Nineteen Eighty-Four Review

The crime in this world is not what you do but what you think. The thought police are always watching. The telescreens in every room watch back.

What orwell understood, and what makes this book feel so different from other political dystopias, is that the most terrifying thing a government can do is not restrict your body but destabilise your relationship with reality. The party does more than control what you can say or do. It controls what you can know, what you can remember, and eventually what you can believe. The concept of doublethink, holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, is the mechanism by which this works. You can know that something is false and believe it is true at the same time because the alternative is too dangerous. Orwell describes this process so precisely that reading it feels less like reading fiction and more like reading a manual for something that actually happens.

O'brien is the character i think about most after finishing the book. He is a senior party member who winston has always secretly believed is also a rebel, a fellow dissenter pretending to conform. The relationship between them is one of the most carefully constructed things in the novel and i do not want to say too much about how it resolves for anyone who has not read it. What i will say is that o'brien is one of the great villains in fiction not because he is cruel in the way villains usually are but because he is intelligent and honest in a way that makes his cruelty worse. The conversation in room 101 between winston and o'brien is probably the best writing in the book. It is also the most frightening.

The ending is inevitable from fairly early on and orwell does not try to hide it. You know where this is going. The question is just how completely it goes there, and the answer is completely. The party does more than break winston. It makes him love them. The final line of the novel is one of the most well-known in twentieth century literature and it lands as hard as it does because orwell has earned it. There is no twist. There is no rescue. There is just a man at a café table and a face on a screen and a feeling of something closing that was never really open.

What i think people sometimes miss about this book is that it is more than a political warning, though it is that. It is also a book about the importance of holding onto what you know is true even when everything around you is telling you that you are wrong.