Literary book review: Nineteen eighty-four (1949) by George Orwell.

Hi everyone, I am here to review a novel with a stark vision for the future... George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). When I was at college and I studied my A-Levels, one of them was English Literature. We had a module on dystopian literature where our two focal texts were Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Orwell's infamous novel. This dystopian tale made me quite grim at times but in the good sense; it meant it was doing the purpose of its job. As I read this and I followed round the protagonist, Winston I correlated with him. By this I mean that his confusions for things in the dystopian setting, were matched on my part as a reader. 

But as a writer and lover of books, something in the novel got me. That was the removal of words because the idea was that synonyms of words were not needed when instead of multiple words meaning the same thing, there was just the one. Though as a generic reader, this novel still catches one's eye. Take the disappearances or worse still, the hate week. I think at first this threw me a little , though this might be because I cannot find it in my heart to hate anyway. I find I cannot hate because for me that is evil. 

This novel had a similarity with Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which stood out to me and that was how the women were meant be in a certain way. It always repulses when the men in a novel have a superiority over the women. This novel establishes that - ‘‘They don't even like married women there,’ she added. ‘Girls are always supposed to be so pure.’¹ The dystopian world here though does not so much centre around a gender divide the way The Handmaid's Tale does but there is a clear divide with the party, Big Brother and the thought police, against the ordinary people. I find this a striking feature that often appears in dystopian novels. Not so much the 'lessening' of women but a clear divide between two separate groups of people, with one holding the greater power, while the other must suffer.

While I did enjoy this novel, at times I felt it to be a bit mundane and I wanted more I guess. This is still a good book, which fans of dystopian novels would like. It has to be a 5.5/10 for this one.

Thomas.



Footnotes:

¹ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 2018), p133.


Bibliography:

Orwell, Atwood. Nineteen Eighty-four. London: Penguin, 2018.

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