5. Nineteen Eighty-Four: Big Brother, Surveillance, and Fear

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“And they revisit the stories that we keep coming back to on this show and they reshape how you experience them.”

One of those is 1984, a dystopian vision that escaped the page and entered our language. All well wasn't just imagining a bleak future. He understood that if language narrows, then thought narrows with it and control often begins by adjusting the record one word at a time. Folio treat books as living texts and here the design mirrors the novel's ideological machinery.

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“At foliosociety.com/thebookclub, that's foliosociety.com/thebookclub.”

you find it on tamaris.com and on the outside. With the code Spotify 10, you get 10% of the time on tamaris.com. Perfect for you. And now, for me. It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking 13. Winston Smith, his chin, nuzzled into his breast and an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of victory mansions. Though not quickly enough to prevent

a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt a boiled cabbage and old rag mats. A one-end of it, a colored poster, two large for indoor display, had been tacked toward the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide. The face of a man of about 45, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying to lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working.

And a present, the electric car had cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for hate week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was 39, and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, wed slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gaze from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move.

Big brother is watching you, the caption beneath it ran. So that was the opening of

“George Allwell's unforguessably chilling novel 1984 published in 1949. And I think the definitive”

novel of the 20th century. And it's surely one of the greatest openings in modern fiction. You know, it's packed with so many tantalizing leading details, you know, almost eerily familiar, but clearly alien as well. So we have the clock striking 13. The glass doors of victory mansions the smell of boiled cabbage. This lift that doesn't work, the power cuts, and hate week,

all of this unexplained. And then finally, we have the poster with that enormous face.

And that's a face which to read is reading this for the first time in 1949. Clearly, recalled Stalin, or perhaps Hitler, you know, that massive moustache, you know, flowering dowry you. And then there's that unforguessable caption now, I think, so established in kind of culture. Big brother is watching you. So Dominic, the the big brother of the book club. Thanks. What's going on there for people who haven't read.

This is the story of a black called Winston Smith who lives in the totalitarian future Britain in the year 1984. A lot of the readers will be familiar with this, but let's some, just pick up from

that very first page, the bit that you read out. So we're obviously in London. It feels very

1940s in many ways. The boil cabbage, the rubble, the bombed out buildings that are patched up with cardboard and corrugated iron. There's a sort of an air that you get even that first paragraph of shabbinous and weariness. Also, as you said, there's things that are alien. The 24-hour clock,

posters with the word Ing Sock. There's a helicopter carrying a police patrol. There's talk of

“sort of three-year plans and what-notes. And it turns out that this is a Britain that has been”

renamed Airstrip One. It's part of the Superpower Oceania and it's fighting a sort of world war with East Asia against Eurasia, though that will change. And as we later discover Oceana is ruled by the principles of English socialism, by big brother and the parties, the English socialism, Ing Sock and those principles which we'll go into later in the episode are new speak. So a new version of English double-think and the changeability of the past, the mutability of the past.

And we'll explain all of these things later in the episode. Yeah, and it's Winston's job to

falsify the past. He works for the party's ministry of truth and he literally re-rights

all the additions of the time. So I wonder what he'd make of some of your more famous headlines for it. He'd probably approve of things like time-to-scrapship, scrapper-lection campaigns.

“But did I write that? Yeah, that's one of your headlines. I've been doing some”

that this is your search for the episode. Yeah, I mean this wasn't the time it's put my favorite is Chairman Corbin's Maoist Britain. I mean that screams nice and easy for anyway. Yeah, I can't believe we brought that up. So this is a world of total surveillance and when Winston reaches his flat, he reflects that the the telescreen in his flat will capture

every sound and gesture. So he lives with the assumption that everything will be overhead,

every moment scrutinized. He even says at one point that there's only, there's one kind of safe moment in his day and that's when he's in his bed with his eyes closed in the darkness. Yeah. And as the story unfolds, he starts to kind of gradually rebel in very, very small ways against the suffocating grip of the party and big brother. So for instance, you know, it's really really small. He buys an antique journal and starts keeping a diary

because the reason that's a rebellion is because that's kind of his own. It's his own thoughts and considerations. It doesn't belong to the party. He has seditious thoughts of his own and he buys an amber paperweight from this kind of antiquarian shop and the reason that seditious is it's because it's from a former age. So and then perhaps it's from the past, exactly. And the past doesn't exist anymore. And perhaps most memorably he starts and elicit a fair with a character

called Julia who's his colleague and together they become involved with another colleague called a Brian who they think is part of a resistance group called the Brotherhood. Exactly. This doesn't end well. Does it? No, it's big spoiler alert. It doesn't end well. So as lots of readers will know they're arrested and Winston ends up in the dreaded ministry of love. The most nauseating name. Yeah. And specifically in its most feared room, which is room 101, and we'll come back to

what happens in room 101. So 1984, it's a dystopian political warning. It is a doomed love story. It's a horror story. It's a work of science fiction. It is a reflection on the importance of history, a warning about the corruption of language. But more than any of those things. I mean that those are aspects of it. But at bottom it is a really gripping and terrifying story. I mean it is a brilliant read. My son read it and he was about 11 or 12. He didn't care about any of those things.

He just loved it as a gripping story. Totally. I mean it's a page turner throughout and well

“as a master of suspense. He builds that as we go on. And it's a phenomenon. I mean I think probably”

on match in the 20th century may be apart from by Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings. And surprisingly that's a comparison that we'll touch on later. You wouldn't think to put them together but you can. And its legacy is just its gigantic. The words and concepts from 1984 so many of them are really familiar today. Big brother, room 101, both of which interestingly have spawned reality TV shows. So that's the idea of being watched. So it's

George or well, the progenitor of Love Island. And then you have thought crime double thing. The two minutes hate, ester at one, etc. All of this. And the word 'wellian' has actually come to donate something in itself. It's associated with totalitarianism with kind of the curtailment to freedom. Like people even used it, I remember during the Covid lockdowns. Of course. Yeah. Massively. And above all the surveillance culture that I think most people today are so familiar with.

The times that he lived in. What this book's all about. Why it's endured and has

“seeped into culture in the way that it has. And also I was think it's interesting to explore whether”

or it is a period piece born of that particular moment. Whether or not it's actually a prophecy with lessons for us today. So I love George or well. The man as much as the book says loads staff for me for lots of, as he used for many writers. I once made a TV program about Britain in the early Cold War that touched on 1984. And actually when I was, I mean, you had wear good enough to read one of my more inflammatory columns. Yeah. Oh, the title of one of my more inflammatory

columns. I mean, I probably might in my days as a colonist for Britain's best-loved mid-market newspaper. Yeah. I must have quoted from George or well about 6,000 times. He's one of those writers that basically, whenever you run out of a, when you've run out of ideas and you're groping desperately for a conclusion. Or well, is the writer that you, um, that you read to or, but interestingly, he actually tabby. I have a sense that, um, or well appeals much more to men

than than to women. So I've never really heard you wax lyrical about George or well. And I

don't even give him too much way when I say that the person producing this podcast, Elia, is not an all-well fan. No, she described this as a boy book. And I think she is not entirely wrong

“that at all. I mean, I think, and I remember thinking this the first time around as well,”

and I was struck by it this time, it's, it's clearly, you know, ingenious and highly original. But I think there's a big difference between admiring a book and liking it. And I, I don't really like 1984. And I think there is something in, in the idea of it being much more of a boy book than a girl book. I actually, I did a bit of digging and they did a, a U-Gov poll in 2014, which showed that men were much more likely to read 1984 than women. I think there's Barry,

Barry's reasons for that. I think in part because it's a book that deals much more in kind of structures and kind of systems, power systems and structures than relationships. It's, it's, it's not very, um, interior. It's, it's emotionally, really, really stark and cold. There's very little kind of relational fulfillment. And the whole thing is sent it on one man's perspective, you know, it's, it's the male gaze throughout. And I just, I found it, you know, reading it in a, in a,

in a chilly, you know, London, January on the Friday 1940s, Ask Northern Line, back from work, every night for the shadows closing in. Who, I found it, a pretty bleak read. Oh no, this is shocking. We'll explore that a bit more later, the idea of, the, the idea of, kind of, perhaps the, the sexism in 1984. But first of all, talk about George Orwell. You're, you're here. Okay. So the funny thing

about Orwell is always renowned for his clarity and his honesty and his sympathy for the underdog

and his hostility to authority. But there's an irony here because he's a son of Empire, it's a son of privilege and he's a former Empire of policeman who writes under a name, not his own. So his name is actually Eric Arthur Blair. So he's born in Bengal in 1903. His father was in the Indian Civil Service and he basically worked as a, on the export of opium. As family interestingly, he describes them famously as lower upper middle class or was fascinated by class. Basically because his family

were gentile where they didn't have the money to sustain it. So that meant that there's always a huge or a widening gap between their expectations and their capacity to pay for them. And that meant that Orwell reflected a lot about the sort of social cast and so on. He's very bright boy. He went to scholarship to prep school and then another scholarship to Eaton, a king scholarship to Eaton where he was taught French by Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World.

That is a great detail though. The two kind of fathers of dystopian literature. Exactly. So he wasn't a great star at Eaton. His parents thought that he probably wouldn't win a scholarship to university and they didn't have the money to send him. So they applied for him to join the Indian Imperial Police, which he does. He passes the exam. He goes off to Burma and some of his biographers see Burma as formative for him because of course, Burma,

he has an experience of repression and punishments and surveillance. But he's on the other side of that equation because he's working for the authorities. Yeah, and he really doesn't enjoy Burma does he? No, not at all. I think he finds it very awkward. He's really brilliantly by the way, by his time and Burma. There's brilliant essay about shooting an elephant and everyone's sort of staring at him and the sort of pressure that he felt as the representative of Imperial

“Authority surrounded by all these people whose lives he didn't really understand. So that's why”

I guess he went back to England eventually in 1928 and then that's when he first had a stab at

the coming of writer. Yeah. He's a big, big change. He lived mainly in a sort of sleepy,

he takes the name George Orwell and he takes it from the king. Yeah, George. Yeah, George. Yeah. George, yeah. He could pick George McMahon and then the local river because he sees it as a solid English name and then he really gives the writing his best shot and he writes down and out in Paris and London and that's published in 1933 and then four books after that. So there's Burmese days, a clergyman's daughter, Keith the Aspidistra, flying and coming up for air and none of these are

very successful and that's face it. We probably wouldn't know them well today and had been for his later works. The common theme of those books is the central character who's trapped by his

time so he feels it's very claustrophobic and the character tries to escape and basically fails.

“So this is a constant theme for Orwell and I think that reflects, I mean obviously the theme in 1984”

and I think that reflects his personality. He's shaped very much by this establishment but also he's quite thoughtful, he's spiky, he's awkward, he's kind of a man apart. He likes to see himself as a man apart. Anyway, the paradox is on the one hand he's quite anti-authority anti-establishment but on the other, he's very loyal to his old school friends so the people at his bedside when he was dying were all old atonians. They were the people he kept in touch with all his life.

And that's led some people to think retrospectively they might have been gay, hasn't it? I can't believe that people think that. Well I can't believe that people think it but I think they're deluded. I mean one of the great criticisms of Orwell now is that Orwell is no woman a safer act or sure. Well he's sort of pouring feebly at them or he's asking them to marry him. Anyway, talking about asking them to marry him. He does get married in 1936 to Eileen,

no surenessy who's Oxford educated and basically becomes his typist and then at the end of 1936

that defining political event of his life he goes off to the Spanish Civil War.

“Before then I think Orwell had, I mean he'd be interested in politics but he hadn't been fundamentally”

political and the Spanish Civil War changes that. He volunteers with the Republicans, the left wing forces. He joins a militia called the Poom, he's shot in a throne, he's killed, but what really is so formative is that the left wing forces and Spain are fighting among themselves. So there's a rift in Barcelona where he's been very excited and happy, there's a big rift between on the one hand all these different kind of sectarian militias like the Poom

and on the other the Orthodox communists and the Orthodox kind of Stalinist communists basically stamp on these other militias and Orwell is really shocked by this, he's shocked by Stalinism, he's shocked by the experience of kind of truth and language being threatened by propaganda and by kind of totalitarian orthodoxy and and and and that stays with him politically forever and that gives him his obsession I think with totalitarianism and with Stalinism.

Yeah and Stalinism I mean Stalin's shadow looms large in 1984 and obviously big brother I mean he's not he's not entirely Stalin like as we said you know the shadows of Hitler and him but the similarities between Stalin and big brother are that impossible to miss I would say I mean the moustache is not alone there's more than that as well. Yeah so the moustache is definitely definitely giving away because it's definitely Stalinist moustache and not Hitler's and the description of the face kind of

raggedly solidly handsome. Yeah exactly put also the way in which in the history books we discover they've been constantly rewritten to emphasise the role of big brother and to push big brother back earlier and earlier into the beginning of the revolution and this is of course exactly what Stalin's court is still interested with him they wrote out the other leaders of the Russian Revolution and put Stalin's centre stage and there's also a lot of stuff I mean when Orwell has

come back when he comes back to England this is the point at which Stalin's show trials have been reported so people like Kruger is an obvious or live cabinet or Nikolai Bukarin the so-called old Bolsheviks they are being dragged in front of the courts in Moscow in these terrible show trials and that the shadow of the show trials hangs over 1984 and this three characters air and

some Jones and Rutherford in the book who are basically like the old Bolsheviks of airstrip one

“and the same thing exactly the same thing happens to them. Yeah and they're disappeared aren't they?”

Yeah, they're back to Orwell's life so he finally returns to England from Spain to recover from these wounds and he's shot in the neck brutal and also illness and that's when he writes homage to Catalonia and makes his name as a reviewer and an essayist and then in September 1939 as he had warned Britain finds itself in the Second World War and I think this is probably an overlooked part of 1984 when you say that people were seeing it's the Cold War and Bolshevism and all this but

the Second World War is a massive part of the book the atmosphere at the world. Yeah I think so

1984's great rival is the sort of formative book of the 20th century um and I think the interesting thing about those books is they're both written against the backdrop of the Second World War they

“conceived in the Second World War they're written well as going on and I think there are lots of”

elements about 1984 that are inconceivable without the context of the Second World War so two of them

just data away two small things the shifting alliances say basically Oceana is always a war with one of

these great superpowers against the other but it's always changing Eurasia East Asia and so on that obviously mirrors what's happened in the Second World War with a Molotov rip-and-drop pact with Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union being allies and then suddenly all that has written in 1941 when Nazi Germany attacks the Soviet Union suddenly the Soviet Union is our gallant ally in the West and everybody is kind of going on about Uncle Joe and all of that kind of thing. Toast it as

soon as you said that there's this scene in the book where they're having a rally to watch the execution of Eurasian prisoners and everyone's very excited and you know bang for blood and then the speakers handed a note halfway through the rally to tell him that the alliance is shifted and then it's kind of it's chilling but it's fakely comical and then suddenly all these people realise that

the banners and the posters are all wrong because actually as it turns out Oceania has always been

at war with East Asia. Well that's the thing isn't it that space that the past has deleted but another little World War II moment they go to the cinemas to watch a news reel and they watch a news reel of a refugee ship being bombed and the audience are laughing it's a really horrific scene like children are being killed and the audience are laughing and cheering this is based on a real incident a refugee ship called the Strumour which was carrying Jewish refugees in Romania

it was torpedo by a Soviet submarine in 1942 so all well cleared takes that from the headlines but also I think generally the atmosphere of the book the bomb damage the shabbyness the fear the rationing this is the atmosphere not so much of the cold or though it's part of it it's the atmosphere Britain in 1942 1943 or whenever when he first conceives of what becomes 1984 and the final element all well was a propaganda stand the war with the BBC so he worked as a producer and presenter

for shows that went out in Asia and that BBC experience I think is crucial he works like

Winston in an office building with a kind of dingy canteen he handles propaganda which all well called muck and filth and when he goes to editorial meetings at broadcasting house in London

“there's meetings are held in room one o one yeah so remember that's that's the room in 1984”

but then I mean how then does he go from that the BBC being a full-time propagandaist journalist whatever to actually writing 1984 yeah so he quits the BBC in lend of 1943 and he writes the satirical fable attacking Stalinism which is animal farm yeah but that's not published for a couple of years because publishers are very wary about touching it because Stalin is now a gallant that lie and they don't want to publish anything critical of the Russians very 1984 very

1984 so meanwhile all well has been reading loads of dystopian fiction so all dyshuxlies his old French teachers brave in world for example or HD wells these all these jackland and all these authors yeah but it's a recent thing dystopian fiction I mean to product it is of the early 20th century so it's born of that atmosphere yes it completely is and then I think he gets the idea in about 1943 or 1944 and the it's basically what will the world be like when Hitler is beaten

all well's thinking about what happens when we when we've won how how all the world play out and the writer Isaac Deutsche who met him in 1945 said to said later that all well had said to him

“I think the Stalin Roosevelt and Churchill are planning to divide the world between them”

that they are consciously plotting as it indeed in some ways they were a conferences like Eulter when they divide the world into spheres of influence you know that the world will be passed out between the superpowers and that gives in the idea of oceania, East Asia and Eurasia and then there's a sort of hiatus because he's distracted by animal farm but also by his own personal life so he and Eileen have not had children they've adopted a but what baby

who they call Richard Horatio Blair but then in the spring of 1945 March Eileen has a routine operation she has an allergic reactions nanosthetic and she dies and everybody expects all well to give up the baby who's only nine months old but he says no he gets a succession of people into kind of look after it but he's very lonely and he basically spends two years proposing if you met him you met him for a cup of tea or something to be he would end up by proposing to you

he sells excellent I think that's over on your behave and he ever was supposed to be all the time and we don't say this personally because I think he would do it to any woman and I think

working like a demon he writes 130 essays a year but there's a kind of starkness and a sadness to his life now and this is what draws him to the Scottish island of Jura yeah and this has become such a kind of faded story you know it's like the the ideal of kind of the writer driven to write it all costs you know like a Spartan living like a Spartan and also he said at the time I mean he was he it's his own success when we shot him in the foot because he had no time the

minute that animal farm was published people constantly trying to get him to do talks and write essays

“and I think he felt a bit overwhelmed I he actually said to his friend you don't know how I”

pined to be free of it all and have time to think again so this is why he starts going up to the Scottish island of Jura as you said my his older Tony and friend David Aster finds him a rented farm house called Barnhill on the North Coast and this is an incredibly bleak grim for bed for bidding landscape you know you can feel that in 1984 actually can't use the grim grain as a bit all and

he's now seriously ill himself or well with TB he's always been a smoker he's struggled with London

smog the cold weather etc but all this time he's working insanely hard and it's now that he bought he turns to 1984 yeah so two more quick things to flag up two more influences so one is that the cold war is now underway and it's all well who has popularised the term the cold war yeah first used it in 1945 speaking very generally then he used it again in March 1946 talking

“about having a cold war with Russia and that's the same month that Winston Churchill gave his”

speech and full-term Missouri way talks about the iron curtain dividing Europe so there's a real sense at this point that something has changed and then the other thing he references it actually

kind of a bleakly once I people he never really directly addressed that influence but he actually

said to his his publisher about the last phase of 1984 about writing the book that it was about like I quote it was about the possible state of affairs if this atomic war isn't conclusive yeah and of course the shadow of the atom bomb the atom bomb the references to atom bombs throughout the book but he's also read a book an older book which is a massive massive influence on 1984 so this is a book called we by Yav Gainy Zamyatin which was published in Russian in 1921

and it's set in the far future it's got a one-party state it has a surveillance culture it has a ruling figure not big brother but he's got the benefactor it has a hero who's got a number not a name who falls in love has enlisted relationship rebels is interrogated is tortured is broken is it basically it kind of is 1984 in the embryo the tone is a bit different it's more ironic but it's remarkably similar and actually at a top friend of yours has read this book and

absolutely it is a my best friend in all the world is read this book another young man of prodigious talents you're sad about the sunbroke is a massive fan he is he loves Yav Gainy Zamyatin

and he said if you don't mention this in your podcast with tabi I will never forgive you

and now we have but writing a 1984 is a terrible slog for all well isn't I mean he said of writing itself that it was a horrible exhausting struggle like a long-bought of illness one would not

“attempt it unless drove driven by some demon and I think 1984 is even worse than that it's slow”

it's grueling and the book feels like the work of a sick tired lonely man sitting at on his own in a farmhouse no electricity no hot water this Scottish gale howling outside and I mean it it also 1946 1947 with a coldest winters of the century in Britain and he's out there in this freezing little cottage and his unsurprisingly his health is close to a terminal breakdown he's lost two stone he's coughing uncontrollably he has his terrible night sweats and so eventually he's confined

to a hospital in Glasgow and then finally in the summer of 1948 he's discharged against medical advice he goes back to work on juror and finishes the hand written manuscript by November at last this grueling process but handwritten is not good enough for the publisher so he needs it has to get a type and basically he sets the publisher Fred Warburg can you find my type is they can't find him one and he's just fine I'll do this myself even though his doctors are told I'm not too and he's

he's sitting in bed chain smoking this is very much I see your future tell me sit in bed chain smoking coughing up blood and typing 4,000 words a day on his tight run this little tight writer and he's dripping the sweat while he's doing this you know the TV is ravaging him yeah he's survived on strong tea and rolled cigarettes sitting in bed exactly so he finishes it the fourth

forever and he goes after a sanitarum in the console which is which is quite a change it's exactly

“how imagine you felt after icing the great British dream factory very good yeah thank you”

it's very similar people so his publisher Fred Warburg loved it he wrote an internal memo he said it's one of the most terrifying books I've ever read but interestingly he then said it's worth a cool million votes to the conservative party because he saw it as warning and socialism

all well himself always denied this and he wrote several times saying this is not an anti-labor book

it's not an anti-socialist or social democratic book it's a book again warning against totalitarianism it could be communism it could be fascism but it's definitely he was he resented the implication that he'd written an anti-socialist book this is why it all was always the poster boy for both sides his own politics also difficult to pin down I agree with the tabby I agree completely I mean lawll sees himself as a man of the left but in many ways he's a small-seek conservative

and he often you know he he comes alive often when he's actually attacking other socialists more so than conservatives I would say the title of the book remains to be decided he wants to call it the last man in Europe his publishers say hmm we think a date is better interestingly the date didn't have to be 1984 so there's a really nice book on 1984 by Dorian Lynnsky and he points out that all well toyed in the final stages when you look at the manuscripts

and one are all toyed with 1980 with 1982 and he only actually switches to 1984 quite late on he's just you know grouping around for which dates seems to make you know seems that is snappiest I mean yeah none of these numbers would have had any meaning in 1949 you know and they they'd have the the personality yet that we are so soon with years once they've gone by anyway it's published in the summer of 1949 June and it comes out to a torrent of praise from the critics

“and I think people's ideological anxieties in the early Cold War so raw and the experience”

the second world war is so recent that's you know they are primed to like a book such as this

although had that said I mean that sounds like I'm trying to make excuses for why people like it they liked it because it's such a gripping compelling unputdownable read I mean they basically say straightaway this is a brilliant brilliant book yeah I mean VS Richard in the new statesman I do not think I've ever read a novel more frightening and depressing and yet such a the originality the suspense the speed of writing and withering indignation

that it is impossible to put the book down so there you go Switzerland Churchill also loved it he told his doctor that he'd read it twice I mean obviously on the other hand the Soviet newspaper the Pravda calls it a filthy book a work of myth and phropic fantasy typical of the propaganda turned out by vinal writers on the orders an instigation of war street which I think speaks to how successful all well was in kind of conjuring his terrifying totalitarian is totally regime but you

know who wasn't who was kind of but yeah what about his old teacher tabby this is so difficult of kind of the spite of writers isn't it he said it was good but his own was better he kind of said this is all the sucksly we should say he said that basically his vision of the future was was far more realistic that the lust for power can would be satisfied more by suggesting people into loving servitude than by flogging and kicking them into obedience because his own book in a brave new

world people become sort of subjected all kind of followers because of this drug called soma which is euphoric and makes them kind of joyously obedient but certainly in time finally all well is on to make some cash from 1984 because it's chosen by the US book of the month club and this means he'll make at least 40,000 pounds perhaps five million pounds today but the last

he'll never get to enjoy his newfound fortune because he's effectively dying by this point

yeah so before he dies there's one little ironic thing that happens which is an old friend from the foreign office could see liacum and comes to visit him in the sanatorium and he gives her a list I mean for he's just written a book about people being informed upon and he gives her a list of

“people who he says these are the these are bad people you should watch them basically you can't”

rely on them because they're too close to communism and there are writers there are you know people are the historian eh car the playwright JB priestly some labor MPs like the future labor leader Michael foot and all well basically says these are these are bad eggs you know these are these are sort of the reds and the beds as it were and this when it came out was very controversial and lots of people who didn't like all well said oh look at this all's completely hypocrit

he's actually informing on all these people some of whom were his whereas friends although all well himself of course would have said you know communism is the great evil and actually I'm doing

anyway he finally is one of his proposals is finally accepted by a publishing assistant called

“Sonia Brown or who becomes his second wife by this point he has been moved to university college”

hospital in London he's obviously dying he's visited by his old attorney in mates sort of day after day but on the 21st of January in 1950 he has an artery burst and as long his lungs have been left absolutely ravaged by TB and he dies immediately and he's actually only 46 years old so plausibly you know world of had 20 25 years more books in him but it was it was not to be I mean such a terrible cliché to say well man of contradictions but you know what

a contradictory end he had he'd been an atheist or his life not been a joiner but he wants a church of in a funeral and he wants to be buried in a church of in a graveyard and his old attorney in pal David Aster the guy had sorted out the Scottish farmhouse for him he says I'll take

charge of this and he basically gets all well agrave in a certain court near Knoxfordshire where

all well has no connections but it's next to the Aster estate and so that's well well rests to this day and he's actually buried interestingly next to British Prime Minister former British Prime Minister H.H. Ask with wow two great men to be yeah both with dubious records with women yes yeah yeah that's true you wouldn't want to be buried next to either of them they'd have ghostly hands wondering over to God say there's definitely wondering hands in that graveyard

so the book's successful word on the book's successful we go into the break it is an even more instant hit than the Lord of the Rings so in America within ten years the paper back sold

“a million copies I think and it's total by now estimates are that it's sold 40 to”

40 50 million copies which is a lot for a book that is as stark and bleak and kind of goreem as 1984 but the ultimate I was in the ultimate tribute to his achievements is that it was banned in the Soviet Union and the Soviet satellites until the 1980s and elicit copies Sam is that would circulate among dissidents and the Polish Nobel laureates anti-communist exile poet called Cheswof Mewash wrote that he said people in the eastern block just could not believe

that somebody who had never lived there could know so you know with such insight exactly what it was

like to live under such a regime and then the 1980s the historian Timothy Garten Ash also columnist for the Guardian he went he spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe and he reported afterwards he said people would come up to him with this kind of doggyed copies of 1984 you know checks, polls, whatever and they would say how on earth could he know how did he know exactly what it's like yeah horses though he were a prophet but the question is does 1984 still have the same power today

was it a prophecy does it really foretell the surveillance culture and kind of post truth politics of the 21st century and Dominic will you finally justify your comparison between all well and my beloved J.R.R. Tolkien find out after the break is Dyn Garten startcluff with the feeling by action in quality and the kleinste price hand in hand. To buy a game fair mini-cutting Seagin were 24, 18 or Garden Touch Garten Sheeran were 1,2 and 80 and deco yet all Garten Productin and in their action app action,

we've talked about George Orwell and how he wrote 1984 and Dominic but now let's talk about the book itself. All well very neatly constructs it into three parts so you have Winston in his world you have his affair with Julia and they're rebellion and that's probably kind of the warmest brightest portion of the book it's more colorful and then you have the bleakest portion which is Winston's imprisonment and his torture by O'Brien and given that this is such a neat format

why did we follow this line ourselves so fast of all Winston Smith and his world because he's not

“your typical hero we know he's not at all he's a very 20th century hero I think flawed week”

fragile his very own glamorous you know you did that reading at the beginning his very coast ulcer he has to pause when he's going upstairs because he's at a breath he's got five fulls teeth he's got a terrible cough rather like Orwell's TB he's done hard it actually looks just right for him I think who plays him in the movie yeah I think so I mean I think in many ways actually

yeah and that's the point of him I mean the name obviously Winston you know you'd assume a little not to Winston Churchill and Smith the most ordinary of English surnames so the Englishness I

“think is massively important or I mean or is obsessed with England and Englishness but Winston's”

weakness is partly because he's had such a terrible life so when he's thinking about his boyhood which would have been in the 1950s sort of an imaginary 1950s it's all air raids and rubble and people firing machine guns and you know these sort of confused impressions that he has of a country under attacking an atomic war but also fooling apart because of civil war and revolution his father disappeared you know it's one of so many people who've disappeared when he was a small boy and he has

this dreadful memory of his mother so basically when he was a little boy he stole some chocolate from his sister um because they had you know only very limited supplies yeah rationing he stole this chocolate his mother was upset he ran away when he came back both his mother and his sister were

gone and he never saw them again they had been disappeared yeah his recollections of that are

horrible and I actually think probably in quite an unemotional book the most emotional portions but as you say he's definitely not perfect I mean I don't think he's even admirable really for example and strikingly he's sexist I'd say to the point of misogyny so for instance he's been married to this one called Catherine but he absolutely loads her she had without exception the most stupid vulgar empty mind that he's ever encountered what it really boils down to for him is

is sex because he says as soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen to embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image and what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength

“you know I think in part maybe you could say this is fair because it's not about her gender it's not”

about her being a woman it's about her being kind of the representation of you know a party person through and through a person that has lost their identity to the party because the party doesn't

believe in in lust and love and sex it believes that sex is reprocreation alone and so basically

it's a duty so she sees it as doing her duty but on the other hand you know that in itself is a bit of a sexist stereotype the fridge the fridge is sexually repressed woman who is blindly obedient so that definitely is a little bit of a window into a broad issue in the book that we'll touch on a bit later when we get to Julia Winston's love interest yeah and I do think this issue about all women and Winston and women is worth exploring definitely and we'll come back to it

but I would say that what grabs your attention when you start the book the reason that you keep reading is not because of Winston it's because of the world so it's it's that the oil is a very good physical writer so the world you know you get a sense of the physicality of it the dinging us the damp the rot nothing working it reminds me a lot oil had among his the nonfiction books that had made his name books like Darren out in Paris and London or the road to Wigan Pier in the late 1930s

one of the things that really made those books come alive for readers was how vividly oil captured the experience the the the the sights and the smells and the sort of the the the sensations of life at the bottom of life in the gutter as it were and there are lots of scenes in 1984 that are very reminiscent of those books so a classic one he's reflecting on how dingy and and shabby and rubbishy and decaying the cities are and he says you know this point about

there everything smelly of cabbage she mentions it again and of and of looking toilets and stuff

and he has this vision of London the city of a million dust bins of brilliant image and he has

this picture of one of his neighbours Mrs. Parsons a woman with lined face and whispered her fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste pipe and that image comes directly from his book the road to Wigan Pier which was reportage where he remembered seeing a slum girl kneeling on the stones poking a stick up the lead and waste pipe with the most desolate hopeless expression I have ever seen and this image he's a very empathetic writer for people who don't share his

privilege and he has this you know in the roads we can appear again and again he looks at the faces of people who are ground down by poverty and despair and will not and you see that reflected

“I think in 1984 and that's makes a different I think from other dystopias definitely because”

other dystopias they're they're setting the future or and kind of remote islands or fans to see locations for instance brave new world or when the sleeper wakes but 1984 is drenched in these

food the rationing you know the description of the gin that he drinks victory gin and the harsh

“sensation of swallowing it I think that is actually one of all worlds crowning achievements in this”

is that the raw physicality of it I think it's just superb and I like the way that he's unafraid to look kind of into the gutters he's outly so everything except things those first readers the physicality of it is precisely what makes it so familiar and even that's true of his where he works the ministry of truth so the ministry of truth which is a very famous passage in the novel this enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete soaring up terrace after terrace

and on it are written the three slogans of the party in gigantic lettering war is peace freedom is slavery ignorance is strength but that building is clearly you know anyone in London would know that that building is senate house it's the sort of the office block of the University of London and in the war it's been the ministry of information and that is where oil's wife Eileen had worked so he's drawing inspiration directly from a real building and actually you know talking about the

relationship to nice easy for all those previous works when you go into that building and when Winston goes in it is full of people who basically have appeared in all those previous books of non-fiction because they're the precise of the people that he most despises yeah because he famously hated fruit juice drinkers, nudists, vegetarians, pacifists, feminists and just essentially kind of earnest people with progressive opinions and weird hobbies so two of them I mean there's

a guy called Parsons these are terrible people yeah Parsons basically oil always pictures him

dressed in the uniform of the boy scouts or the spies that as they have become so he talks about his he says I always him even though Parsons is dressed perfectly normally oil pictures similar Winston pictures him with dimpled knees and sleeves roll back from pudgy for arms what about the next one tabby come rate ogle v he was a total abstainer and a non-smoker and had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium and he had taken a vow of celibacy so goody

goody too she is just just opt out yeah so Winston's job in the ministry of I was about to the ministry of information to the ministry of truth is to rewrite history in the page of the times so quote day by day and all this minute by minute the past was brought up to date so history is scraping it clean to use another expression so basically they're rewriting history so

the party was always right and what the party wanted to have happened happened and this is crucial

to the totalitarian project because the party's slogan is who controls the past controls the future who controls the present controls the past and of course Winston knows that this is he knows what he's doing and this is where double think comes in you can know that something happened i.e.

“you can know that there are airplanes before the party came along but you have to convince”

yourself that the reality is otherwise so you have to somehow compartmentalise your mind your brain so that the truth is buried you know the truth is there but you bury it deep down and you almost come to believe the lie that you yourself are propagating yeah you live a different truth I guess there's no such thing as objective truth see this is the chilling thing isn't it that the inside that all has because it's not just newspapers that are being rewritten

no it is everything it is leaflets posters soundtracks cartoons photographs that's a huge list of all these things that are basically being altered so that the past is who's actually is the party wanted it to be there's even a woman whose job it is to erase the names

of people who've been vaporized so i.e. they're cancelled they never ever existed she and she

even kind of has to erase her husband her own husband's existence and has to do it willingly and almost endlessly because otherwise you're not a member of the party and you're in big trouble and and there you have with the example of the double think that she must know that her husband exists but she's in charge of suppressing every last vestige of his of the fact that he was ever there and it's not just um rewriting articles or or even books or whatever but it's

basically every relic of the world before the party has to be erased the past itself has to be

“has to be cancelled and i think this speaks to all well's traditionalism and his small”

sea conservatism he loves Britain's past he loves traditions even though he's in many ways you know he's a radical cultural traditions really speak to something in all well it's like his love of

something which again will come back to that he has in common with his contemporary jara talking yeah because also that the the books full of kind of little jokes like they use a 24 hour clock they're the metric system dollars and kilometers not pounds and miles you know and you definitely you mean that just just the sort of which seems that we can all expect to enjoy in your

“own journalism Dominic but it's kind of you know you all you have people today i mean i think”

i say it's unless you're like you just said sidewalk not pavement that's American you know so it's like a little yeah it's kind of thing that i would say it's somebody yeah exactly i like the old words it precise you say and actually there's a scene in the book when an old man goes into a pub and he asks for a pint and the barman doesn't know what it is he says i don't even know what the word means because basically they serve beer in litres and the the use of the

metric system you know is a massive red flag for George or well basically somebody who uses dollars and kilometers or whatever is the worst possible person because all well really believes in the old quirky traditional kind of ways yeah so i mean this this scene with the pint is really

the real tragedy at the heart of nice cool it is absolutely and always sorry i say all

well i'm confusing all well and Winston which i guess is is some speaks volumes because in many ways yeah it's very telling because Winston and all well over a similar Winston's a whole project really is to try to recover the past to bring the past alive that's why you mentioned him buying the anti-journal keeping the diary or he has this fascination with a nursery rhyme doesn't he which kind of recurs and a slightly sort of ghostly way throughout the

“little courageous and lemon say the bells are some clements i think this is one of the kind of”

the most evocative sort of strains or threads in the book for me because it's that kind of idea a nursery rhyme is always used in horror movies you know the sweet kind of innocent contorted something horrific but then also it's kind of it's lately kind of moving because it's like a breath of this old world and everyone like remembers it in their heads but and they remember little bits of it so it's like being an adult and there's suddenly you'll smell something

and it'll take you back to a memory from your childhood it's really really effectively done i think yeah i think i agree but getting rid of such rhymes is exactly what the part is about because they don't want to just erase Britain's history but they want to change its culture and its language so in the ministry of truth uh Winston has a colleague called Simon and Simon's work in a dictionary the eleventh edition of new speak and Simon at one point you know Simon

“basically explains the whole thing to uh to Winston and he says we are destroying words”

scores of them hundreds of them every day we're cutting the language down to the bone the aim of new speak says Simon is to narrow the range of thought in the end we should make thought crime literally impossible because there'll be no words in which to express it every year

fewer and fewer words and the range of consciousness always a little smaller so i mean they

will they'll also therefore just destroy literature itself so it says by 2050 earlier probably all real knowledge of old speak will have disappeared the whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer Shakespeare Milton Byron there'll exist only in new speak versions not many change and something different but actually change and something contradictory of what they used to be and that that also is kind of classic of totalitarian regimes you know taking a text

and then distorting it to suit your ends the Nazis did it for instance yeah of course i mean this is what you you you to get to this is the defining characteristic of 20th century regimes that they they don't want to have a kind of overt public ideological conformity they want to get into your heads and to change the way you think and the way they do that is by book burnings by you know changing the curriculum and schools by doing all this kind of thing and basically if something

in the past doesn't fit you change it and that's obviously why so many people in the 21st century get agitated about rewriting texts from the past or whatever and they say it's a wellian because it kind of is because that's precisely what Simon and his colleagues want to do because it's also the things that are very familiar to you that they're changing it's like changing the texture of the ground on which you walk the texture of your most familiar touchstones

but the thing is that Winston recognises that Simon being able to to say this and pointed out like he sees too much he's too perceptive and he speaks too plainly and sure enough later in the book

Simon ceases to exist he had never existed yeah Simon's to honest about the projects and so he has to

go and actually that threat of cancellation I mean it sounds like a 21st century word but this is absolutely the threat of the hangs over Winston from the the first page of the book to quote

your existence was denied and then forgotten you were abolished annihilated vaporised was the usual

word it's not just that you'll be killed I mean in a weird way being killed is not so frightening

“I mean everybody dies it's that the fact that you would never have existed that is I think is so”

scary and gets under your skin we said towards the beginning of episode this is a world of surveillance and they're right in formers everywhere particularly children you know even your own children can't be trusted and so it says they adore the party and everything connected with it it was almost normal for people over there so to be frightened of their own children which is deeply deeply disturbing and for instance at one point Winston sees pastens children playing it being spies

and the sunshouts you're a traitor you're a thought criminal you're a erasian spy or shoots you are vaporised you are sent you to the saltbines which obviously caused a mind the hit the youth the hit the youth of course but also I mean there's a real story from the Soviet Union and a guy called Pavlik Murazov all well would have known about this story because it was very widely reported Murazov was a 13 year old boy who was said to have denounced his own father

“and in 1932 he was murdered by his other relatives so Murazov became a hero in Stalin's Soviet”

Union he was said this boy this heroic boy he denounced his father who was a criminal but then his relatives murdered him and actually it historians now think this is pretty much a legend that was concluded by Stalinist the Murazov that insofar as he existed at all the real story was completely different but yeah so the Murazov thing absolutely hangs over the book this guy Parsons that that Winston works with he ends up being denounced by his own 70-year-old daughter

for thought crime so it turns out that he was in his sleep was muttering down with big brother and she was listening at the keyhole and she reported him to the authorities and when Parsons tells Winston about this Parsons is actually still proud of her yeah I was guilty and I'm gonna thank the tribunal when they convict me you know he's so indoctrinated that he believes as people appeared to in the Stalin show trials that he is guilty and deserves to be

punished but he's also kind of looking around him like did you hear that did you hear me say

“that I'm proud of her that I think she did a great job yeah no so it's it's really really horrible”

bit anyway we're slightly getting ahead of ourselves there because we need to get to the second third of the book now and the character with whom Winston becomes involved and this is Julia and we first meet Julia at the Ministry of Truth where Winston works and Winston really isn't a big fan he's not at all not at all he'd disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her because the atmosphere of hockey fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean

mindeness which she had managed to carry about with her he disliked you can definitely hear the echoes of all well there you know kind of honest people who have weird hobbies he disliked nearly

all women and especially the young and pretty ones it was always the women and above all the

young ones who were the most bigoted adherence of the party the swallowers of slogans the amateur spies and knows his out of unorthodoxy and he is Winston is especially repelled by her membership of the junior anti-sex league so you know you can see that sex is a big issue for Winston or rather the not having it of women and he her one of his first assumptions is that she might be an agent of the thought police and she well might be but you can see from that reading that there's an

aggression as I said there's an aggressively sexual dimension to all this so during the two minute hate directed at this kind of trotsky ethic figure Emmanuel Goldstein, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face of the screen to the dark head girl behind him vivid beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind he would flock her to death with a rubber truncheon he would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian he would ravish her and cut her throat

at the moment of climax he hated her because she was young and pretty in sexless because he wanted

to go to bed with her and would never do so because round her sweet subtle waist which seemed to

ask you to encircle it with your arm there was only the odious scarlet sash aggressive symbol of chastity so I mean that's that's the sash of the junior anti-sex league and so right there I mean that reading its screams in cell you know men that would hate women it does though men that would hate women and be violent because I mean fundamentally they feel rejected by women and again I mean people this is led people to to wonder whether this is all well subconscious you know some

biographers have even gone so far as to accuse him of being a predator you know or is this too reductive and equally as we mentioned earlier they've accused his vision in 1984 being really really misogynistic very very sexist and Julia the character herself of being a caricature so

he is voicing the thoughts of a character in a book we've got to remember that these aren't necessarily

his thoughts but it doesn't mean he ever acted on these things you know people have accused him of

“mistreating his wife and and controlling her and being cruel and I think he probably was all those”

things but there's zero evidence to suggest that George Orwell was ever a predator in his real life and that's an important distinction to make and Ditto his problematic representation of women in the novel is not the same as being a culpable to kind of personal sexual abuse that's a massive massive accusation and he got to be careful not to judge a character in his novel on the lines of kind of moral frame the frame moral frame works of today and especially as well this is something

that's kind of blown up on social media in recent years you know canceling George Orwell I don't think that's fair either so there's a couple of things says one is there are people women who said later I don't know that he'd lunged at them or he'd made advances to them and whatnot

which I guess you never know the truth of these things so this is going back to the 1930s or whatever

but then the canceling him because Julia is too much of a caricature because she's because it seems that Orwell is endorsing Winston's you know he wants to tie to a stake and fire arrows that's Orwell whatever I think the main thing is you can't just reduce him to a label on the basis of of that in the basis of the book I still don't think he was a sexual predator in real life I think he probably yeah he was it had dodgy dealings with women for sure by the stands of the day

we wouldn't perceive his treatment of women as acceptable particularly kind of this treatment of his

“wife but I don't think you can you should label him on the basis of 1984 but having said that”

this is not all to say that I don't think his portrayal of Julia and general asks you to woman the book isn't sexist because I do I do think it's sexist the women in 1984 you know you heard it in the reading there they're the least likely to resist they are the most controllable they're noisy they're nosy they're bigoted they are constantly stereotype throughout the book and filtered through Winston's kind of hate filled male days and all the main female characters in the book are kind of

female stereotypes and they serve as symbols rather than being kind of real people in and of themselves so Katherine as we said is this frigid to be frigid to be in wife she's symbolic of party in Dr Nation then you have the pro woman who sings outside Winston's window and she's kind of the maternal figure and she's all about fertility and she has broad hips and she does domestic

“chores and then you have Julia who is I think a massive caricature she is the sexually available”

made in the youth thoughtless mindless rebellion you know there's nothing very cerebral about her she's constantly defined in terms of her body and her young supple hips and whatever it is her rebellion is all about promiscuity she's in it to further her own kind of sexual ends she seems ignorant she even falls asleep and Winston has kind of articulated the ideology of the party to her

and he's reading from this book and even no Brian uses her as kind of a symbol to finally break

Winston she has no interior life and and kind of no individuality in 2023 it's under a new and wrote a book called Julia and in this she reframed the whole of 1984 so that it's from her perspective and in the book Julia is thoughtful she's complex she has a deep understanding of the party she sees the world from a female perspective so the fourth three production is terrifying you know women being punished differently to men is terrifying so it's a much more handmade tales ask vision

of this world and I think that's really really interesting you can see the handmade tale which we did an episode about when we were doing this within the ages of the rest of history club when we're doing these books episodes we did the handmade tale and you can see that as a kind of female equivalent to 1984 Kanye I mean obviously the two books are very very similar and in the ways in which you see the world unfold through a single character who then rebels

but it's not really you know rebels in a slightly cautious and half-hearted way as June does in the Hamid's Tale as Winston does in 1984 just come back to what you were saying you know you were describing the women are all perceived in terms of you know their physicality or their relations with men Julia has no interior life you know the way that Winston talks about her and other women is very you know he projectifies them he despises them all of these kinds

of things all of these things are completely true I can't you know no one can argue with any of those things but there is a difference between the the writer and the character you might be you might I suppose the complexity of it is that we know that deep down that all well probably agrees with

we know how he treated women in his own life as well I'm not saying that he was abusive you know sexually abusive or physically abusive but you know he he was quite cruel to his wife I don't think he took it that seriously I think he wanted her to kind of take care of him he did more on her deeply when she died but I wonder how much of that was because he needed a kind of a career

“I think he likes to be mothered he likes women some other him that's why he's approaching”

all his women when I lean dies because basically he wants and he would say to them do you think

you could look his way of proposing by the way tabby and we were talking about how he would post you within moments of meeting you but he would say to you do you think you could take care of me and I don't feel that that's that's pathetic that's me so much respect so anyway yeah I would say that the 1984 is quite a sexist book and I would see that there are that's one of many reasons why it probably wouldn't go down as well with women as men but then the other thing

is take that out of it I'm not sure there are fair Winston and Julius Affair is entirely convincing and CS Lewis thought this didn't he I think CS Lewis did say he didn't believe in the affair between Julia and Winston and actually the thing is it's purely it's really purely physical there's no meeting in minds or meeting of souls there and when they do have they this sort of transcendent moments I mean the most obvious one is when they go out to the country

and they have this kind of rural idyll Winston has this dream of a place called the golden

“country out in the countryside which he associates I think with his mother so he has it first when”

he's just been thinking about his mother and then he decides he'll take Julia out of the countryside and they're out there and the sun is shining and there's lovely leaves and trees and all this kind of thing it's pure wishful filament slightly chocolate box countryside painting and you know

all as mates said of him he would always have this ideal of an idyllic rural England to which

he's could escape a kind of escape from the pressures of modernity and all this kind of thing and he attributes this to Winston and the book but is it real you know does it feel like a proper relationship and or is it just all a bit of a fantasy it does feel to me like a bit of a fantasy I think but maybe that's partly the point you know of course this isn't ever going to be a reality I don't think either of them really believe it's going to be a reality you know it's like a

it's like a dream it's like a a day dream but because there is this sense of inevitability that hangs over 1984 they even have this refrain with this mantra that they say to each other Julia and Winston we are the dead and this runs through the book because they know even the middle of their kind of their rebellion there are fair their moments of happiness or whatever it is that you'd call it that they are eventually going to be doomed and so then they kind of

“throw it all to hell and they take this crucial step they go to CEO Brian because they believe that”

he's connected to this mysterious brotherhood who are rebelling against the party but even then you get a massive sense of foreboding because when Winston first talks to a Brian he had the sensation

of stepping into the dampness of a grave and it was not much better because he had always known

that the grave was there and waiting for him and this leads to kind of the terrifying I guess kind of climax of the book which is the inevitable moment of arrest and this is a terrifying scene it's really it's genuinely terrifying yeah so they've been at this flat there that he's basically he's taking this room above the antique shop Mr. Chairington's antique shop and it's a very sort of sleepy lazy atmosphere they've been in bed and he's reading this book

that some O'Brien has lent him which is a kind of manifesto by the party's great enemy the trotsky of the party Emmanuel Goldstein and they say to each other we are the dead you know which is their kind of mantra that everything you know one day they're going to catch up with us and then you are the dead set an iron voice behind them and you realise somebody is watching them and is speaking to them and then they're terrified and then Mr. Chairington the guy for

an antique shop comes in and he is completely changed he looks younger his hair is different his appearances different his face previously benign is alert and cold and for the Winston realises that in looking on Mr. Chairington he's looking at a member of the thought police and that's they have caught up with him yeah and we realised this along with him we thought he was an ally the reader but no you see no one can be trusted and then this takes us to the final

third of the book which is who it's grim reading I would say because this is Winston the ministry of love and the mounting terror of the prospect of room 101 yeah so they interrogate him they beat him they torture him he confesses to loads of mad things that he hasn't done to assassinations to embezzlement he confesses that he's been a spy for the East Asian government he confesses that

his wife even though both he and the interrogators know that his wife is still alive and then after

all this he has this confrontation very very celebrated scene with O'Brien and O'Brien basically

says to him I want you we're gonna make you realise there was no such thing as the past and ever existed and there is no such thing as reality the reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else and the supreme symbol of this of course is some maths even I can you can see that this maths doesn't make sense because basically O'Brien says to Winston that whatever the party holds to be truth is truth i.e. reality is whatever the party decrees that it be so what you think to be true is only true

if the party believes so too if the party is told you to believe it and he kind of outlines the whole goal of this totalitarian project and that is not to tell you that two plus two equals five that's not me just being a dimwit by the way it's yeah to make you believe it so even though you know that two plus two equals four I actually think this is the most affecting scene in the whole book because it's so scary to have everything that you believe everything that you think to be true

to be told that actually know it's subjective it's not objective so and and it's not enough for you to tell yourself that you believe that two plus two equals five the party's goal is to make you truly truly believe it in the same way as maybe once you believe that two plus two equals four exactly a Brian threat to Winston is absolutely terrifying so he says things will happen to you

from which you could not recover if you lived a thousand years never again will you be capable

of ordinary human feeling everything will be dead inside you we shall squeeze you empty and then we shall filled you with ourselves that's almost like it's like it's always sexual it's almost like the raping his mind then that I think there's really really haunting lines when a Brian

“system you should stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you Winston of course this is what”

rebels and martyrs always think you know in the long run I will be remembered and history will absolve me posterity will never hear of you you'll be lifted clean out of the stream of history you'll be annihilated in the past as well as in the future you will never have existed and again I think that's so frightening it's not that you won't exist I mean if we all once we reach you at certain age we reconcile ourselves to the fact that one day we weren't exist but the thought that

me might never have existed somehow I'd find that really kind of get sent to my skin the idea

that you were never there and no one will ever know that you were there brutally if you saw yeah and then no Brian explains what the party's all about and actually the again the the chilling thing with the party it's not like the communist party in the Soviet Union or the Nazi party in the third Reich which had ideals however twisted they might have been a Brian says we have no ideals are only ideal is power power the object of persecution is persecution the object of torture is torture the

object of power is power power over human beings we're interested not in power as a means to something else not in money not in happiness not in long life but only power pure power that's all that this is and he goes on to say the progress in our world will be progress towards more pain we will destroy every emotion except hatred we will destroy or love we will cut all the relations between friends between you know parents and child between husband and wife and whatnot there'll be no

love except the love a big brother there'll be no laughter there'll be no art there'll be no

“literature no science if and then this great line if you want to picture the future imagine a boot”

stamping on a human face forever yeah it's so grim I mean and there's also something quite talking about that isn't that I mean you mentioned earlier a possible comparison but you know talking in all well both born only nine years apart and they both have this kind of similar horror of modernity and and authority and you know Winston's ideal of the party as he said is huge terrible and glittering a world steel and concrete of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons

a nation of warriors and fanatics marching again the boot thing forward in perfect unity all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans I mean that is so an army of orcs serving saraman and saron isn't it you know anything about the you know before the walls of Helm's deep and the trudge trudge trudge the huge terrible and glittering

“the modernity all of that does feel very talking I think they're reacting against the same thing”

which is modern totalitarian dictatorships and stuff and power the worship of power obviously but they have the same things that they like I mean there's such different characters but they have the same sense of nostalgia the love of ordinaryness and smallness the love of England and

who got to be defended and that sounds like a kind of kind of thing Gandalf might say to the

hobbits yeah the obvious and silly and true yeah anyway away from hope and to the harsh quality of Winston Smith so back to the ministry of love and specifically now with only here

“to room 101 so you know he also bride what's in it and a bride says the worst thing in the world”

so whenever a person most fears you will find in room 101 and for Winston Smith this is rats and I think for people who haven't even read 1984 don't even have a particularly good idea of what it's about so many people know about the rat scene because it's Winston Smith's greatest fear and this is foreshadowed earlier in the book they're selling terribly intimate and personal about it actually interestingly all well hated rats himself and it's a fixture in his writing

but basically what this entails is is strapping a metal mask to Winston's face and there's a

little door and then on the other side a hungry rats and if you lift up the door the rats will eat your face yeah yeah and this is what finally breaks him unsurprisingly and the manifestation of his being broken is to say do it to Julia do it to Julia tell her face or strip her

“to the bones so I I mentioned earlier how a bride uses Julia to as like representation of Winston's”

broken spirit and there it is you know he turns entirely on the woman he reports to love and then you have this very depressing final scene don't you the final scene is in this chestnut tree cafe he doodles on the the dust on the table two plus two equals five you know he's come to believe it there's news on the teller screen they've won a victory a fake victory obviously over Eurasia and he looks up with the picture a big brother and this this

these very celebrated lines he gazed up at the enormous face 40 years of taking him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache blah blah blah blah blah and this tears going down gin centred tears coming down Winston's face brilliant detail yeah but it was all right everything was all right the struggle was finished he had won the victory over himself he loved big brother and that's the end of the book big brother has won well actually has big brother won

so Fred Warburg all well as publisher said it felt like a book written by somebody who had lost hope somebody on the island of Jura who's dying of tuberculosis who's personal life has been very haunted by tragedy and you know it's incredibly cold his poem of rain isn't the middle of nowhere in Scotland no wonder he feels so miserable but there could be a couple of flickers of hope so one is that there's an appendix written that purports to be written in the far future looking back

at the principles of news speak so in other words there is a world when the party and big brother are dead and gone and that's a device that Margaret Atwood uses in the Matt Handmaid's Tale the same thing there's an academic paper at the end of the book which is a little kind of nod to to 1984 but also throughout the book Winston has said again and again if there is hope it lies in the pros I eat the working class masses they don't care about the party they're just interested in

football and gambling they don't take any notice of the politics and Winston basically says to Julia that they are immortal in the end they're awakening would come which is the argument that all

well had always made about the English people it made it in the line the unicorn is great essay

during the early years of the Second World War it said one day the ordinary people of England who are a sleep they will wake up and when they wake up they will discover their power and they will overthrow fascism which of course they do in the Second World War so I guess you could say whether you find the book hopeful or not it depends on whether you believe Winston and you believe or well whether you watch and whether you believe in the English or the British people so tell me the

question for you do you or do you actually hate Britain and you don't think they will ever wake up

“well I think according to this this premise then I guess I do hate Britain because I don't believe”

that I don't think this is a book with hope I think that's sort of unusually for for all well I think that's kind of vaguely patronizing you know to attribute a massive people with kind of such basic attributes you know they like heavy physical work of the care of the home and children it's so reductive and also in the vision of the future presented by a Brian to Winston Smith when he's interrogating him there there is no possibility to think beyond the bounds of the party and according

to the the world of 1984 that we have to accept that the party wins here there's no alternative

world that exciles pleasure you know so film football beer that doesn't exist in the world of 1984 so what is it to keep the pro's happy but by love of party so you don't believe so the argument would be they're all these people who are not political at all who are not interested who don't care what's going on they're just listening to what Winston describes as their terrible music this sort of pop music that's produced for them and one day they will find their voices and they

will rise up but I guess if you believe what I Brian's saying he's saying we're going to create

an environment which that's never possible. Final question you asked at the beginning do you

“say to have a do you think it's a period piece or do you think it's a warning for the 21st century?”

I think it's both I think it probably started as a period piece and then as all well wrote it's kind of locked away in this little corner of the world in Scotland living day and night with this terrible vision of the world maybe it increasingly came to seem like a vision of the future for him like a prophecy and use you know he said I read out what he wrote to his publisher about the final portion of the book so I think I think it's both what about you? Well I think the

stuff that's dated is the stuff about communism and Stalin and whatnot I don't think that's quite has the resonance that it did but I think the stuff about rewriting the past changing

language erasing what doesn't seem convenient cancelling people you know I mean literally rewriting

texts so it's hard to read the stuff about where their assignment is saying we will rewrite Shakespeare and Byron so that they will say what we want them to say and their meaning will be different it's hard to read that now and not to think I mean I don't want to just turn into kind of a ranting that in Britain's best loved mid-market newspaper however whatever you know it's hard to read that and they don't think about people who are like I don't know they're doing rewriting

roll dial or all the sort of man stuff they're doing yeah so that it says what we would like roll dial to have said I mean that does feel like hate to use the sort of jargon but that does feel to me quite or wellian I mean let's stuff in the past say what people in the past wanted

to say don't change it for our own sensibilities so I think if all I mean no question if all

well was was alive now I mean this is such a sort of colonist bingo hackneed it is thanks it is hackneed but if you were alive now he would be said looking like that stuff and saying this is

“insane you know and incredibly dangerous you know that you have to allow things to have their”

own independence existence and independent value and you might not like them but that's how they were and you should respect that rather than try to to smooth and streamline everything so that it conforms to the dictates the political dictates of your moment. I agree with that and I think two other things that they jumped out at me like we live in an age of technology in AI and whether you're on the internet or whatever you're constantly being driven to look at something that

something external is kind of driving you towards whether that's arts or Instagram or whatever you know AI is famously obsequious it tells you what you want to hear so our curiosity is constantly being shaped by something else and I think curiosity informs learning a lot of the time you know what we know and more interests us but also it is interesting and it's easy to forget that we actually once upon a time not that long ago there was no such thing as my truth and your truth

there was truth and there was true and not true and we do live in a world now I think where truth has become something that's slightly more subjective to be hacked can need myself there is something quite all well in about that too okay bring in the you've been magnet some of you after the accusing me you pulled me down with you into the gaza so what are we using our very sophisticated rating system what are we gonna rate 1984 out of I thought about this and I thought what George

or would enjoy is if we rated it in metric liters of sour proletarian beer I'm giving it 10 out of 10 seriously wow yeah it's a great book it's an absolutely canonical book and it's a great read I can see why some female readers say this is very much a man's book but I'm in a hammer man it's the most influential political book of the last century no question it has absolutely shaped the way we think about politics and the way we think about some of the you know our anxiety is

about surveillance about control about the way we view the past about the way we use language on top of that it is it is a it is a it is a rolling read I mean it's a scary read and a bleak read but it's a real page turner I think it's one of those books that really if you haven't read it you kind of should have read it and actually weirdly if you haven't read it you probably know about it already because it's so embedded in the imagination so I have to give it 10 really

“and that that's what it gets and what are you gonna give it you're gonna give it two I'm actually”

gonna give it eight uh surprising I'm gonna have to deduct points for the fact that Julia is a

deduct a point for all else sort of constantly asking women to marry him and being a bit handsy

which we don't accept on this show you're deducting a point for off-screen activities that's

“yeah you have to I'm sorry you have to and also I mean and I'm tied in with that as the fact”

that I didn't really enjoy reading it but you can't really selling it I know but but

having said all that this is one of the great books isn't it I mean the physicality of his language this the peeling walls of this world the all of that it's just I just think it's it's

“superb it's superb I can't help but think this is a masterful and very important book an”

important book that's the kind of thing that I thought we'd never end up saying on this show this

was a long podcast this approach surely be our longest effort we'll have to discipline ourselves

“and actually the terrible thing is the version that you're hearing is massively cut down”

on that bunch of stuff goodbye there's no way to work twice from 1900 or the technology from gestern then comes to new work evolution and a decade the work's worth two days to come. Agile Arbeits Methoden, Vielfalt, Moderna Arbeits Culture, Flexibility, Diversity and Vieles, more the new work evolution. For five to seven thousand twenty in the musical now now you're here.

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