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book review of novel 1984

Classic dystopian novel about life under constant scrutiny.

1984 Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

George Orwell's 1984 is one of the most influentia

Despite his failings, Winston Smith finds the cour

The protagonist, Winston Smith, has been beaten do

Oceania exists in a constant state of war, so viol

Winston Smith and his younger lover, Julia, engage

Citizens of Oceania are forbidden from using objec

Members of the Party are encouraged to smoke Victo

Parents need to know that 1984 presents an unblinking portrait of life lived under constant surveillance and stands as one of the great dystopian satires of the 20th century. Author George Orwell also wrote Animal Farm , a satirical allegory about the abuse of power.

Educational Value

George Orwell's 1984 is one of the most influential satires of the 20th century. Its vocabulary has become part of everyday discourse, from "Big Brother" to "Thought Police" to "doublethink." Its themes remain especially relevant at a time of when personal privacy is at a premium and when governments large and small manipulate language to promote their own particular ends.

Positive Messages

Despite his failings, Winston Smith finds the courage to keep a diary, take a lover, and think of working to overthrow the Party and Big Brother.

Positive Role Models

The protagonist, Winston Smith, has been beaten down by decades under the all-seeing eye of Big Brother. Nevertheless, he finds the courage for small acts of rebellion. As he begins to take bigger risks, he becomes more likeable, until the reader is rooting for him against all odds.

Violence & Scariness

Oceania exists in a constant state of war, so violence is a daily part of life. Bombs rain from the sky. Disgraced members of the Party are executed for their supposed crimes. Worse is the emotional violence inflicted upon a populace constantly under surveillance and forced to report the slightest infraction. Winston Smith is tortured in the Ministry of Love, in scenes that are physically wrenching, but there are still worse things that await him in Room 101.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Winston Smith and his younger lover, Julia, engage in an illicit sexual relationship, presumably away from the attentions of Big Brother. The description of their lovemaking is not explicit, but there is no doubt that theirs is a thoroughly adult, physical relationship.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Citizens of Oceania are forbidden from using objectionable language, but a few "hells" and "damns" slip out.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Members of the Party are encouraged to smoke Victory cigarettes and Victory gin, but no one really seems to enjoy them. The poverty-stricken Proles partake in alcohol consumption as a form of "entertainment" provided by the Party.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Where to read, community reviews.

  • Parents say (20)
  • Kids say (76)

Based on 20 parent reviews

Theme of Sexual Freedom

What's the story.

In a dystopian future where nuclear war has divided the world into three repressive superstates, middle-aged Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in the superstate of Oceania, in the city called Airstrip One (formerly London). He has no hope of escaping the watchful eye of Big Brother until he meets Julia, a younger woman who persuades him to sneak away with her and become her illicit lover. Even though he knows they will be caught, Smith cannot imagine what awaits him once he is captured and taken to the Ministry of Love for interrogation.

Is It Any Good?

Narrated with infinite precision, 1984 is one of the most famous dystopian satires in the English language. Its vocabulary -- "doublethink," "Big Brother," "down the Memory Hole," "Thought Police," "unperson" -- has become part of popular culture. Winston Smith's quest for freedom under the gaze of all-seeing, all-knowing Big Brother still resonates strongly today, when privacy is hard to come by and governments adopt intrusive policies, supposedly to keep their citizens safe.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how being constantly watched and listened to affects how people conduct their lives and what it does to their mental states.

1984 is an inversion of 1948, the year in which Orwell began writing the novel. What historic events were happening in the world at that time, and how might they have influenced the construction of 1984? Is the future Orwell imagines completely made up, or is it based on real-life situations?

Three slogans adorn the entrance to the Ministry of Truth: WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. How is it possible for anyone to believe such paradoxical statements?

Orwell includes "The Principles of Newspeak" as an appendix to the novel proper. Why do you think he wanted to include this information? Why is the control of language so important to the Party in the novel? Can you give examples of how authority figures today manipulate language to their own advantage?

1984 is considered a classic and is often required reading in high school. Why do you think that is?

Book Details

  • Author : George Orwell
  • Genre : Literary Fiction
  • Topics : History
  • Book type : Fiction
  • Publisher : Plume
  • Publication date : June 6, 1949
  • Number of pages : 368
  • Last updated : January 15, 2019

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  • Read TIME’s Original Review of <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i>

Read TIME’s Original Review of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nov. 28, 1983

G eorge Orwell was already an established literary star when his masterwork Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on this day in 1949, but that didn’t stop TIME’s reviewer from being pleasantly surprised by the book. After all, even the expectation that a book would be good doesn’t mean one can’t be impressed when it turns out to be, as TIME put it, “absolutely super.”

One of the reasons, the review suggested, was Orwell’s bet that his fictional dystopia would not actually seem so foreign to contemporary readers. They would easily recognize many elements of the fictional world that TIME summed up as such:

In Britain 1984 A.D., no one would have suspected that Winston and Julia were capable of crimethink (dangerous thoughts) or a secret desire for ownlife (individualism). After all, Party-Member Winston Smith was one of the Ministry of Truth’s most trusted forgers; he had always flung himself heart & soul into the falsification of government statistics. And Party-Member Julia was outwardly so goodthinkful (naturally orthodox) that, after a brilliant girlhood in the Spies, she became active in the Junior Anti-Sex League and was snapped up by Pornosec, a subsection of the government Fiction Department that ground out happy-making pornography for the masses. In short, the grim, grey London Times could not have been referring to Winston and Julia when it snorted contemptuously: “Old-thinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc,” i.e., “Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.” How Winston and Julia rebelled, fell in love and paid the penalty in the terroristic world of tomorrow is the thread on which Britain’s George Orwell has spun his latest and finest work of fiction. In Animal Farm (TIME, Feb. 4, 1946,) Orwell parodied the Communist system in terms of barnyard satire; but in 1984 … there is not a smile or a jest that does not add bitterness to Orwell’s utterly depressing vision of what the world may be in 35 years’ time.

Decades later, as the real-life 1984 approached, TIME dedicated a cover story to Orwell’s earlier vision of what that year could have been like. “That Year Is Almost Here,” the headline proclaimed . But obsessing over how it matched up to its fictional depiction was missing the point, the article posited. “The proper way to remember George Orwell, finally, is not as a man of numbers—1984 will pass, not Nineteen Eighty–Four—but as a man of letters,” wrote Paul Gray, “who wanted to change the world by changing the word.”

Read the full 1949 review, here in the TIME Vault: Where the Rainbow Ends

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book review of novel 1984

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Write to Lily Rothman at [email protected]

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Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined

What 1984 means today

book review of novel 1984

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984 . The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc— doublethink , memory hole , unperson , thoughtcrime , Newspeak , Thought Police , Room 101 , Big Brother —they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

book review of novel 1984

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984 . Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

Read: Teaching ‘1984’ in 2016

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984 . It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era , it’s a best seller .

book review of novel 1984

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 , by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis , but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

book review of novel 1984

Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia —and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

The biographical story of 1984 —the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura , off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live—he got remarried on his deathbed—just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, “Nothing in Orwell’s life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.”

Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you .” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.

Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the president’s adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts , the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” has given 1984 a whole new life.

What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We don’t live under anything like a totalitarian system. “By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.

Trump’s election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny , Fascism: A Warning , and How Fascism Works . My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984 . They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalism—“ the politics of inevitability ,” in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, “a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancy—not the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984 , where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: “ ‘The People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.’  — George Orwell.” But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among America’s non-elites. In 1984 , working-class people are called “proles,” and Winston believes they’re the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote . In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

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Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or “canceled” produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.

This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,” Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. “Sanity is not statistical,” Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

About the Book

By George Orwell

'1984' by George Orwell follows Winston Smith as he seeks to fight back, through knowledge and free thought, against the totalitarian Party that rules Oceania and his entire life.

Two of the most prominent themes of '1984' are totalitarianism and the self/mind. They are intertwined, with the former influencing and sometimes overtaking the latter.

Emma Baldwin

Written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The novel takes place in the year 1984 in which England has been transformed under a totalitarian superstate known as Oceania. 1984 follows Winston Smith , a mid-level member of the Party. The Party demands the allegiance and adoration of its citizens. But, Winston Smith has escaped the brainwashing that seems to have taken over everyone else’s mind. At the center of the Party is a mysterious figurehead who goes by the name of Big Brother . Winston’s burgeoning interest in the past and his hatred of the Party and its cruel, murderous, and destructive policies lead him to seek out the revolution.

Key Facts about 1984

  • Title: Nineteen-Eighty-Four: A Novel,  later republished as  1984. 
  • When/where written : Orwell wrote the book in Jura, Scotland from 1945-1949 .
  • Published:  June 1949
  • Literary Period:  Late Modernism
  • Genre: Novel / Dystopian / Science Fiction
  • Point-of-View: Third-person omniscient
  • Setting: London/Oceania in 1984
  • Climax: Torture scene in Room 101 .
  • Antagonist: The Party/ O’Brien /Big Brother

George Orwell and 1984

It is for  1984  that George Orwell is best-known. The events of his life led him down a path that allowed him to see the world through a very clear lens. His belief system was well fostered and served to inspire him to write 1984  and Animal Farm ,  as well as other works of fiction and non-fiction that seek to promote democratic socialism over any form of totalitarianism. As a young man, Orwell lived in poverty in London and Paris in order to learn about the darkest parts of society. Unlike most men and women with strongly held beliefs, he stood up for them. When he traveled to Spain to write about the Spanish Civil War he ended up joining a militia in order to fight against fascism and Franco. He was shot in the neck and charged with treason for his efforts. Orwell was well aware of the dangers of totalitarianism and Soviet Communism and knew that the conditions he depicted in both novels could occur anywhere at any time. Today, the books are considered to be a reminder that democracy is not bulletproof. It is possible for our better-governing systems and better selves, to fail.

1984 by George Orwell Digital Art

Books Related to 1984

When George Orwell wrote  1984  dystopian fiction was not the genre that it is today. At the time that he was writing 1984,  there were several wonderful examples of this genre from which he could draw inspiration. Some of these include his mentor Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World  published in 1932, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s  We  published in 1924, and Jack London’s The Iron Heel . The latter is considered to be the earliest example of the genre, published in 1908.

 Over the decades the genre would grow, becoming one of the most popular amongst readers and writers. Today, there are numerous contemporary examples of novels and short stories that have their origins in George Orwell’s masterpiece. These include books like  The Handmaid’s Tale  by Margaret Atwood,  The Stand by Stephen King,  The Power  by Naomi Alderman,  The Giver  by Lois Lowry, and  The Road  by Cormac McCarthy.

The Lasting Impact of  1984

Today, as anti-democratic, pro-isolationist, and even fascist governments are taking power all over the world, many have turned to Orwell for his knowledge of these systems and the importance of fighting back against them. Totalitarianism is not a thing of the past and luckily we have  1984  as well as Orwell’s other novels and essays to remind us how possible it is to lose our democratic systems of governance.

1984 Quotes 💬

Two of the most prominent themes of ‘1984’ are totalitarianism and the self/mind. They are intertwined, with the former influencing and sometimes overtaking the latter.

1984 Historical Context 📺

‘1984’ was written between the years of 1947-48, only 2-3 years after the end of World War II. This conflict of immense proportions, the outcome of which was critical to the survival of democracy, inspired George Orwell to consider the tenuousness of the people’s rule.

1984 Themes and Analysis 📺

There is a range of themes one should consider when analyzing George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’, such as technology and the past.

1984 Review ⭐

George Orwell opens his stunning novel ‘1948’ novel by telling the reader that the “clocks were striking thirteen”. If this isn’t an opening line for the ages, I don’t know what is.

1984 Character List 📖

There are many characters in George Orwell’s ‘1984’, such as Winston Smith, Julia, O’Brien, and the likes of the Big Brother figure.

1984 Summary 📖

‘1984’ by George Orwell follows Winston Smith, who attempts to fight back against a totalitarian Party that rules Oceania and his entire life.

It'll change your perspective on books forever.

Discover 5 Secrets to the Greatest Literature

Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , completed in 1948 and published a year later, is a classic example of dystopian fiction. Indeed, it’s surely the most famous dystopian novel in the world, even if its ideas are known by far more people than have actually read it. (According to at least one survey , Nineteen Eighty-Four is the book people most often claim to have read when they haven’t.)

Like many novels that are more known about than are carefully read and analysed, Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually a more complex work than the label ‘nightmare dystopian vision’ can convey. Before we offer an analysis of the novel’s themes and origins, let’s briefly recap the plot.

Nineteen Eighty-Four : plot summary

In the year 1984, Britain has been renamed Airstrip One and is a province of Oceania, a vast totalitarian superstate ruled by ‘the Party’, whose politics are described as Ingsoc (‘English Socialism’). Big Brother is the leader of the Party, which keeps its citizens in a perpetual state of fear and submission through a variety of means.

Surveillance is a key part of the novel’s world, with hidden microphones (which are found in the countryside as well as urban areas, and can identify not only what is said but also who says it) and two-way telescreen monitors being used to root out any dissidents, who disappear from society with all trace of their existence wiped out.

They become, in the language of Newspeak (the language used by people in the novel), ‘unpersons’. People are short of food, perpetually on the brink of starvation, and going about in fear for their lives.

The novel’s setting is London, where Trafalgar Square has been renamed Victory Square and the statue of Horatio Nelson atop Nelson’s Column has been replaced by one of Big Brother. Through such touches, Orwell defamiliarises the London of the 1940s which the original readers would have recognised, showing how the London they know might be transformed under a totalitarian regime.

The novel’s protagonist is Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical records so they are consistent with the state’s latest version of history. However, even though his day job involves doing the work of the Party, Winston longs to escape the oppressive control of the Party, hoping for a rebellion.

Winston meets the owner of an antique shop named Mr Charrington, from whom he buys a diary in which he can record his true feelings towards the Party. Believing the working-class ‘proles’ are the key to a revolution, Winston visits them, but is disappointed to find them wholly lacking in any political understanding.

Meanwhile, hearing of the existence of an underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood – which has been formed by the rival of Big Brother, a man named Emmanuel Goldstein – Winston suspects that O’Brien, who also works with him, is involved with this resistance.

At lunch with another colleague, named Syme, Winston learns that the English language is being rewritten as Newspeak so as to control and influence people’s thought, the idea being that if the word for an idea doesn’t exist in the language, people will be unable to think about it.

Winston meets a woman named Julia who works for the Ministry of Truth, maintaining novel-writing machines, but believes she is a Party spy sent to watch him. But then Julia passes a clandestine love message to him and the two begin an affair – which is itself illicit since the Party decrees that sex is for reproduction alone, rather than pleasure.

We gradually learn more about Winston’s past, including his marriage to Katherine, from whom he is now separated. Syme, who had been working on Newspeak, disappears in mysterious circumstances: something Winston had predicted.

O’Brien invites Winston to his flat, declaring himself – as Winston had also predicted – a member of the Brotherhood, the resistance against the Party. He gives Winston a copy of the book written by Goldstein, the leader of the Brotherhood.

When Oceania’s enemy changes during the ritual Hate Week, Winston is tasked with making further historical revisions to old newspapers and documents to reflect this change.

Meanwhile, Winston and Julia secretly read Goldstein’s book, which explains how the Party maintains its totalitarian power. As Winston had suspected, the secret to overthrowing the Party lies in the vast mass of the population known as the ‘proles’ (derived from ‘proletarian’, Marx’s term for the working classes). It argues that the Party can be overthrown if proles rise up against it.

But shortly after this, Winston and Julia are arrested, having been shopped to the authorities by Mr Charrington (whose flat above his shop they had been using for their illicit meetings). It turns out that both he and O’Brien work for the Thought Police, on behalf of the Party.

At the Ministry of Love, O’Brien tells Winston that Goldstein’s book was actually written by him and other Party members, and that the Brotherhood may not even exist. Winston endures torture and starvation in an attempt to grind him down so he will accept Big Brother.

In Room 101, a room in which a prisoner is exposed to their greatest fear, Winston is placed in front of a wire cage containing rats, which he fears above all else. Winston betrays Julia, wishing she could take his place and endure this suffering instead.

His reprogramming complete, Winston is allowed to go free, but he is essentially living under a death sentence: he knows that one day he will be summoned by the authorities and shot for his former treachery.

He meets Julia one day, and learns that she was subjected to torture at the Ministry of Love as well. They have both betrayed each other, and part ways. The novel ends with Winston accepting, after all, that the Party has won and that ‘he loved Big Brother.’

Nineteen Eighty-Four : analysis

Nineteen Eighty-Four is probably the most famous novel about totalitarianism, and about the dangers of allowing a one-party state where democracy, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and even freedom of thought are all outlawed. The novel is often analysed as a warning about the dangers of allowing a creeping totalitarianism into Britain, after the horrors of such regimes in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere had been witnessed.

Because of this quality of the book, it is often called ‘prophetic’ and a ‘nightmare vision of the future’, among other things.

However, books set in the future are rarely simply about the future. They are not mere speculation, but are grounded in the circumstances in which they were written.

Indeed, we might go so far as to say that most dystopian novels, whilst nominally set in an imagined future, are really using their future setting to reflect on what are already firmly established social or political ideas. In the case of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four , this means the novel reflects the London of the 1940s.

By the time he came to write the novel, Orwell already had a long-standing interest in using his writing to highlight the horrors of totalitarianism around the world, especially following his experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. As Orwell put it in his essay ‘ Why I Write ’, all of his serious work written since 1936 was written ‘ against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’.

In his analysis of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his study of Orwell, George Orwell (Reader’s Guides) , Jeffrey Meyers argues convincingly that, rather than being a nightmare vision of the future, a prophetic or speculative work, Orwell’s novel is actually a ‘realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar materials’ – indeed, as much of Orwell’s best work is.

His talent lay not in original imaginative thinking but in clear-headed critical analysis of things as they are: his essays are a prime example of this. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in Meyer’s words, ‘realistic rather than fantastic’.

Indeed, Orwell himself stated that although the novel was ‘in a sense a fantasy’, it is written in the form of the naturalistic novel, with its themes and ideas having been already ‘partly realised in Communism and fascism’. Orwell’s intention, as stated by Orwell himself, was to take the totalitarian ideas that had ‘taken root’ in the minds of intellectuals all over Europe, and draw them out ‘to their logical consequences’.

Like much classic speculative fiction – the novels and stories of J. G. Ballard offer another example – the futuristic vision of the author is more a reflection of contemporary anxieties and concerns. Meyers goes so far as to argue that Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia ‘transposed’ into London of the early 1940s, during the Second World War.

Certainly, many of the most famous features of Nineteen Eighty-Four were suggested to Orwell by his time working at the BBC in London in the first half of the 1940s: it is well-known that the Ministry of Truth was based on the bureaucratic BBC with its propaganda department, while the infamous Room 101 was supposedly named after a room of that number in the BBC building, in which Orwell had to endure tedious meetings.

The technology of the novel, too, was familiar by the 1940s, involving little innovation or leaps of imagination from Orwell (‘telescreens’ being a natural extension of the television set: BBC TV had been established in 1936, although the Second World War pushed back its development somewhat).

Orwell learned much about the workings of Stalinism from reading Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1937), written by one of the leading figures in the Russian Revolution of 1917 who saw Stalinist Russia as the antithesis of what Trotsky, Lenin, and those early revolutionaries had been striving to achieve. (This would also be important for Orwell’s Animal Farm , of course.)

And indeed, many of the details surrounding censorship – the rewriting of history, the suppression of dissident literature, the control of the language people use to express themselves and even to think in – were also derived from Orwell’s reading of life in Soviet Russia. Surveillance was also a key element of the Stalinist regime, as in other Communist countries in Europe.

The moustachioed figure of Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four recalls nobody so much as Josef Stalin himself. Not only the ideas of ‘thought crime’ and ‘thought police’, but even the terms themselves, predate Orwell’s use of them: they were first recorded in a 1934 book about Japan.

One of the key questions Winston asks himself in Nineteen Eighty-Four is what the Party is trying to achieve. O’Brien’s answer is simple: the maintaining of power for its own sake. Many human beings want to control other human beings, and they can persuade a worrying number of people to go along with their plans and even actively support them.

Despite the fact that they are starving and living a miserable life, many of the people in Airstrip One love Big Brother, viewing him not as a tyrannical dictator but as their ‘Saviour’ (as one woman calls him). Again, this detail was taken from accounts of Stalin, who was revered by many Russians even though they were often living a wretched life under his rule.

Another key theme of Orwell’s novel is the relationship between language and thought. In our era of fake news and corrupt media, this has only become even more pronounced: if you lie to a population and confuse them enough, you can control them. O’Brien introduces Winston to the work of the traitor to the Party, Emmanuel Goldstein, only to tell him later that Goldstein may not exist and his book was actually written by the Party.

Is this the lie, or was the book the lie? One of the most famous lines from the novel is Winston’s note to himself in his diary: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’

But later, O’Brien will force Winston to ‘admit’ that two plus two can make five. Orwell tells us, ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.’

Or as Voltaire once wrote, ‘Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust.’ Forcing somebody to utter blatant falsehoods is a powerful psychological tool for totalitarian regimes because through doing so, they have chipped away at your moral and intellectual integrity.

4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”

1984 is a novel which is great in spite of itself and has been lionised for the wrong reasons. The title of the novel is a simple anagram of 1948, the date when the novel was written, and was driven by Orwell’s paranoia about the 1945 Labour government in UK. Orwell, a public school man, had built a reputation for hiself in the nineteen thirties as a socialist writer, and had fought for socialism in the Spanish civil war. The Road To Wigan Pier is an excellent polemic attacking the way the UK government was handling the mass unemployment of the time, reducing workers to a state of near starvation. In Homage To Catalonia, Orwell describes his experiences fighting with a small Marxist militia against Franco’s fascists. It was in Spain that Orwell developed his lifelong hatred of Stalinism, observing that the Communist contingents were more interested in suppressing other left-wing factions than in defeating Franco. The 1945 Labour government ws Britain’s first democratically elected socialist governement. It successfully established the welfare state and the National Health Service in a country almost bankrupted by the war, and despite the fact that Truman in USA was demanding the punctual repayment of wartime loans. Instead of rejoicing, Orwell, by now terminally ill from tuberculosis, saw the necessary continuation of wartime austerity and rationing as a deliberate and unnecessary imposition. Consequently, the book is often used as propaganda against socialism. The virtues of the book are the warnings about the dangers of giving the state too much power, in the form of electronic surveillance, ehanced police powers, intrusive laws, and the insidious use of political propaganda to warp peoples’ thinking. All of this has come to pass in the West as well as the East, but because of the overtly anticommunist spin to Orwell’s novel, most people fail to get its important message..

As with other work here, another good review. I’m also fascinated that Orwell located the government as prime problem, whereas Huxley located the people as prime problem, two sides of the same coin.

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George Orwell

The masterpiece that killed George Orwell

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. But when you see the original manuscript, you find something else: not so much the ringing clarity, more the obsessive rewriting, in different inks, that betrays the extraordinary turmoil behind its composition.

Probably the definitive novel of the 20th century, a story that remains eternally fresh and contemporary, and whose terms such as "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "newspeak" have become part of everyday currency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature.

"Orwellian" is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s.

The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war. The idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four, alternatively, "The Last Man in Europe", had been incubating in Orwell's mind since the Spanish civil war. His novel, which owes something to Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian fiction We, probably began to acquire a definitive shape during 1943-44, around the time he and his wife, Eileen adopted their only son, Richard. Orwell himself claimed that he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944. Isaac Deutscher, an Observer colleague, reported that Orwell was "convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world" at Tehran.

Orwell had worked for David Astor's Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent. The editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency", and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's creative life had already benefited from his association with the Observer in the writing of Animal Farm. As the war drew to a close, the fruitful interaction of fiction and Sunday journalism would contribute to the much darker and more complex novel he had in mind after that celebrated "fairy tale". It's clear from his Observer book reviews, for example, that he was fascinated by the relationship between morality and language.

There were other influences at work. Soon after Richard was adopted, Orwell's flat was wrecked by a doodlebug. The atmosphere of random terror in the everyday life of wartime London became integral to the mood of the novel-in-progress. Worse was to follow. In March 1945, while on assignment for the Observer in Europe, Orwell received the news that his wife, Eileen, had died under anaesthesia during a routine operation.

Suddenly he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his Islington lodgings, and working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife's premature death. In 1945, for instanc e, he wrote almost 110,000 words for various publications, including 15 book reviews for the Observer.

Now Astor stepped in. His family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura, next to Islay. There was a house, Barnhill, seven miles outside Ardlussa at the remote northern tip of this rocky finger of heather in the Inner Hebrides. Initially, Astor offered it to Orwell for a holiday. Speaking to the Observer last week, Richard Blair says he believes, from family legend, that Astor was taken aback by the enthusiasm of Orwell's response.

In May 1946 Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life, took the train for the long and arduous journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was "almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage".

It was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the coldest of the century. Postwar Britain was bleaker even than wartime, and he had always suffered from a bad chest. At least, cut off from the irritations of literary London, he was free to grapple unencumbered with the new novel. "Smothered under journalism," as he put it, he told one friend, "I have become more and more like a sucked orange."

Ironically, part of Orwell's difficulties derived from the success of Animal Farm. After years of neglect and indifference the world was waking up to his genius. "Everyone keeps coming at me," he complained to Koestler, "wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc - you don't know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again."

On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price. Years before, in the essay "Why I Write", he had described the struggle to complete a book: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality." Then that famous Orwellian coda. "Good prose is like a window pane."

From the spring of 1947 to his death in 1950 Orwell would re-enact every aspect of this struggle in the most painful way imaginable. Privately, perhaps, he relished the overlap between theory and practice. He had always thrived on self-inflicted adversity.

At first, after "a quite unendurable winter", he revelled in the isolation and wild beauty of Jura. "I am struggling with this book," he wrote to his agent, "which I may finish by the end of the year - at any rate I shall have broken the back by then so long as I keep well and keep off journalistic work until the autumn."

Barnhill, overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world.

Orwell, a gentle, unworldly sort of man, arrived with just a camp bed, a table, a couple of chairs and a few pots and pans. It was a spartan existence but supplied the conditions under which he liked to work. He is remembered here as a spectre in the mist, a gaunt figure in oilskins.

The locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own. The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his highly competent sister, Avril. Richard Blair remembers that his father "could not have done it without Avril. She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts of my father's time on Jura recognise how essential she was."

Once his new regime was settled, Orwell could finally make a start on the book. At the end of May 1947 he told his publisher, Fred Warburg: "I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time because I really have been in most wretched health this year ever since about January (my chest as usual) and can't quite shake it off."

Mindful of his publisher's impatience for the new novel, Orwell added: "Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job." Still, he pressed on, and at the end of July was predicting a completed "rough draft" by October. After that, he said, he would need another six months to polish up the text for publication. But then, disaster.

Part of the pleasure of life on Jura was that he and his young son could enjoy the outdoor life together, go fishing, explore the island, and potter about in boats. In August, during a spell of lovely summer weather, Orwell, Avril, Richard and some friends, returning from a hike up the coast in a small motor boat, were nearly drowned in the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool.

Richard Blair remembers being "bloody cold" in the freezing water, and Orwell, whose constant coughing worried his friends, did his lungs no favours. Within two months he was seriously ill. Typically, his account to David Astor of this narrow escape was laconic, even nonchalant.

The long struggle with "The Last Man in Europe" continued. In late October 1947, oppressed with "wretched health", Orwell recognised that his novel was still "a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be retyped entirely".

He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with "inflammation of the lungs" and told Koestler that he was "very ill in bed". Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB.

A few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: "I still feel deadly sick," and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, "like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing." In 1947 there was no cure for TB - doctors prescribed fresh air and a regular diet - but there was a new, experimental drug on the market, streptomycin. Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US.

Richard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works."

As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. "It really is rather important," wrote Warburg to his star author, "from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible."

Just when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in "early December", and coping with "filthy weather" on autumnal Jura. Early in October he confided to Astor: "I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive."

This is one of Orwell's exceedingly rare references to the theme of his book. He believed, as many writers do, that it was bad luck to discuss work-in-progress. Later, to Anthony Powell, he described it as "a Utopia written in the form of a novel". The typing of the fair copy of "The Last Man in Europe" became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his "unbelievably bad" manuscript the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. It was, he told his agent, "extremely long, even 125,000 words". With characteristic candour, he noted: "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied... I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB."

And he was still undecided about the title: "I am inclined to call it NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE," he wrote, "but I might just possibly think of something else in the next week or two." By the end of October Orwell believed he was done. Now he just needed a stenographer to help make sense of it all.

It was a desperate race against time. Orwell's health was deteriorating, the "unbelievably bad" manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming. Warburg promised to help, and so did Orwell's agent. At cross-purposes over possible typists, they somehow contrived to make a bad situation infinitely worse. Orwell, feeling beyond help, followed his ex-public schoolboy's instincts: he would go it alone.

By mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter" by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November 1948 it was virtually done.

Now Orwell, the old campaigner, protested to his agent that "it really wasn't worth all this fuss. It's merely that, as it tires me to sit upright for any length of time, I can't type very neatly and can't do many pages a day." Besides, he added, it was "wonderful" what mistakes a professional typist could make, and "in this book there is the difficulty that it contains a lot of neologisms".

The typescript of George Orwell's latest novel reached London in mid December, as promised. Warburg recognised its qualities at once ("amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read") and so did his colleagues. An in-house memo noted "if we can't sell 15 to 20 thousand copies we ought to be shot".

By now Orwell had left Jura and checked into a TB sanitorium high in the Cotswolds. "I ought to have done this two months ago," he told Astor, "but I wanted to get that bloody book finished." Once again Astor stepped in to monitor his friend's treatment but Orwell's specialist was privately pessimistic.

As word of Nineteen Eighty-Four began to circulate, Astor's journalistic instincts kicked in and he began to plan an Observer Profile, a significant accolade but an idea that Orwell contemplated "with a certain alarm". As spring came he was "having haemoptyses" (spitting blood) and "feeling ghastly most of the time" but was able to involve himself in the pre-publication rituals of the novel, registering "quite good notices" with satisfaction. He joked to Astor that it wouldn't surprise him "if you had to change that profile into an obituary".

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone.

The news was broadcast on the BBC the next morning. Avril Blair and her nephew, still up on Jura, heard the report on the little battery radio in Barnhill. Richard Blair does not recall whether the day was bright or cold but remembers the shock of the news: his father was dead, aged 46.

David Astor arranged for Orwell's burial in the churchyard at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. He lies there now, as Eric Blair, between HH Asquith and a local family of Gypsies.

Why '1984'?

Orwell's title remains a mystery. Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984), or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton's story, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill", which is set in 1984.

In his edition of the Collected Works (20 volumes), Peter Davison notes that Orwell's American publisher claimed that the title derived from reversing the date, 1948, though there's no documentary evidence for this. Davison also argues that the date 1984 is linked to the year of Richard Blair's birth, 1944, and notes that in the manuscript of the novel, the narrative occurs, successively, in 1980, 1982 and finally, 1984. There's no mystery about the decision to abandon "The Last Man in Europe". Orwell himself was always unsure of it. It was his publisher, Fred Warburg who suggested that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a more commercial title.

Freedom of speech: How '1984' has entrusted our culture

The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on our cultural and linguistic landscape has not been limited to either the film adaptation starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, with its Nazi-esque rallies and chilling soundtrack, nor the earlier one with Michael Redgrave and Edmond O'Brien.

It is likely, however, that many people watching the Big Brother series on television (in the UK, let alone in Angola, Oman or Sweden, or any of the other countries whose TV networks broadcast programmes in the same format) have no idea where the title comes from or that Big Brother himself, whose role in the reality show is mostly to keep the peace between scrapping, swearing contestants like a wise uncle, is not so benign in his original incarnation.

Apart from pop-culture renditions of some of the novel's themes, aspects of its language have been leapt upon by libertarians to describe the curtailment of freedom in the real world by politicians and officials - alarmingly, nowhere and never more often than in contemporary Britain.

George owes his own adjective to this book alone and his idea that wellbeing is crushed by restrictive, authoritarian and untruthful government.

Big Brother (is watching you)

A term in common usage for a scarily omniscient ruler long before the worldwide smash-hit reality-TV show was even a twinkle in its producers' eyes. The irony of societal hounding of Big Brother contestants would not have been lost on George Orwell.

Some hotels have refused to call a guest bedroom number 101 - rather like those tower blocks that don't have a 13th floor - thanks to the ingenious Orwellian concept of a room that contains whatever its occupant finds most impossible to endure. Like Big Brother, this has spawned a modern TV show: in this case, celebrities are invited to name the people or objects they hate most in the world.

Thought Police

An accusation often levelled at the current government by those who like it least is that they are trying to tell us what we can and cannot think is right and wrong. People who believe that there are correct ways to think find themselves named after Orwell's enforcement brigade.

Thoughtcrime

See "Thought Police" above. The act or fact of transgressing enforced wisdom.

For Orwell, freedom of expression was not just about freedom of thought but also linguistic freedom. This term, denoting the narrow and diminishing official vocabulary, has been used ever since to denote jargon currently in vogue with those in power.

Doublethink

Hypocrisy, but with a twist. Rather than choosing to disregard a contradiction in your opinion, if you are doublethinking, you are deliberately forgetting that the contradiction is there. This subtlety is mostly overlooked by people using the accusation of "doublethink" when trying to accuse an adversary of being hypocritical - but it is a very popular word with people who like a good debate along with their pints in the pub. Oliver Marre

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1984 | George Orwell | Book Review

July 11, 2021

1984 by George Orwell

After a long time, I got my hands on something that wasn’t about the affairs of the world or decoding Tharoor’s onerous and demanding vocabulary while finding my way out to the conclusion of the book.

But little did I know that those 300 pages made more sense than any philosopher or great thinker ever did with his narratives about the world and its astounding power politics. And to make it as dramatic as fictions are, it sure wasn’t ‘your average fiction’.

George Orwell’s 1984 has been a timeless classic , yet there is something contemporary about it. Fascinated by its constant appeal for so many generations, I decided to take part in the conspiracy myself. Completing 100 pages a day of an ebook didn’t feel like an achievement till I did not reach the appendix of the work.

The impact of the book was so that the thought of it didn’t leave my head for hours and hours throughout the day. It felt as if it was written in this time and age and was so close to the living reality that it felt worth not escaping.

The paradox in Winston Smith’s life was one thing that would leave you gazing at the screen for days straight. While his sheer capability of comprehending the concept of real freedom was noteworthy, it was remarkable to witness the dilemma his mind was going through while trying to differentiate between reality and illusion that was constantly present because of the intense stare by Big Brother’s eyes and the invisible curve under his moustache which was inevitable to ignore.

The features were so definite that the presence of Big Brother felt almost real. His impressions were literally present in every form and everywhere, be it physically (or mentally).

Every object, living or dead, witnessed Big Brother everywhere, in the form of the posters and advertisements and telescreen and songs and Hate Hours organized by the party and the development of kids into Spies in their blue uniforms and so on. It was a never-ending trail of praises for Big Brother and his ideology of state control.

It’s left unsaid if Big Brother existed in reality or not, but every single movement and every single breath of the people were guided by his words “Big Brother Is Watching You”.

Winston Smith’s efforts to face his dilemmas and accept the reality around him made him understand his disliking for the state and its despotic ministries.

DESPITE TRYING HARD ENOUGH TO STAND AGAINST THE REGIME, BUT WITH ALL CAUTION TO AVOID THE ARREST UNDER ‘THOUGHTCRIME’, WINSTON FAILS TO MOVE THINGS ACCORDING TO HIS PLANS.

The book takes you through a rollercoaster ride of sentiments, that a human brain can perceive and reflect, without breaking the flow of the story. From a supposedly brave love story which you root for, to the failure of Winston’s decision-making instincts, you feel vexed, dismay, betrayal, heartbroken, all at once.

In 1984, the narration is so overwhelming that you are left to absorb all those nail-biting endings that you were not prepared for. And all of this coming out of just a three hundred-page fiction leaves you amused.

It’s difficult to let go of the fact that a mere fiction, written in the 1940s has enough strength to make you realize that the existence of power play and human exploitation in the non-fictional world is in no way different from what Smith lives every day.

It is not just an anxious story about the state and the use of its unfair means to do as it pleases, but also about human relations with one another. A story where parents can’t trust their own children, a colleague can’t sit with another colleague, an individual unable to even think the thoughts of his liking, a story about extensive inequality, and a story of an utter betrayal by your own instincts that get you in the hands of your enemy, served as a fresh fish.

It’s a bird’s eye view of the world that lives amidst conformity and surveillance of the people, by people.

The conclusion makes you realize that Orwell was a child of his time who knew more than any other nearing generation of fully evolved human intellectuals. Or maybe he just wanted to be honest to the growing generation who was about to read his excellent work that portrayed a clear picture of human psychology and the greed for power behind the smokescreen of 1984.

It’s an uncompromising reminder for us to have a look at the present and ever-evolving global stage to understand what Smith meant when he said, “Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two is four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

It makes you wonder if the definitions fed to us about the ideals of constitutions from all around the world stand true on the face of it, or it was just another big work of few philosophers. This review is just a medium of appeal to anyone who hasn’t picked up 1984 yet, but it is on their wishlist, to give it a shot without thinking twice.

Can’t wait to read it? Buy your copy of 1984 using the link below.

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Review by Jayashree Mishra .

Jayashree is 20 years old, and a student of Delhi University Political Science (Hons). She has been reading since grade 6th and like any typical teenager, her first ‘favorite’ author was Chetan Bhagat, and his book 3 Mistakes Of My Life was her first read. She considers admiring Bhagat as the first mistake in her life. She is currently more inclined towards the world of nonfiction and but Khalid Hosseini still remains her favorite.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Secker & Warburg

Genre: Dystopian, Science Fiction, Satire

First Publication: 1949

Language:  English

Major Characters: Winston Smith, Big Brother, O’Brien, Emmanuel Goldstein, Tom Parsons, Syme, Julia

Theme: Totalitarianism and Communism, The Individual vs. Collective Identity, Reality Control, Class Struggle,

Setting: London in the year 1984

Narrator: Third-person omniscient

Book Summary: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

1984: A Novel, unleashes a unique plot as per which No One is Safe or Free. No place is safe to run or even hide from a dominating party leader, Big Brother, who is considered equal to God. This is a situation where everything is owned by the State. The world was seeing the ruins of World War II. Leaders such as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini prevailed during this phase. Big Brother is always watching your actions. He even controls everyone’s feelings of love, to live and to discover. The basic plot of this historic novel revolves around the concept that no person has freedom to live life on his or her own terms. The present day is 1984.

The whole world is gradually changing. The nations which enjoy freedom, have distorted into unpleasant and degraded places, in turn creating a powerful cartel known as Oceania. This is the world where the Big Brother controls everything. There is another character Winston Smith, who is leading a normal layman life under these harsh circumstances, though hating all of this. He works on writing the old newspaper articles in order to make history or past relevant to today’s party line.

He is efficient enough in spite of hating his bosses. Julia, a young girl who is morally very rigid comes into the fore. She too hates the system as much as Winston does. Gradually, they get into an affair but have to conceal their feelings for each other, as it will not be acceptable by Big Brother. In Big Brother’s bad world, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

Book Review: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighr is an astonishingly good book which practically (almost single-handedly) created and defined the ‘dystopian novel’ genre. This is undoubtedly the definitive dystopian novel which stands astride the genre like a colossus – head and shoulders above the rest.

Written in the year 1948 and first published in 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was originally designed as a satire of Stalinism. Like many of his contemporaries, George Orwell was distraught by the Soviet Union’s increasingly totalitarian interpretation of communism. The Soviet Union would collapse in 1991, of course, and communism plays a marginal role at best in today’s world. So how come Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is currently enjoying a resurgence of popularity? How come it feels more and more relevant in a world dominated by capitalism rather than communism?

The fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is under complete control of The Party and its mythical head, Big Brother. Privacy no longer exists: “ Big Brother is watching you ” – always. Data is collected, minds are molded, consent is manufactured. So-called “ telescreens ” monitor every facial expression and record every spoken word, tirelessly looking for “ thoughtcrimes “ while simultaneously broadcasting a never-ending stream of propaganda. No other source of information is available, so the loss of privacy comes with a loss of history and political agency.

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

The Party is even in the process of developing what it calls “ newspeak ,” a stripped-down, ultimately impotent version of the English language that – through the reduction of grammar and vocabulary – renders subversive ideas unthinkable. Until “ newspeak ” takes over, “ doublethink ” ensures that those little inconsistencies between reality and the claims made by Big Brother (claims such as “ ignorance is strength ” or “ freedom is slavery ” or “ 2+2=5 ”) do not feel problematic in the slightest.

And even if they did, fabricated telescreen reports on what is portrayed as a brutal global war keep the masses in a perpetual state of fear that makes rebellion highly unlikely. Conveniently, this pseudo-war can also be used to justify the elimination of civil rights and liberties. And if there is someone somewhere who somehow manages to resist all this propaganda and surveillance (someone who, like our protagonist, manages to think an independent thought), Big Brother takes the old iron fist out of his pocket and enforces conformity through imprisonment and torture.

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

In today’s world, the scope, sophistication and effectiveness of propaganda and surveillance have long surpassed anything George Orwell could have imagined in 1948. It is not the Communist Party that controls those endeavours, of course, but largely commercial enterprise (with a little help from the politicians it buys).

1984 by George Orwell portrays, with what now seems like terrifying accuracy a near future extreme totalitarian society and it is a novel that is as pertinent today as never before. In an age of ‘ fake news ’ ‘ counter-fake news ’ where truth is increasingly in question, a commodity to be perverted according to need, George Orwell’s 1984 reads like an increasingly and frighteningly accurate portrayal of what was then – a possible future and now a possible present.

Orwell’s concepts of thoughtcrime , doublethink , newspeak , sexcrime , the thought police , along with the wholesale and habitual use of propaganda, the deletion and re-writing of the news/history (‘ he who controls the future controls the past’ ) – historical revisionism, is all just so brilliantly conceived and executed and lest we forget,  George Orwell wrote 1984 in year 1949. If it had not been so brilliantly executed, 1984 by George Orwell would undoubtedly have become very clichéd, tired and dated over the subsequent decades – which quite clearly it hasn’t.

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

1984 is now so embedded at such a fundamental level in our culture, it is now almost impossible to imagine an absence of 1984 – itself a paradox considering the subject matter and themes of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. The concept now so oft used as common parlance of something being ‘Orwellian’ – surveillance and control.

What George Orwell has created in Nineteen Eighty-Four (once again and along with Animal Farm ) is simply one of the greatest short novels in the English language ever written, let alone one of the most influential – both in literary and cultural terms. The characters of Winston, Julia and O’Brien, Room 101, the surrounding events, the world of Oceania, Ingsoc and the Party remain seared into the readers’ memory with startling effectiveness long after the last page has been turned.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is an outstandingly (in every sense of the word) powerful, thought-provoking, compelling, engaging portrait of an all too feasible near future. Parallels in history are clearly there to see – the National Socialism of Hitler, the Communism of Stalin to name but two – showing us the absolute feasibility of such a world. The way that Orwell writes of the manipulation and creation / management of mass hysteria, the instillation and perpetuation of xenophobia and the unquestioning and blind allegiance to the ‘Party’ has such a feeling of authenticity and is all done so effectively and unbelievably well.

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

I cannot overstate the brilliance of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, nor emphasise the power that this novel increasingly has, though perhaps to say that 1984 by George Orwell is quite simply a work of modern literary genius will go some way in conveying how truly great a novel this really is.

George Orwell’s 1984 paints a horrifying picture of a world that could so easily be – an intelligent portrayal of and warning against the evils of totalitarianism and extreme authoritarianism of any kind. But it is so much more than that, along with providing us with such a great central story – a story not solely about power, corruption and lies, but also about love, truth and the human spirit, Nineteen Eighty-Four works on so many, many levels. George Orwell’s 1984 is absolutely, unquestionably and unequivocally essential reading.

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Book Review – 1984, by George Orwell

book review of novel 1984

George Orwell’s 1984 is a grim read that tells of a future in which something has gone horribly wrong in society resulting the extreme oppression of the citizens of at least one super state. It might be most famous for exploring the idea of technological mass surveillance but at its core it is a book about power.

To best understand the book it helps to understand a little about the circumstances in which it was written. Released in 1949 it was written during the immediate aftermath of WWII as the Iron Curtain descended over Eastern Europe and Stalin tightened his grip on power. It was also a time when communism was spreading globally, particularly in Asia. The threat of global war was renewed however this time with the prospect of nuclear weapons.

This was also a time when the old European empires were in rapid retreat, the seat of Western power had shifted to the USA and Britain had yet to develop its own nuclear weapons. Britain was also struggling to recover from WWII economically.

George Orwell himself was a disillusioned socialist. Deeply committed to socialist economics  but strongly opposed to communism and its totalitarian tendencies, especially Soviet style communism under Stalin.  

The effect of all these personal (Orwell), national (Britain) and global anxieties are reflected in the story. However, while socialist revolutions were the vehicle used to explain how the political structure of 1984 emerged, the central themes of the story would still work if a different ideology was used, i.e extreme oligarchical capitalism. It is a book about political power crushing the lives of individuals so all that is required is a mechanism to concentrate extreme political power in the hands of a few at the expense of an increasingly disempowered general population. What matters is the relentless accumulation of power for power’s own sake.

1984 is told from the perspective of Winston Smith, a low-level party member who works in the “Ministry of Truth”. Winston’s world is one in which there is no objective truth, only party approved “facts.” The classic example of which is requiring citizens to believe “2 + 2 = 5” despite knowing it being demonstrably false. 1984 explores the throne of lies upon which totalitarian oppression sits. In the party’s view, every “fact” is malleable, one of several possible truths. Which one is true at any one time depends upon which best suites the purposes of the party.

The best example of this is the global war that has been running for decades between the three super states that exist in 1984. At any one time Winston’s nation is at war with one and allied with the other. Winston observes that every few years the allegiances suddenly switch for no apparent reason but the official history is that the allegiances have never varied. Winston begins to doubt the war’s existence and since it is never directly observed by the reader, he might be correct. He begins to suspect that the war might simply be another party tool to maintain social unity. United against a common enemy.

“War is Peace”

The threat of a global war against two rival super states over time enables the party to force the citizenry to tolerate ever more pervasive attacks on their individual freedoms in support of the war effort. To do otherwise risks losing the war and being enslaved by foreign invaders. Only total loyalty to the party can avert this fate.

“Freedom is Slavery”

This leads to doubts about the very nature of Winston’s world beyond Airstrip 1 (formerly the United Kingdom). No other parts of the world are directly observed or objectively documented as foreign trade and travel do not exist in 1984. It is possible that only the United Kingdom has succumbed to such brutal totalitarianism and now exists as an isolated hermit state. Or the world could be exactly as described by the party. The point is that Winston (and by extension the reader) have no way of knowing. Objective truth is buried.

“Ignorance is Strength”

The true horror and genius of 1984 isn’t the mass technological surveillance. Rather it is as a cautionary tale (rather than a discrete prophecy) showing glimpses of a disfigured, tortured, grotesque society that exists in our near future and is a clear descendent of our own. One in which technology is exploited to the detriment rather than the benefit of humanity.

This is a story about totalitarianism and the disturbingly simple but powerful ways to gradually and increasingly enslave an entire population, which is why it remains relevant. The party’s methods are written right there above the front entrance to the Ministry of Truth:

“War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength”

About the author: Chris is an Associate Editor at Grounded Curiosity and a currently serving Australian Army officer. Building on a multi-discipline engineering background, his passion is technological development and PME. Chris’ work has previously appeared on Grounded Curiosity, Strategy Bridge and The Cove.  Find him on Twitter .

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1984 by George Orwell  book reviews are usual. The SciFi Novel is a major classic in English Literature and an honoring job for any reviewer.

1984 by George Orwell on Amazon

The novel 1984 by George Orwell is an iconic influence in our contemporary society. A work of great popularity and relevance, the book is a Science Fiction Fantasy Classic that is must on any serious reader bookshelf.

In the book, the author twists reality with the purpose of making a deep analysis of human behavior and character. Our perception of human degradation in a fascist/socialist society is enhanced by what, at the time it was written, seemed to be unbearable.

1984 by George Orwell is a terrifying premonitory magnifying glass of our worst liabilities and a warning of how low humankind can go. The novel is our present society on the shrink’s couch, a profound and fascinating analysis of what man can achieve, for better or for worse.

“GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950) was born in India and worked with the Imperial Police in Burma before joining the Spanish Civil War in the Republican Army. Orwell was the writer of six novels as well as numerous essays and nonfiction works.”

Written in 1949, the novel takes place in 1984 in a dystopian futuristic society where  Winston, the hero, is trapped in the totalitarian gear of an entirely state-dominated society.

Everything is done collectively, but each one lives alone.  Nobody escapes the vigilance of Big Brother, the most famous literary personification of what could be an infinite, cynical and cruel power in an imaginary and fantastic future.

In fact, the ideology of the ruling party in 1984 has nothing to do with anyone or anytime’s motivations. It’s just power for the sake of control with no philosophical or financial purpose. Just the worst of men.

The novel 1984 by George Orwell , had a significant impact on me when I read it the first time, about forty years ago. The author, through this book, has become an icon of prediction since this novel has influenced the world significantly since then.

Most Important Characters

Winston is the Protagonist and Main Character.

The Government is the Antagonist

Mr. Charrington is the Guardian archetype.

O’Brien is the Contagonist.

Julia is the Emotion and Temptation Character.

Big Brother represents control.

Dramatic Story Structure

Winston works at the Ministry of Truth in Oceania, a place where the government spies on everyone all the time. Avoiding the cameras, he secretly writes a journal.

Winston and Julia fall in love.

Winston is drawn to the Revolutionary Brotherhood.

They secretly start seeing each other.

Winston meets O’Brien, leader of the Brotherhood.

O’Brien turns out to be a member of the government’s police and arrests the couple.

They discover their secret encounters were being watched all the time.

After being tortured, Winston betrays Julia to save his skin.

Julia and Winston are reprogrammed into model citizens.

1984 was an analysis of the human being that remains and has influenced our society in almost all its aspects like:

  • Literature, Cinema, Television, Videogames, Technology, Social Behavior, Politics, Government Behavior, Psyche

Can you be sure that we are not being watched? I can’t.

1984 Book Cover

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2 thoughts on “ 1984 by George Orwell book review ”

Wow, great review! This book seems to be very intriguing and it must have been a bestseller back in the day. I like sci-fi novels. They are so exciting! They make our imagination fly out to space. And they so very much have influenced science and design. Bruno

Hi, again, Bruno,

Thanks for, once again, sharing your opinion on our website. Cheers!

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Books from mexico, netherlands, and japan bring rewrites of history, teen tales.

Covers of You Dreamed of Empires, Confrontations and A Woman of Pleasure.

One of the pleasures of reading widely in translation is getting to juxtapose books from completely different literary traditions, letting them inform each other in a new language in ways they could not do in the original.

The Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue has been a favorite of mine for years, and while I did not expect to find myself reading the two other books below — Simone Atangana Bekono's Confrontations and Kiyoko Murata's A Woman of Pleasure — through the lens of Enrigue's newly translated You Dreamed of Empire , doing so feels natural. They may not come from the same place, but that's no reason they can't be in conversation.

You Dreamed of Empires

When Álvaro Enrigue's sixth novel, Sudden Death , the story of a fictional tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo, came out in English in 2016, Enrigue told a New York Times interviewer curious about his attraction to the past, "I work with history because I come from a country that has a tremendous thirst for reality." History, he went on, lets him "take a step back, through metaphor," in his analysis of the present.

In his latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires — translated, like Sudden Death , by the brilliant Natasha Wimmer — Enrigue takes two steps back from reality. You Dreamed of Empires is a counterfactual history of Hernán Cortés' arrival at Moctezuma's court. It's also a drug novel. Moctezuma is high on mushrooms for the whole book. In one climactic scene, he and Cortés take peyote together, which may sound like a gag but is, in Enrigue's skillful hands, the culmination of political maneuvering almost too intricate to follow.

You Dreamed of Empires is full of pettiness and intrigue, its characters scrambling for power on all levels. It's got glorious, but never self-serious, levels of historical detail — Moctezuma's gold-and-gem sandals bother his feet; a Spanish major is late to meet a superior officer because he's cutting his toenails, and doing so "with a dagger is no easy thing, let alone putting boots back on with bleeding fingers" — and the constant shimmer of mild hallucinations. All this melds into a drugged-out Mexican Wolf Hall , a novel that, much like a mushroom trip, rewards the reader who relaxes into it, not the reader who tries to take control.

It isn't hard to see the link between Enrigue's Tenochtitlan and the United States or Mexico today. You Dreamed of Empires is a portrait of people, mostly men, jockeying for influence in a government whose sustaining alliances, overt and not, are on the verge of blowing up. But Enrigue's not offering allegory here. Neat comparisons and takeaways aren't available. In a note to his Anglophone readers about the Nahuatl he integrates into the text, Enrigue suggests, "Don't worry too much about [understanding]... Mexican readers won't know right away what a macehuatl or a pipil is either. Let the meanings reveal themselves." It's good advice for reading his large and compelling cast of characters, too. Cortés' translator Malinalli is clumsily drawn — after Cortés assaults her, Enrigue writes, "The rape had made her feel vulnerable," a staggeringly obvious line in a work that otherwise resists obviousness — but everyone else is slippery and fascinating, easy both to empathize with and to hate. Getting that balance right is tricky in any novel, let alone one set in an alternate version of the 16th century. Here, it's a colossal achievement. Early in the book, Enrigue writes of the conquistadores, "They were making things up as they went along, with extraordinary results." The same could be said of him.

Confrontations

Reading Confrontations , the Dutch writer Simone Atangana Bekono's debut novel, alongside You Dreamed of Empires is more illuminating than the books' subjects and settings would suggest. Confrontations , translated into English by Suzanne Heukensfeldt Jansen, is contemporary — well, nearly: Its characters listen to Chingy CDs — and as self-serious and limited as Enrigue's novel is imaginative and freewheeling. It appears in English as an adult literary novel, but, in the original Dutch, won awards for both best debut and best book for young readers. Certainly it feels adolescent: Atangana Bekono succeeds in capturing her teenage narrator's voice and emotional state, but at the expense of the complexity and perspective that readers of all ages should expect.

Confrontations is, theoretically, set in a juvenile detention center, where its protagonist Salomé, the working-class daughter of a Dutch mother and Cameroonian father, is serving six months after violently assaulting a pair of bigoted, bullying classmates. (Technically, that was a spoiler: The precise nature of Salomé's crime isn't revealed until late in the book, but it's easy to guess almost immediately.) But the detention-center setting is underdeveloped, the other girls in it mere stick figures. Her therapist, Frits, is patently useless, a symbol of institutional racism who cannot possibly help either Salomé or the narrative. Really, then, the whole book takes place in Salomé's head, where she weighs the two competing sets of adult instructions by which she has attempted to live — her dad's advice, which is "Work hard. Don't moan," and her intellectual aunt Céleste's reminders that "the systems [of power] are aligned against you" — and decides that Céleste is right.

Céleste is right, of course. Atangana Bekono seems to assume from the start of the book that her readers know as much, though she does find it necessary to include a letter in which Aunt Céleste assures Salomé that the boys she beat up "represent an extremely malicious system!" Such a plainly explanatory approach on the writer's part leaves very little room for Salomé to explore or develop: she is present on the page to learn lessons, not to surprise herself with her thoughts or emotional capabilities. It doesn't help that in dramatic moments, Atangana Bekono, a poet as well as a novelist, shifts into a dreamlike stream of consciousness that is all impression and no analysis, effectively curtailing another avenue for Salomé to break the novel's didactic mold. As a result, Confrontations cannot startle or challenge any reader who agrees with the basic premise that the systems of power are aligned against its protagonist. It delivers that message clearly and repeatedly, but both Salomé and her readers deserve more.

A Woman of Pleasure

Kiyoko Murata's A Woman of Pleasure is proof that a novel can opt for clarity without sacrificing complexity. Set in a fancy brothel in turn-of-the-century Kumamoto, Japan, it is at once a detailed character study, a beautifully researched work of historical fiction, and a plain declaration of both women's rights and workers' rights. Murata is a major literary voice in Japan, but her books have never appeared in English before, an injustice made slightly better by the fact that she's now being translated by the incomparable Juliet Winters Carpenter. (Among Carpenter's many gifts is great taste: A good rule of thumb is to read any book with her name on it.) In Carpenter's English, A Woman of Pleasure is brisk but lyrical, moving but unsentimental, able to range easily from haiku to sex talk to the broken journal entries of its protagonist, Ichi, a girl from a rural island who, when she gets sold to a brothel at 15, speaks only her island's dialect and barely knows how to write.

Ichi's education gives A Woman of Pleasure its shape. At first, it seems to be the book's only plot — which would be more than enough, given how compelling Ichi is. She attracts the attention of Tetsuko, a kindly teacher at the Female Industrial School where Kumamoto's sex workers get their education and gynecological care; at the brothel to which she's been sold, she's placed under the tutelage of Shinonome, the oiran, or highest-ranking prostitute. Shinonome is so highly valued that her body is metaphorically "made of money;" to the awed, frightened Ichi, Shinonome "was Kannon, the goddess of mercy, and other times she was the female sex itself." But the lessons Ichi learns from Tetsuko and Shinonome — how to write; how to do Kegels; how to advocate for herself even in the heartbreaking context of indentured sex work --- happen in the context of labor unrest across Japan.

Slowly but surely, Murata builds a collective consciousness into her novel, juxtaposing other women's perspectives to Ichi's. She lets the reader into Tetsuko's rejection of the condescending, "egotistical compassion" that reformers show sex workers; she draws out Shinonome's slow rejection of her claim, early in the novel, that "there's nobody in the world as free as a prostitute." By the novel's stirring end, when Shinonome leads her colleagues in a quest for real freedom, A Woman of Pleasure has become an ode to self-determination — physical and intellectual both.

Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. Her first novel, Short War , is forthcoming from A Strange Object in 2024.

ChatGPT is nothing new. Machines have helped us write for centuries.

In ‘literary theory for robots,’ dennis yi tenen explores the surprisingly long history of machine-assisted creativity.

Before blocked writers could turn to ChatGPT for help, they might have consulted Wycliffe Hill’s 1930s manual, “The Plot Genie.” The genie’s magic was held in a series of numbered lists that, according to Hill, collectively contained every story ever told. Simply spin the cardboard “Plot Robot” wheel (sold separately) and generate “a complete plot framework every five minutes.” Perhaps a coffee taster (Unusual Male Character No. 148) and a dope addict’s sister (Usual Female Character No. 50) desire “vengeance against a rival in love [but are] opposed by inclement weather” (Problems List Nos. 5, 11). Or maybe a lighthouse tender (Usual Male Character No. 81) and an attorney (Unusual Female Character No. 23) are “about to permit an unrecognized sister to perish in a fire” (Crises No. 159), when all of a sudden “advantage is threatened by a race riot” (Predicament No. 126).

The Plot Genie is just one of modern AI’s many distant cousins described by Dennis Yi Tenen, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University and a former Microsoft engineer, in his peculiar history of the modern chatbot, “ Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write .” Instead of drawing a line from GPT-3 to GPT-4 to the robot apocalypse (as today’s AI alarmists tend to do), Tenen stretches much further into the past and beyond the boundaries of computer science, going from medieval Arabic divination circles to 17th-century German cabinetmakers to Boeing aviation incident reports.

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Tenen’s goal is not only for readers to understand the contemporary chatbot’s predecessors but for them to reimagine their relationship to the written word. The rise of chatbots, he argues, is just the latest in a centuries-long trend of the line blurring between authors and the tools they use, between individual and collective intelligence. “The mistake,” Tenen writes, “was ever to imagine intelligence in a vat of private exceptional achievement. Thinking and writing happen through time, in dialogue with a crowd,” and we have built technologies to mediate that conversation since writing began.

Tenen does not go about making this argument the way one might expect, drawing direct lineages from, say, Noah Webster’s dictionary to auto-correct. Instead, he assembles a dollhouse of obscure “literary robots” throughout history, discussing them and their lovable weirdo inventors to trace parallels with our current AI moment. Tenen never totally justifies his larger worldview that authors are indistinguishable from the tools they use to write. But if you take the effort to wade through this sometimes confusing, erratic book, you will be rewarded with something else: the cool, soothing relief that these times are, in fact, precedented.

As Tenen shows throughout, ours is far from the first moment when scholars have attempted to uncover universal rules of language and then use them to make predictions, answer questions and write stories. Without computers to crunch through data to uncover these rules, however, early author-engineers had to make up their own. Take for instance the zairajah, a 14th-century Arabic divination circle and algorithmic soothsayer. The curious could ask the zairajah a question, and their wording would be converted into numbers and looked up in a web of connected tables to generate a vague but intelligible answer. As with modern chatbots, the futures it imagined for you depended on how you described your problems to it.

As new literary robots came onto the scene, they inspired familiar debates, including a heated exchange of letters between two 17th-century Germans: Polymath Athanasius Kircher had just invented the Mathematical Organ, a large wooden cabinet with movable slats that, depending on the manual (or “application”) consulted, could be used to compose music, encrypt secret messages or write poetry. Kircher sought to convince bad-boy poet Quirinus Kuhlmann that his invention was a boon to society. Imbuing this cabinet with intelligence, Kircher argued, had made the knowledge of the ages more accessible. Kuhlmann, however, argued that intelligence without understanding was worth nothing. Under the tutelage of the Mathematical Organ, Kuhlmann argued, a child could grow up to become only an “idiotic parrot.” More than 350 years later, similar conversations swirl around the educational applications of artificial intelligence.

Of course, the advent of the computer eventually led literary robots to read and write on their own. At last, they could infer the rules of language themselves, rather than merely encoding the worldview of a lone tinkerer. And the first thing computers read, Tenen says, was literature. Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, described that work as a “poetical science.” Much later, the Markov Chain, a language-generation algorithm whose descendants include ChatGPT and Google search, was first created to emulate poetry in the style of Alexander Pushkin’s epic poem “Eugene Onegin . ” Even when the U.S. military sought to use auto-generated text as part of its command-and-control approach to managing the Cold War, it trained the technology to create sentences using Lois Lenski’s 1940 children’s book “The Little Train.” From the beginning, computer science and literature have been mirrored arts, one allowing programmers to express logic with symbols, the other allowing writers to use symbols to create meaning.

It’s reassuring to know that while what we consider “intelligence” has always shifted in response to technological developments, creativity has never been extinguished. “Literary Theory for Robots” helps us recognize that over time, the seemingly extraordinary fades into the ordinary, becoming yet another tool through which we think and write in conversation with others. As Tenen writes: “Dictionaries, grammars, thesauruses, and encyclopedias were once hailed as monumental national achievements. Today, they are silently integrated into digital autocompletion or autocorrection tools.”

But that feeling of reassurance is fleeting. While Tenen’s book helps us understand how we got here, it doesn’t take stock of where “here” is and whether it’s where we want to be. Despite the long arc of technological history, it is hard to feel positive about chatbots’ effect on creative work, especially as once-trusted media outlets fill with AI-written sludge and coaxing ChatGPT becomes the central task of more creative jobs. It can be comforting to zoom out from the day-to-day tumult, the better to see our place as part of a larger historical pattern. But should we call that comfort a kind of wisdom? Or is it just complacency?

Gabriel Nicholas is a research fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology and a nonresident fellow at the NYU Information Law Institute.

Literary Theory for Robots

How Computers Learned to Write

By Dennis Yi Tenen

W.W. Norton. 158 pp. $22

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9 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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As the war in Ukraine enters its third year with no sign of disappearing from headlines, Simon Shuster’s well-timed look at the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, tops our list of recommendations this week. You might pair that one with Guzel Yakhina’s newly translated historical novel, “A Volga Tale,” about a rural villager facing an earlier Russian encroachment — or consider an altogether different novel about imperial ambitions, Álvaro Enrigue’s hallucinatory reimagining of the fateful meeting between Cortés and Moctezuma.

Also up this week: Cynthia Zarin’s lovely and deeply interior novel “Inverno,” along with a history of hate mail, a look at the moon’s significance, an account of women taking justice into their own hands, and two books exploring San Francisco’s colorful history. (What does it mean, a week before the Super Bowl, that we recommend two books about San Francisco and none about Kansas City? We’ll let you draw your own conclusions.) Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

THE SHOWMAN: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky Simon Shuster

Using interviews with the Ukrainian president, his closest associates and his critics, Shuster crafts an intimate account of the Russian invasion, which vividly captures Zelensky’s transformation from a clean-cut funnyman into a war hero out of central casting.

book review of novel 1984

“While Shuster’s admiration for his subject is palpable, he never tips over into hagiography. He knows that Zelensky’s skill as an entertainer, and the tactical advantages it has conferred in global politics, do not sufficiently explain the complexities of his presidency.”

From David Kortava’s review

Morrow | $32.99

A VOLGA TALE Guzel Yakhina

Yakhina’s novel, translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon, centers on an eccentric tutor who, recalling the comfort he once took in folk tales, contrives to make a living writing a “new folklore” for the Communist organizer who wants to mold local villagers into paragons of socialist virtue.

book review of novel 1984

“The larger narrative is itself shaped by folkloric forces ... offset by darkly brooding interludes.”

From Alida Becker’s historical fiction column

Europa | $28

OUR MOON: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are Rebecca Boyle

The moon may seem the least mysterious of our celestial neighbors, but Boyle gracefully argues that our development as a species and a planet is inextricably linked to its presence.

book review of novel 1984

“It is the only piece of a vast universe that most of us will ever get to experience: All you have to do is look up. Or, of course, look down into Boyle’s new book, which makes the moon feel closer than ever.”

From Katrina Miller’s review

Random House | $28

PENNING POISON: A History of Anonymous Letters Emily Cockayne

The internet may be rife with anonymous cruelty, but this lively study demonstrates that the impulse goes back centuries or more: Neighbors, friends, enemies and strangers send poison pen letters for all kinds of reasons, and in all kinds of ways. The motives are often obscure, the effect disquieting.

book review of novel 1984

“Even restricted to the age of ink and paper, this is a capacious subject — and, given that not everyone cherishes extortion attempts as family heirlooms, one that requires no small measure of scholarly digging. ... What Cockayne has actually written is a history of that most devalued currency — privacy.”

From Sadie Stein’s review

Oxford University Press | $25

YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES Álvaro Enrigue

The Mexican writer Enrigue recasts the fateful meeting between Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs in this hallucinatory novel, translated by Natasha Wimmer. Moctezuma is fearsome yet depressed, often tripping on magic mushrooms, while the conquistadors grow increasingly anxious.

book review of novel 1984

“Short, strange, spiky and sublime. ... Enrigue, who is clearly a major talent, has delivered a humane comedy of manners that is largely about paranoia (is today the day my head will be lopped off?) and the quotidian bummers of life, even if you are powerful beyond belief.”

From Dwight Garner’s review

Riverhead | $28

THE LONGEST MINUTE: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 Matthew J. Davenport

Through meticulous research and vivid reporting, Davenport brings April 18, 1906, to life, chronicling every moment of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and the ensuing fire that devastated the city.

book review of novel 1984

“In a chronicle that reads, at times, like the script of a Robert Altman movie, Davenport enlists a cast of hundreds ... whose archival testimony details the roughly 60 seconds of terror and what one observer called ‘the great silence’ that followed.”

From Ian Volner’s review

St. Martin’s Press | $35

PORTAL: San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities John King

King, a longtime writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, presents a history of the city through one structure: the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, built in 1898.

book review of novel 1984

“Not just for souvenir hunters. Serious and rigorous, the book furnishes a gimlet-eyed glimpse of San Francisco’s continuing struggles — and what lies beneath them.”

Norton | $29.99

THE FURIES: Women, Vengeance, and Justice Elizabeth Flock

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book review of novel 1984

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Harper | $32

INVERNO Cynthia Zarin

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book review of novel 1984

“To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art. There is not a banal sentence or purple patch to be found in this book, which only a poet could have written.”

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COMMENTS

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