Tales from the Bitface (version 4.2)

Ministry of Plenty

It’s 2024. It’s 40 years since 1984. So I guess that’s why there have been a lot of things turning up that are related in one way or another to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four¹. It’s considerably more than forty years since the novel was published: more like 75 years. Which is a memorable enough number in itself.

At Worldcon in Glasgow in August, the last panel I went to was about the book. People discussing when they had first read it, how it had affected them, the effects it had on literature and culture more broadly, and so on.

Then a few weeks later the podcast of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time dropped into my feed, with an episode about it. It was described as a ‘summer repeat’. I assume the programme is off the air but they like to keep the feed fed. It was originally broadcast in 2022, so nothing to do with any anniversaries in this year, but no matter.

All of this served to remind me of two things: one, that it was high time I read it again. And two, since read it in my teenage years and never since, I had shamefully never quite read all of it. Because there’s that bit in the middle where Winston is reading ‘The Book’, as it’s called. And when you’re fourteen or fifteen that can seem terribly dull and easily skippable.

Also at the convention² I picked up a copy of Ken MacLeod’s new collection, A Jura for Julia. You might guess from the title that there’s some sort of connection, what with Julia being the only female character in the original book, and Jura being where Orwell spent the last months of his life writing it.

And indeed, the collection is bookended by two connected stories comprising a sequel to Orwell’s novel.

So I was going to revisit the original and then read Ken’s stories. But I realised I didn’t actually have a copy. I think I read it from the library all those years ago. We got our son a copy at some point, but that’s either with him or in a box in the basement. So I decided just to buy a new one.

While I was in Foyles I noticed another connected work: Julia by Sandra Newman. I remembered reading about this when it came out and thinking I’d like to read it. It’s a retelling of the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four, from Julia’s point of view. It came out last year, so I’m sure author and publisher had anniversaries in mind, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Not Forever

So what about these books, then?

There are two things Ingsoc got right, I mention in passing: going over properly to the metric system — which leads to the oddity of a prole barman who has never even heard of a pint — and going to full use of the twenty-four-hour clock, giving us that famously startling opening line about the clocks striking thirteen.

Not much else, though. It’s a bit odd thinking about it now that the ideology is called ‘English Socialism’ when the geopolitical bloc Airstrip One is part of, Oceania, is clearly dominated by America. The renaming of the UK makes that clear. And indeed, the switch to decimal measurements and twenty-four-hour time are even stranger, given how America in our world is the biggest holdout against those.

I suppose the ‘English’ in ‘Ingsoc’ could mean the language. But a socialism dominated by America? Something that calls itself socialism, at least: it’s no more socialism than Germany’s ‘National Socialism’ was.

I’ve said before that I dislike dystopian fiction as genre or background to stories. I wonder if that dislike was caused in part by early inoculation with this work. But what I found really weird about reading it after all these years is how weirdly cosy it all felt. Maybe it’s just because I knew what happens; maybe because there are these sequels by other hands to consider; or it could be somehow inherent in the writing. But I had no real sense of bleakness, nor even of menace. Strange, really.

It is, of course, a tragedy, among other things. Winston and Julia know that they’ll be caught by the Thought Police and taken to the Ministry of Love eventually; but they believe that, whatever they have to go through, there will be a core of them, deep in their hearts, that will survive, uncorrupted, undefeated. I was reminded of Evey, in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta. About how you’ll survive — maybe win — as long as they can never reach that last half inch of you (I write from probably inaccurate memory).

That turns out not to be true for Winston and Julia, as they each betray the other. O’Brien’s assertion that ‘We will empty you out and fill you up with us’ proves true; and the novel closes with Winston loving Big Brother. There is no hope. A boot stamping on a human face.

Except, then we get the appendix. It tells the story of Newspeak, and does so wholly in the past tense, describing plans the party had for the minimal, stripped-down language. How it was expected to limit the capability for thoughtcrime — for thought itself — in the populace forced to use it. But it is presented as if it were an academic work, part of a history of the Big Brother times in what was then called Airstrip One, and is now called Britain again.

Hope in an appendix. I like it.

Keeping it Short

So we come to the first sequel I want to speak of, which is composed of Ken MacLeod’s two short stories. ‘Nineteen Eighty-Nine’ picks up on Winston’s story. He’s taken from the Chestnut Tree café thinking he’s finally going to be killed. But in fact it’s the revolution. Big Brother and the party are overthrown. Winston is to be Minister of Truth in the new government.

And then in ‘A Jura for Julia’ it’s a decade or two later. Julia is a researcher in ‘computational literature’, mechanical writing. She used to be a mechanic who worked on the machines that created cheap novels for the proles. Now she’s an academic studying the technology behind the machines. She travels to Jura because she has heard there is an important link there to the history of the machines. What she finds ties her story and Winston’s together with Orwell’s in a fascinating way.

A Woman’s Perspective

I hadn’t heard of Sandra Newman before Julia, but she’s written several books, and been nominated for various awards. This one is authorised by Orwell’s estate and tells the familiar story from Julia’s perspective, expanding it both in worldbuilding, character, and time.

It’s a much richer story than Orwell’s, in that Julia’s character is dramatically expanded from the original, and we learn a great deal about the society, or the various societies that exist in Airstrip One. It’s all well done, very convincing, and completely in keeping with the original. There’s nothing added that couldn’t have been imagined in Orwell’s time.

Julia the character is not much more than a cipher in the original, and here she has a rich inner life, and is wonderfully and believably changeable.

One chapter opens with the line, ‘She was in Love.’ Which jars you for a second, because the previous chapter ended with her and Winston’s arrest. Till you remember that she refers to the ministries just by their key words: ‘Truth’ for the Ministry of Truth, and so on.

It takes us to a an ending not so very different from MacLeod’s but perhaps a more ambiguous one.

And that’s enough Nineteen Eighty-Four for a while, and enough 1984, too, though it strikes me that the novel I’m writing at the moment is set then. It’s a year that still has a massive gravitational pull on the imagination.