The Ministry Of Truth

The year just concluded marked the seventieth anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and to honor the occasion Dorian Lynskey wrote a "biography" of the book, The Ministry Of Truth. It's a very interesting if sometimes over-opinionated look at Orwell, the history of dystopian literature, and the legacy of the book.

"Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the book we turn to when truth is mutilated, language is distorted, power is abused, and we want to know how bad things can get, because someone who lived and died in another era was clear-sighted enough to identify these evils and sufficiently talented to present them in the form of a novel that Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, called “an apocalyptical codex of our worst fears.”' The book is well known to even those who haven't read it, as words and phrases like Big Brother, Newspeak, Thought Police, Doublethink, and "Wai Is Peace" have become part of our vernacular. Every time something happens in the news that reminds us of the book, like Kellyanne Conway using the term "alternative facts," sales of the book skyrocket.

Lynskey begins with a short biography of Orwell, who was born Eric Blair in 1903. He was a journalist and muckraker, who was wounded during the Spanish Civil War, wrote for radio, penned a few books of essays and novels (notably Animal Farm, a satire of Stalinism) and then Nineteen Eighty-Four: "December 1948. A man sits at a typewriter, in bed, on a remote island, fighting to complete the book that means more to him than any other. He is terribly ill. The book will be finished and, a year or so later, so will the man."

Orwell was a democratic socialist who has since been taken to heart by all parts of the political spectrum. The right think he was writing about Soviet communism, the left about fascism. Lynskey notes that he opposed both communists and conservatives, and what he was attacking was totalitarianism. He also notes that during the 1984 presidential election, both Democrats and Republicans cited the work in fundraising letters, and that the Soviet Union claimed the book was attacking the West, even though they banned it. China's Internet censors scrub all mention of Orwell.

Lynskey also writes about others who have written about the future, going back to Edward Bellamy, who wrote Looking Backward, and Yevgeny Zamyatin, who wrote We. Others that influenced Orwell were H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, which is often linked with Nineteen Eighty-Four. But, as Lynskey notes, while Orwell's book was about how the things we fear will destroy us, Huxley's was about how we will be destroyed by the things we love.

Orwell died only a few days after the book was published. He wrote the book on the Scottish island of Jura, while suffering from tuberculosis. It was an almost instant success: "The book was variously compared to an earthquake, a bundle of dynamite, and the label on a bottle of poison." But he didn't live to listen to all the interpretations of it. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Lynskey's book is the last section, in which various intellectuals argue about what it all means and how other artists have interpreted it.

David Bowie wanted to write a rock opera about it, but was denied by Orwell's widow. Instead he wrote a song with the same title, and the album on which it was featured, Diamond Dogs, was centered around the book. Films and plays have been adapted from it, such as Michael Radford's film starring John Hurt, and a recent Broadway adaptation, while other books and films have been inspired by it, such as Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, Alan Moore's V For Vendetta, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

But it's in the political arena that the book keeps bobbing to the surface. It is here where Lynskey doesn't hold back, revealing his political beliefs. He is merciless about Joe McCarthy: "McCarthy was one of those hot-breathed monsters who surface noisily from the depths of the American id from time to time to maul the democratic values that they claim to defend." That's an easy target, but he also goes after Margaret Thatcher and, of course, Donald Trump, whose use of phrases like "fake news" makes him seem as if he is a character out of Orwell: "He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the discipline, intellect or ideology."

So if The Ministry Of Truth is at times a bit glib, it is certainly full of interesting information, and a must read for fans of Nineteen Eighty-Four.