a wide category of readers, even if it does come across as a little cliched in today's hyper aware and vitriolic Twitter generation. 

(As with Winston's job of rewriting the past, I have done that with this review by replacing my Folio copy with the Penguin clothbound version, even though it was not published until 5 years later in 2021.)

Rating: 4/5