Posts Tagged 1984

1984 Play Review: A Dystopian Masterpiece

November 28, 2024 at 5:31 am · Filed under Drama, Theatre ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

3,648 words, 19 minutes read time.

I’ve read Orwell’s classic novel 1984 three times, starting in my late teens or early twenties, and I’m now on my fourth. My first encounter with the story was a showing of the 1954 live television production with Peter Cushing in the lead role when it was repeated sometime in the mid-seventies. I was pleased to rediscover this on a nicely restored DVD last year, and I regard this version as the definite film adaptation of the book, far superior to the version starring Richard Burton and John Hurt which was released, predictably enough, in 1984. The 1950’s American ‘CIA’ adaptation which can be easily found for free online, is best forgotten, though worth a single watch for comedic purposes. I’ve also read and reviewed (link at the end) Sandra Newman’s 2023 novel Julia, a retelling of the story from the point of view of the main female character.

So, I’m well-versed in the events, themes and lore of Orwell’s perhaps definitive tale of dystopia. I regard it as a genuine masterpiece, one of the greatest works of the English literary canon and love how its meaning mutates and adds extra layers of depth with each new visit, as both I, the reader, and the world around me change.

But I’d never seen a theatrical production, so I approached this performance by the Bath Theatre Royal Players with anticipation and with little idea of what to expect. As is usual with my visits to both the theatre and the cinema, I avoided reading any reviews before I’d seen it for myself.

The first thing I noticed as I took my seat, well placed at the end of the third row from where the action would take place, was the huge telescreen mounted at the back of the stage, with cameras silently panning the audience, giving us an immediate sense of being under surveillance. This was suitably disconcerting, and I made sure I wasn’t visible on the screen as I sneaked a pre-performance pinch of snuff.

This screen has a big role in the production, becoming almost an extra cast member/character in its own right. Its functions include text information regarding changes in location, from the Ministry of Truth (‘Minitruth’) to Winston’s flat, to the canteen, to the Golden Country where Winston will begin his secret erotic liaisons with Julia, to the ‘safe-house’ where they will continue after their fateful ‘recruitment’ by the sinister O’Brien and, after the interval, to the Cell and the dreaded Room 101. The screen also blares out triumphant announcements by the Party, praising the achievements of Ingsoc, such as rises in munitions production for use in the war against Eastasia or Eurasia, whichever has currently been designated the enemy of Oceania, the latest victories of ‘our’ glorious troops or latest atrocities by those of the ever-shifting enemy. These announcements are accompanied by a still image of the benevolent, moustached, Stalin-like leader Big Brother himself, an image with which most of us are familiar. During the fabled ‘Two Minute Hate’, the image of Big Brother is replaced by that of Goldstein, the Trotsky of the story, the once revolutionary leader turned ultimate counter-revolutionary, responsible for, through his mysterious underground group The Brotherhood for all manner of acts of sabotage against the loyal people of Airstrip One and the heroic soldiers of Oceania.

We are gripped from the moment Winston Smith appears on a stage that is bare apart from the screen behind him and a bed and chair to his far left, seemingly breaking the Fourth Wall as the cast will do throughout the performance, addressing us directly as he goes about his daily work, reciting his latest amendments to the historical record, consigning events and people to the Memory Hole to fit with the current needs and thinking of Big Brother and the Inner-Party.

The process by which history is amended had been updated, the pen and paper of Orwell’s original digitalised. This makes sense, allowing us to see this process at work directly on the screen as individuals are ‘disappeared’ from history so that no tangible record of their former existence remains. It also forces us to reflect upon how modern technology has made it far easier for the truly totalitarian system Orwell envisaged to become a reality, and perhaps is becoming all too increasingly real. ‘1984’ as a point in time may be forty years in our past, but as a textbook for absolute control it doesn’t seem so far in our future, or even so distant from our present.

Soon he will be joined by his neighbour and ‘friend’, to the extent that friendship can exist in such a world, the cheerful but vulnerable Parsons, who expresses his pride in his seven-year-old daughter’s ability to identify and keenness to report ‘criminals’ to the secret police. Most of us will be all too aware that he himself will soon enough fall victim to this public-spirited ‘keenness’.

We next get to meet Julia for the first time. She is wearing the regulation Party boiler suit but with the red sash of the Anti-Sex-League tied around her waist. Those of us with a decent prior knowledge of the story, of course, knew that Julia would soon be revealed to be rather more pro-sex than was fitting for a member of such an organisation.

It wasn’t long before we met O’Brien. It was then that I realised O’Brien had always been with us, sitting silently on the chair by the bed in the near-darkness, a location to which he would return whenever he was not required front and centre. This was a clever decision, which powerfully underscored the theme of the omnipresence of the Secret/Thought Police.

Now, the full cast was in place, though there are also a handful of silent supporting characters who blare the role between performer and prop assistant, appearing as unnamed minor Party functionaries in the standard issue boiler suits whilst also quickly and efficiently moving the bed and chair from the side of the stage to the centre and back again, a move which assists the on-screen text in denoting changes in location.  

The first half, lasting precisely one hour and eight minutes, takes the story through Winston and Julia’s illicit assignations, their fateful meeting with O’Brien who sinisterly tells Winston that ‘We will meet again in the place where there is no darkness,’ the meaning of which will be well known to those familiar with the book, and which is made all too clear to even those who aren’t after the interval, and concludes with their arrest at the Safe House.

For me, the highlight of that first half, and the greatest use of faux-location change was Winston and Julia’s first sexual encounter in the Golden Country. The sudden appearance of vibrant colour, of sun, trees and sky on the screen, plus the sound of birds singing freely and the windy rustle of nature, attacked the senses wonderfully, marking a fabulous contrast, for the first and only time in the play, with the stark, grey drabness of life within the rooms of the Party. I will assign my credits at the end, but this is perhaps the best place to mention the valuable role that both set and video designer Justin Nardella and sound designer Giles Thomas, for what was a very loud play sonically, adding much to the unnerving feel of the whole.

The fifty-minute second half utilises just three locations, The Cell, the notorious Room 101, and the canteen for the short, sad, final meeting between Winston and Julia. It begins with Parsons alone on stage, blooded and almost broken, his despair briefly lessened as he is joined by the familiar face of Winston. Despite everything he must know about the workings of his master’s by this point, he still clings to the hope that they will be lenient with him, ‘maybe five or ten years’ in a labour camp. He also retains his pride in his seven-year-old daughter whose actions have brought him to this point, seeing in them confirmation that he had ‘raised her right’.

Soon, any hope for mercy Parsons retains disappears as he is taken away by the uncredited supporting players/crew, to meet his fate in Room 101, a room with a reputation that has proceeded it.

The rest of the play becomes essentially a two-hander, a one-sided duel, between the characters of O’Brien and Winston I do think, however, that the young girl who stood silently inscrutable, close to the action throughout as a young functionary who had been desensitised through repeated exposure to the brutality that unfolded before her, and our eyes, deserved a credit for her admirable stillness and blankness of expression.

Other ‘none-speaking characters’ also appear at one point to beat Winston with clubs, a naked, completely naked Winson, stripped of all clothes and humanity.

Almost to the end, Winston remains unbroken, in spirit if not in body, desperately fighting to retain something, something to cling onto, a faith that the ‘human spirit’ will, somehow, assert itself over tyranny, and the belief that reality is, in some areas at least, an absolute that exists and must continue to exist, regardless of the power that some human beings have abrogated to themselves to redefine and amend it at will. Two plus two must always equal four, even if the whole world insists this is not necessarily the case.

This is the crux of the story and the question that is left for any serious person who engages with it, that of how can an individual retain belief in any absolutes when those with the power show moment by moment, day by day that they can simply expunge from history anything that contradicts whatever is their latest, expedient version of ‘truth’? The irony is, of course, that Smith, in his job within the Minitruth was himself complicit in this ongoing act of historical amendment, knowing as well as anyone the relevant quotation from the Handbook of Ingsoc: ‘He who controls the past controls the present. He who controls the present controls the future.’

For O’Brien, as a True Believer, it is not enough to simply break Winston, or those like him who dare to think differently, to doubt and to hope. It is not enough that he will submit, through beatings and electric shock treatment, that he will say that he sees five fingers when O’Brien demands it. He must also believe it, must see five fingers, even though we, the audience, know he is holding up only four.

Not only must we imagine a ‘Boot stamping upon a human face, forever,’ but we must also imagine the human underfoot as accepting this as a normality that can never, and should never, be changed.

In this sense, we then, as the audience, through our senses become the arbiters of true reality. But what if there is no audience, if O’Brien, the powerful, and Smith, the powerless were up there on stage alone, or really in a dungeon as far away physically from humanity as it is morally (as we understand it) or what if we too could be made to see four fingers, all of us: in what sense could it remain true that O’Brien was only holding up four? 

Ultimately, in the world of 1984, through the constant refinement, amendment and shrinkage of language (which may strike a chord with some members of a 2024 audience) the aim is not only to punish and reform those minds that are guilty of ‘wrongthink’ but to make wrongthink impossible. How can you dream of freedom if the word and the concept of ‘freedom’ no longer exist?

In the end, of course, Winston does break, his suffering as he is tortured with increasing savagery towards this moment of breakage, literally made large to us by the projection of the physical Smith, battered, bruised and wracked by the ever-increasing power of the shocks being fed directly into his brain through electrodes attached to his head, onto the big screen.

I’ve already included too many spoilers for anyone wishing to see the play who is unfamiliar with the source material, but I will leave at least one aspect of the production unspoilt, the original manner which the writer and/or director chose to portray the penultimate, climatic scene in Room101.  

The scenes between O’Brien and Smith utilise dialogue which is more or less lifted and adapted straight from Orwell’s original text, which is only right as little can be done to improve on such a master of the English language.

In spirit, the production as a whole is also faithful to the book, though there are one or two omissions worth mentioning. We lose the junk shop where Winston buys his little snow globe, a miraculous relic from past times, and its owner Charrington. It is however alluded to, and that is perfectly fine.

We do, however, also lose Winston’s belief that ‘If there is hope it lies in the proles,’ and I think that’s a pity. It reduces hope to nothing more than an individual endeavour. It may be possible for isolated individuals to hold out to the very end, to go to their grave still quietly secure in their knowledge that two plus two must always equal four even if the exercise of sheer brute power has made them say otherwise. But aside from the intervention of a power from outside of the universe, acting as the guarantor of Absolute Reality, or God, then it’s difficult to see where hope for the defeat of tyranny can be found if it is not to be found in collective action, whether we want to call that collective the ‘proles’ or the ‘masses’, or the ‘people’ or something else.

This is one of my few minor criticisms of the play, along with one plot device involving the printing of a certain photograph from his home telescreen by Winston as a means of retaining a concrete record of a historical event. This isn’t in Orwell’s original novel, written at a time when remote printing from a screen was impossible and perhaps seen as too far-fetched even for Science Fiction. But even if it had been possible, I think Orwell would have seen such an act as something too risky for Winston to attempt for it to be believable.

There was also one reference by Parson to watching newsreel footage of ‘Eastasian women and children in small boots’ being machine-gunned at the coast. This seemed shoe-horned into the script and was also glaringly incongruent in almost telling us what to think about a certain issue, current in our society, that is being played out around our own shores.

There’s another modern reference, to information covering the whole of Winston’s life being stored by and known to the ‘Algorithm’. This is relevant and pertinent and thus a worthwhile inclusion.

These are minor gripes. I’ve mentioned the superb visual and audio design of the production, and will add to this that it’s tightly written by Ryan Craig. Lindsey Posner’s pacy direction is also a big factor in its success. Both halves of the play were fully absorbing. No one was surreptitiously checking their phone that I noticed, though it might have added a new layer of irony if they were, and I forgot all about snuff, apart from at the interval.

On to the actors, none of whom I can find any major criticism at all.

David Burrell portrays Parsons more or less as I imagined him from the novel, as a minor functionary who is not a rebel like Winston, but rather a true-believer-wannabe, as someone who wants very much to not only do whatever is asked of him but also to believe that it is also for the best, for himself and for the whole. Unable to manage this, and finally seeing himself punished for his unconscious transgressions, he takes refuge in the idea that at least the next generation, as represented by his unseen daughter, will be fully able to dissolve their individuality for the greater good. It’s a fine performance by Burrell.

Ryan Craig’s Winston is perhaps a little more humorous and less worldly, at least initially than I remember from the book, and also younger, the image of the character forever fixed in my mind as Peter Cushing. But it’s still an impressive portrayal of a quiet rebel, content with the small victory represented by being able to scribble his ‘notes from the present to the future’ in his diary, at a location in his flat that is, or so he believes out of site for the omniscient telescreen. But when this small victory is joined by the thrill of his sexual encounters with Julia, he becomes intoxicated by hope, manifested by his belief that Goldstein and the Brotherhood exist, that O’Brien is part of it and is inviting him to be part of it, acknowledging openly that he is prepared to do anything to bring down Big Brother and the Party, up to and including throwing acid into the face of an innocent child, words that O’Brien with throw back at him – ‘So much for the human spirit!’ – as he is systematically broken down by pain, by irrefutable ideological logic, and by the knowledge of what lies in store for him beyond the permanently illuminated Cell, ‘The place where there is no darkness’, in Room 101. Craig plays this character arc beautifully, really coming into his own in those final chilling scenes.

Eleanor Wild’s Julia is a revelation. Even in Orwell’s original, it was always Julia who took the lead in seducing Winston and introducing her initially shy prey into carnal delights beyond his imagination; and it’s inevitable that in a modern production, in the era of the Strong Woman/Girl Boss this should be ramped up further, themes I already touched upon in my Julia novel review. She is the one with the sexual experience, proudly announcing that she has ‘known’ hundreds of men, later amended to forty or fifty in the Golden Country, after first successfully pleasuring ‘pleasuring herself’ there as a means of testing out its safety. For Julia, this Julia, the pursuit and satisfaction of physical desire away from the sexless void of the Party is victory enough in itself. She is almost nonchalant, resigned to the knowledge that this will end one day, but while she can, she’ll take her moments of joy where she can find them.

And we do get to see that joy. We don’t get to see anything overtly sexual, though the language is much more ripe than Orwell could have got away with, but we genuinely do feel the pair’s sense of liberation as they frolic together on the bare stage floor, exploding at one point into riotous shouts of ‘Fuck Big Brother!’ as the beauty of the Golden Country, of Nature, provides the ideal backdrop on the screen behind them.

But, ultimately, she herself is seduced, carried away by Winston’s hope, by his dream of a future more long-lasting freedom, though I suspect she always knows that this hope is nothing more than a blind faith that is leading her to a place that she may not necessarily have needed, at least not yet, to go. Again, this is a character arc impeccably written and impeccably realised by the performer.

Kieth Allen is, of course, the marquee name among the cast, known to me best for his role in the Comic Strip series of comedy television films in the eighties and nineties, as one of the writer/performers of ‘Vindaloo’, the third best England football team song ever, and for an excellent Channel 4 documentary casting doubt on the official narrative on the death of Diana Princess of Wales, which definitely wouldn’t get made today. Those of a younger generation may know him best as the father of pop singer Lily Allen.

Allen doesn’t disappoint. As I mentioned, when he’s not centre stage, he sits silently menacing stage left. When he is, he dominates, though not in such a way that he does not allow others, principally Craig’s Smith with whom he shares most stage time, to also shine.

For this character, there is no arc consisting of distinct phases. He is what he is at the beginning as he is at the end, the perfect ideologue and Inner-Party-man, who does what he does, be it lying about his involvement with the underground resistance or effortlessly switching between Mr. Nice and Mister Nasty as he breaks down Smith bit by bit through a combination of physical and psychological measures whilst calmly outlining the philosophical incoherence of holding on to hope in a world where power is everything, not out of any sense of self-preservation or even material gain, but because he believes, or rather he knows that it is right. You know that O’Brien has been through this same process, suitably amended for each individual ‘case’ many times and will do so many times more.

Another character brilliantly brought to life, but it would be wrong to single out Allen, or any of the cast as the ‘star’ of the show. This a real ensemble performance, and one where the word ‘ensemble’ extends to everyone involved, speaking or not speaking, on stage or behind the scenes.

The sombre, thoughtful mood of the packed audience as they left the theatre said it all.

A triumphant production.

The play is still touring, and a must-see if you get an opportunity.

Produced and Performed by the Theatre Royal, Bath
Seen at the Liverpool Playhouse
Reviewed by Anthony C Green

Written by Ryan Craig
Directed by Lindsey Posner

Cast List:

Winston Smith: Mark Quartly
Julia: Eleanor Wild
O’Brien: Keith Allen
Parson’s: David Birrell

My review of the Julia novel by Sandra Newman Julia by Sandra Newman: A Page-Turning Feminist Perspective on Orwell’s Classic | Counter Culture

Green, November C 2024 Anthony

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Julia by Sandra Newman: A Page-Turning Feminist Perspective on Orwell’s Classic

December 3, 2023 at 11:18 am · Filed under Books, Fiction ·Tagged , , , ,

2,928 words, 15 minutes read time.

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Written with the full approval of the Orwell estate, Julia is a retelling of George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty Four from the point of view of Winston Smith’s lover, the eponymous hero of this novel, rather than of Winston himself. As a long-time fan of Orwell’s book, which even three-year’s membership of the Communist Party of Britain didn’t dissuade me from, this was a book I knew I had to read as soon as I became aware of its existence a few weeks ago. It’s to the novel’s credit that even though I rarely read fiction nowadays, and at four hundred pages it’s of a fair length, I got through it quickly. It is a real page turner, and though not without reservation, it’s one I strongly recommend.

I did approach it with some trepidation. Whilst reading it, I purposely avoided any reviews. I have however looked at a few since finishing it. Some of these have recommended it be read as a companion piece to the book Wifedom by Anna Funder, which is a biography of Orwell’s first wife Eileen O’ Shaughnessy nee Blair (Orwell was Christened Eric Blair). This apparently portrays Orwell as an insensitive misogynist, possibly a closet homosexual, who took many of his best ideas from Eileen, without acknowledging her contribution. Eileen died in 1945, four years before the publication of Nineteen Eighty Four, but it seems written a poem of this name several years earlier. She also suggested he write his planned satire on the degeneration of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia as an allegorical a fable. This book of course became his second most famous novel, Animal Farm. Funder alleges that Orwell’s dislike of women, or at least his belief that they were of little political importance, was embedded in his writings, in his novels, his essays and his letters, which is not something I personally have noticed, despite having read virtually everything he ever wrote by the end of the 1980’s. To be fair to Funder though, I’m not a woman, and wasn’t looking for such things.

Clearly, Orwell is not immune to cancel-culture, and this was my fear with Julia, even before I’d hear of or read anything about Wifedom, that it would be a ‘woke’ retelling of his masterpiece, and one that may even end up replacing it as required reading for the youth of today.

Fortunately, my fears in this regard proved unfounded. Naturally, women, Julia herself of course, but also women in general, do play a more important role than is to be found in Orwell’s original. That is to be expected and is essentially it’s point of the novel. Female sexuality, in particular plays a role that is, as you’d expect of a novel written in the late ‘40’s, almost entirely absent from Orwell, and is subtly handled. But none of this change of perspective was done at the expense of the male characters, who remain much as we remember them. There is a tendency today in fiction, in books, in films and television, to make all women into strong women, and portray all men as being weak and/or stupid. I didn’t find this the case in Newman’s work, where the male characters, principally Winston but others too, are not only recognisable from Orwell’s novel, but are also given an extra dimension through being seen through feminine eyes.

I will try to review, as is my general policy for book reviews (for films I tend to assume the reader has most likely already seen the movie), without giving away too many spoilers.

First, I suppose I should answer the question as to whether this book could be read without familiarity with Orwell’s original. Here, I’d have to say that the answer has to be, in general, ‘no.’ I suppose it would be possible to read this and then to go back and read Orwell’s source material. But then a re-reading of Julia would I think also be essential. At the very least, a reasonable knowledge of the world Orwell created, of its main themes, concepts and chronology, is essential for the fullest enjoyment of Julia.

Indeed, spotting where you are in relation in relation to the original was a big factor in my own enjoyment of the book: ‘Ah, this is the shop where Winston buys the paperweight’, or ‘Yes, this is the Prole woman who Winston watched singing and decided was beautiful.’ Thoughts like this were frequent occurrences for me, and to not have that background knowledge as a guide would be a huge handicap for a reader.

Of course, some aspects of Nineteen Eighty Four, have become such a recognisable aspect of modern culture and politics, Big Brother or Newspeak etc, that they would be understood by any reasonably intelligent, politically aware reader. Indeed, the very term Orwellian has become a part of modern political discourse, denoting anything perceived as a further step towards a totalitarian society.

I’m pleased that the author has remained faithful to the world that Orwell created. This was a world that, although set in what must have seemed to readers, and perhaps to Orwell himself, as a far-flung future date (though the real ‘1984’ is now further away in our past than it was in Orwell’s future!), it was still clearly based very much on his own time. The ‘Thought Police’ were obviously influenced by Stalin’s then still highly active KGB, and to a lesser extent the recently defeated Hitler’s Gestapo; and the general shabbiness, shortages and rationing of ‘Airstrip One’, the modern name for England in the novel, was very much influenced by  Britain under the 1945-51 Labour government of Clement Attlee, a government rightly revered on the Left, particularly for its creation of the NHS, but which presided over a nation ravaged and bankrupted by war, a grey, decayed country of enforced austerity.

(Orwell chose the even more austere atmosphere of the remote Scottish island of Jura, then sparsely populated, and now devoid of all human presence other than hardy travellers, for the actual writing of the novel).

I very much enjoyed the way the author filled out Orwell’s world, giving us more detail of how people lived in Airstrip One, be they the Proles, the Outer-Party, to which both Julia and Winston belong, and the elite Inner-Party, the elite to which their soon to be interrogator O’Brien belongs, and which has at its apex, omnipresent on the ‘tele-screens’ (which are now a reality in all but name in our own world), the infallible Big Brother himself.

There are, however, problems with such detail, and this where the novel, in my opinion, reveals its weak points. Surely, the main takeaway from Orwell’s book, is that this is a totalitarianism that is indeed total in almost every respect. ‘A boot stamping on a human face, forever’, to quote O’Brien, from which there seems no possible escape.

In Julia ‘Airstrip One’ often resembles a run-of-the-mill ‘Peoples Democracy,’ the official, Soviet approved names for the East European one-party communist states which were in the process of construction at the time Orwell was writing. It wasn’t a surprise to me to discover that one of Newman’s previous books is called Stasiland, and is a work of none-fiction about life in the former German Democratic Republic.

(As an only partially reconstructed Tankie, I still don’t see everything as negative about those societies, something that is also true of many people who grew up in the Soviet Union or in one of these ‘People’s Democracies’, and is also true of my own wife, who had what she remembers as a very happy childhood in ‘Communist China.’ The lack of emphasis on consumerism and individuality, the social solidarity, and the hope and joy many experienced through collectively working to build what they were convinced would be a better future has an almost spiritual dimension to it that is often overlooked. Would the citizens of modern Cuba or Vietnam, or indeed China be better off if a successful, western-orchestrated ‘colour revolution’, brought them liberal-democratic ‘freedom’ of the kind we ‘enjoy’? This is a discussion for elsewhere, but I doubt it. Already, I’ve digressed too long, but although I never bought into the ‘Party-line’ on Orwell, I do regret how his two most famous books, Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm, although both were indeed heavily influenced by Stalinism, are routinely utilised in the service of capitalist propaganda. After all, hasn’t modern corporate-capitalism already taken us a long way down the road to absolute totalitarian control? Google/You Tube/Facebook, the Big Tech giants, already have greater and more absolute powers of surveillance than Stalin or Mao, or indeed Orwell, could ever have imagined).

Having said that bleakness and an absence of any hope of beneficial change is generally regarded as the main takeaway from Nineteen Eighty Four, I have long seen more than a glimmer of hope in Orwell’s book. This hope lies, not with the ‘proles’, to quote Winston Smith, but with the ‘Appendix on Newspeak’ which concludes the novel. This is clearly written from the perspective of a future-point where Big Brother, Ingsoc (English Socialism, the guiding ideology of Airstrip One) and it’s trilogy of ‘principles’, ‘War is Peace’, Freedom is Slavery’ and ‘Ignorance is Strength’, and indeed Newspeak itself, are relics from a nightmare era that no longer exists.

Orwell died soon after the publication of the novel, and I’ve never seen the text of any interviews where he discuses it (surprisingly, considering he made so many broadcasts for the BBC during the war, not a single audio clip of his speaking voice has ever been unearthed either), so we will likely never know his intention. But I’m pretty sure that the insertion of this Appendix was a conscious, artistic decision, designed to suggest that ultimately, the human will to freedom will always eventually triumph, over even the most seemingly perfect tyranny.

However, the Appendix aside, there is no doubt that within the main text of the novel, Orwell does indeed create a system that appears to have no weaknesses through which the human spirit might begin to assert itself. In this world, language, and through language thought itself, is being reconstructed in such a way that concepts such as freedom and justice will eventually become impossible, even in the abstract.

They are not quite there yet in Orwell. People like Winston and Julia can still hope and dream, but it is strongly suggested that even these hopes and dreams are creations of the elite: Does the Brotherhood, supposedly led by Emmanuel Goldstein (clearly based on the Soviet renegade Leon Trotsky, and the object of the daily ritual ‘two-minute-hate’ sessions) really exist? O’Brien suggests that they too are creations. Do Eurasia and Eastasia, with whom Oceania, of which Airstrip One is a part, is permanently at war, first with one then the other, with history suitably amended to show that today’s enemy is also yesterday’s enemy, even exist as separate entities?

Orwell suggests they do, though their ruling ideologies (‘Obliteration of the Self’ and ‘Neo Bolshevism’ respectively) are in any case indistinguishable from Ingsoc, thus making their ‘separateness’ irrelevant.

If they didn’t exist, the implication is that it would be necessary to invent them. Because every tyranny needs not one, but two enemies: One is internal, as represented by the Brotherhood/Goldstein, and the other is external, represented by whatever foreign power it is currently expedient to be at war with.

(The benefits of ‘Forever Wars’ seems to be a lesson our own elite rulers have learnt well.)

In fact, O’Brien suggests that even Big Brother himself may be an invention. He is a face on the posters and on the telescreens, seemingly immune to the normal human process of aging, a voice booming through the loudspeakers, an object of the people’s love, gratitude and devotion whose physical existence as a living, breathing human being doesn’t matter one way or another.

This is another area where, in my view, Julia falls short as a novel. Somehow, we need this world to be something far worse than perhaps East German was between the late forties and the late eighties, even as seen by its biggest critics. There are too many gaps in the totality of control of the party in Julia, too much hope within its text. For instance, there is a suggestion at one point that help, maybe eventually even liberation, might come from America. Yes, this could be more false hope engineered from above, but the Inner-Party in Orwell’s book would never have allowed even the idea that, somewhere, alternative, freer models of society might exist. The ideologies of Eastasia (presumably America is part of this bloc or is it independent of all three blocs? This is not made clear), and Eurasia and their identity with the ideology of Oceania, is never mentioned.

In any case, the idea of America as a force for liberation has been exposed as a Neocon fantasy/propaganda exercise in or own, real world. It’s importation to the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty Four seems curious and out of place. I doubt Orwell would have approved, even if, like most British citizens, he acknowledged the invaluable role the United States had recently played in the defeat of Nazism (though of course their level of suffering was much less than that of the Soviet Union).

But in addition to this flaw, by the end of Julia, much of the mystery of life in Orwell’s world has been unnecessarily de-mystified. We know the answers to questions as to such as whether the Brotherhood and Big Brother really exist.

Personally, I would sooner be left with the mysteries.

The book also, though I stand by my earlier assertion that it’s a real page turner, goes on too long. Orwell’s original, again leaving aside the Appendix, ends with the desultory meeting between a broken Winston and a broken Julia, before Winston is quietly dispatched with a bullet to the head, his last thoughts being that he did, finally, love Big Brother, in a way that was every bit as real as the Party demanded.

I have no problem at all with Newman choosing to end the book differently from Orwell, and there was nothing in the original, as far as I remember, that ruled out the possibility that Julia’s fate might have been different to that of Winston. But I do think that, in chronological terms, it would have been better to have ended the book at the same point in time as Nineteen Eighty Four.

The author made a mistake similar to those that have been made in recent television adaptations of classic books. For example, one of my favourite novels is The Man in a High Castle by Philip K Dick. Amazon produced what was a very good adaptation of this for the screen a few years ago. Or at least, that was very good for two seasons, at which point they’d reached the end of Dick’s original source material. Because of the show’s success, they chose to continue anyway, the story becoming ever more fantastical and further away from the spirit of the original novel. The same could be said of Channel Four’s adaptation of Margaret Attwood’s novel The Handmaiden’s Tale which, again, was good for a couple of seasons, until the writers reached the end of the material the writer had originally created, at which point the plot became increasingly unhinged and unbelievable.

I’m sure there are purely literary examples, but Julia definitely, in my view, becomes much less recognisably a part of the world Orwell created, once she continues the story on beyond the point where Orwell chose to end it.

One review I’ve read since I finished the book described it as ‘superior fanfiction.’ That’s not a world in which I’ve ever immersed myself, either as a reader or a writer (though I’ve had a Doctor Who story knocking around my head for years, which I might get around to writing one day), but I think it’s better than that, and of course the approval of the Orwell estate elevates it above that world anyway.

It is however a valid, and perhaps the best way of looking at Julia. It’s a good idea, that of taking a classic novel and re-imagining it through the eyes of a different character to that of the original; and in Newman’s hands, the possibilities of the idea are, for the most part, very well executed.

I was never bored or tempted to give up on it, and the ‘woke’ element I feared was almost entirely absent.

But the novel, if not quite ‘fanfiction’, is best not seen as canonical. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four is one of the best, and most important novels ever written. It stands alone, without need of addition or extension, or prequals or sequels. Writers are free to write them, and if they can get official approval, all power to them. Readers though, should not, and do not, have an obligation to regard them as an official or essential part of the story.

Read Orwell’s original if you haven’t already done so, learn something of the environment within which it was created, and the ideas that influenced it. Think about it, absorb it, consider its relationship to our own world, and then, at some point, when you’ve a mind to, give Sandra Newman’s Julia a read. I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy it.

Julia By Sandra Newman

(Granta Books, 2023, 400 pages)

Reviewed by Anthony C Green

Anthony C Green, November 2023

Comments (7)

TRIGGER WARNING

July 26, 2015 at 7:42 pm · Filed under Books, Comedy, Politics ·Tagged , , , ,

triggerwarning cover

Trigger Warning: [free speech and offensive language]. This review contains strong racial and sexual slurs, discussions of –isms, or hatred of any kind (racism, chauvinism, classism, sexism, body-image shaming)

WHAT you have just read is a ‘Trigger Warning’. Increasingly common, a Trigger Warning is a notice at the start of any piece of writing, or audio or video to warn would-be readers, listeners or viewers that something potentially upsetting or offensive is on its way. The underlying implication seems to be look away, do not read this, or turn off your radio or television set.

This modern innovation has inspired Spiked-online editor Mick Hume to write an impassioned polemic in defence of freedom of speech which he claims is under threat, mainly because many of us don’t want to offend anyone. His new book, Trigger Warning, claims that politeness or fear of causing offence is undermining the hard-won rights of freedom of speech and thought that we like to think are the foundations of our society.

“The Islamic gunmen who attacked the office of Charlie Hebdo acted not just as the soldiers of an oldish Eastern religion but also as the armed and extremist wing of a thoroughly modern Western creed… a creeping culture of conformism. The cri de Coeur of these crusaders against offensive speech is You-Can’t-Say-That.”

The gunmen who shot up the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a Copenhagen café just cut out the middleman in order to stop anyone reading the blasphemies in Charlie Hebdo or listening to a debate in Copenhagen on the nature of free speech and blasphemy.

Reverse-Voltaires

Western culture seems to have fallen out with its own core value of free speech. The author brands the crusaders in question as ‘Reverse-Voltaires’. The famous phrase, attributed to the French freethinker had him saying, “I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” Hume’s Reverse-Voltaires in effect say, “I know I’ll detest and be offended by what you say, and I will defend to the end of free speech my right to stop you saying it.” They don’t wish to debate or dispute arguments that they find offensive. They would deny the other person’s right to say it in the first instance. The author’s charge is that these Reverse-Voltaires’ personal emotions and feelings come first. They want to be protected from words.

What has happened to the West’s liberal lobby in defence of free speech? They still speak up for oppressed dissidents in other parts of the world but at home, too many professed ‘liberals’ have gone over to the other side and want to restrict the ‘wrong’ kinds of speech. To many, censorship even seems cool.

Under King William III of glorious, pious and immortal memory, the need lapsed in 1695 for a Crown licence to publish anything. The recent Leveson Report called for a new State-sanctioned regulator to police press freedom. Even Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty gave public support for a new Royal Charter to limit press freedom.

Hume notes sadly that the remaining Pythons – who thirty-five years ago fought massive battles against Mary Whitehouse and quite a few Church of England bishops in order that everyone could go to see The Life of Brian – have effectively switched sides and joined a secular crusade for less press freedom. Illiberal liberalism now rules the roost so that black activist Jasper Lee rejoiced in closing down the controversial Exhibit B at the Barbican with the claim that censorship was a blow for free speech.

Today, free speech is attacked in the name of defending rights and freedoms. Even worse, there is now a blurring of the line between public and private spheres so that recently a large number of public figures and celebrities were monstered for thoughts expressed in private phone calls, texts or emails that were leaked, often by former friends or partners. As Brendan O’Neill of Spiked magazine put it, “there is surely only one solution to the alleged scourge of people saying bad things in private – put a telescreen in very home to capture our banter and alert the morality police to the utterance of dark or daft thoughts.” just as was the case in Orwell’s 1984 where people were encouraged to shop colleagues, neighbours and even family members. In 1984, Orwell’s Thought Police didn’t just punish those guilty of thoughtcrime but served to encourage others to practice ‘crimestop’ – the faculty of stopping short before embracing any dangerous thought.

Historical context

Hume puts the importance of freedom of thought and free speech in its historical context in a short outline of free-speech heretics, something we as Dissenters and Non-Conformists know – or ought to know – well. The right to freedom of expression and conscience was not handed down to us as a gift from the gods or from kings and aristocrats as an act of condescending beneficence. It had to be fought for and defended, over and over again.

We have heard a lot about Magna Carta in the past few months, given that its 800th anniversary was recently celebrated in great style. It did have a genuine role against arbitrary state power by establishing the idea that the Crown is not above the law and that free men have certain rights, most notably the right to trial by a jury of their peers. However, the Magna Carta had nothing to say about freedom of speech in a society where serfs were virtually owned body and soul by the lords of the manor.

After William Caxton introduced the printing press into England in 1476, the Crown sought to control it under a system of licensing. Today’s attempts to muzzle and control the internet are not entirely unprecedented. Nothing could be published without permission of the Star Chamber. Any criticism of the Crown was branded as treason or seditious libel.

One early free-speech martyr was the Greek philosopher, Socrates who, mirroring present-day Britain and America ‘just went too far.’ He was accused of corrupting the morals of Athens youth by saying things that ought not to be said. He replied that even if they went to spare him, he would keep on saying the unsayable and asking forbidden questions. Socrates posed the question; should there be a right to be a heretic?

As Hume notes, notions of heresy change as society changes in history. ‘Heresy’ is a label stuck on you by someone else. “From the trial of Socrates to today the big battles have been about the right to go against the grain, dissent from respectable opinion and question the unquestionable.” – in short, the right to be offensive.

In an age when many people dismiss religion as repressive and reactionary, Hume reminds secular readers that William Tyndale whose struggle to publish the Bible in English ended in fiery martyrdom, as well as the other religious heretics, came up against the censorious power of the political authorities. Their demands soon melded into calls for press freedom.

In 1689, after the Glorious Revolution which brought the immortal King Billy to the throne, the Bill of Rights wrote freedom of speech and debate into English law for parliamentarians. The system of Crown licensing for printers and publishers ended in 1695. The philosopher John Locke argued in A Letter Concerning Toleration against the State interfering in matters of conscience or faith but three centuries later, the government is still at it.

Up until the last few decades, liberty of expression and free-speech had widened in the UK. The last prosecution for blasphemous libel was in 1977 when Mary Whitehouse took a private case against Gay News for a poem she didn’t like. The offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were abolished in 2008. However, Hume argues that this has been replaced by a form of ‘blasphemy-lite’ – the new censorship of ‘hate-speech’.

Proponents of old orthodoxies now find themselves in the dock – often literally. This might make some folk smile a ‘slap-it-into-you’ wry smile but as Hume remarks, heresy-hunting still threatens free-speech even if the person on the receiving end is a bigot. Today, a myriad of unofficial and shifting speech rules and codes apply and woe betides anyone who falls foul of them.

The internet front

In China and Turkey the State authorities are open and honest that they censor opinions that they don’t like. But the internet is today a major front in the silent war on free speech. Here in the West we don’t censor in order to enforce political repression – perish the thought – but to protect the vulnerable against harmful and hateful words.

We hear a lot in the media about internet ‘trolls’ although there is no firm definition of the term. This hasn’t prevented a government minster threatening to quadruple prison sentences for writing words based on a shaky definition of what a troll actually is.

Some people on the internet are really horrible but ‘trolls’ have just as much right to say what somebody else doesn’t like as anyone else. Like everyone else, however, they have no right to be taken seriously. In case anyone was wondering, threats of rape, violence or murder are already illegal, so no new anti-trolling laws are necessary. Not only words, but the context in which they are used should determine the credibility or otherwise of any alleged threat.

The rise of the troll has led to the emergence of professional self-appointed ‘troll-hunters’ who seek to track down and punish these people. One recent tragic case concerned Brenda Leyland who killed herself after she was exposed on television as the women who posted a serious of online accusations against the parents of a missing child.

Another threat to internet free-speech emerged after a 2014 European Court of Justice case on ‘the right to be forgotten’. This led to a pianist demanding that the Washington Post take down a three-year-old critical review of one of his concerts and many others seeking to cast stuff about their past into an Orwellian memory hole.

Universities

Two centuries ago, the poet Percy Shelley was banned from Oxford in 1811 for publishing The Necessity of Atheism. Today, universities are all supposed to be about the search for knowledge, truth and free expression; what Disraeli called, ‘a place of light, of liberty and of learning.’ That’s no longer true in the US or in the UK where often students fight for freedom from speech. Berkley University in 1964 was where students founded the Free Speech Movement. By a twist of irony, students at the same university petitioned to ‘disinvite’ the comedian Bill Maher in order that they might feel safe.

Bizarro World has come alive in many universities so that self-professed liberals or radicals are in the forefront of campus censorship campaigns. In recent cases, people have been told that ‘people who do not have uteruses’ have no say on the abortion debate and various speakers have been banned under widening cowardly and reactionary ‘no platform’ rules. Once it was ‘no platform’ for racists and fascists. Now it is ‘no platform for racists, fascists, Islamic extremists, Islamaphobes, rappers, comedians, Israelis, climate-change deniers, Christians, atheists or UKIP members. Hume says that this would be better phrased as ‘no arguments’ as their proponents refuse to countenance any ideas other than their own.

Hume excoriates the use of ‘Safe Space’ and ‘Free Speech Zones’ in many US universities which restrict opinions to the zone and make them off-limits everywhere else and turn the rule into the exception.

Trigger warning migrated from a therapeutic took to help sufferers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to many books on the university syllabus and even to things like Downton Abbey. This misuse undermines two freedoms; the right to speak or write what you want or the right to read, listen to, or watch what you want.

Football and comedy

“Free speech is for (allegedly) fat and (mostly) white, male, working class football fans too.” In recent years, as money has poured into the game, there has been an attempt to ‘socially cleanse’ football terraces of its working class fan base, ostensibly to make the game more acceptable to the middle classes and ethnic minorities and more ‘family friendly’. While the thought appals many folk, a large part of the appeal of the game is winding up supporters of opposing teams by singing offensive songs. In Scotland, this can get you locked up under draconian legislation which is supposed to outlaw sectarianism. People have even been fined for singing God Save the Queen.

Players find themselves hung out to dry too. John Terry from Chelsea Football Club was found not guilty in court of calling another player, Anton Ferdinand of QPR a ‘fucking black cunt’ but nevertheless was sentenced by the English FA to a huge fine of £220,000 and forced to undergo re-education in etiquette and speech codes because of his ‘racism’. He was cleared in court of any offence but treated as guilty anyway on the grounds that he ought to have been some sort of ‘role model’ to young impressionable football fans. In today’s society, role model rules overcome the principle of presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

Hume mourns the passing of the Jewish-American comedienne Joan Rivers. Loved and hated in equal measure, she never apologised to anyone who claimed to be offended by her acerbic brand of humour. Who, he wonders, will slay all those sacred cows now? The censors once were conservative politicians, policemen and priests. Now protests are led by illiberal liberals in the media, other comedians and activists.

The alternative comedians of the 1980s have created their own alternative comedic conformism. Most recent examples are the comic character ‘Dapper Laughs’, who was killed off by an illiberal liberal lynch mob. Interestingly, the West Belfast Festival, Féile an Phobail, is under pressure from some of the same circles to disinvite the Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle because they disapprove of some of his recent material. Nobody, Hume observes, “is against free speech for comedians. Until, that is, they decide somebody has gone too far in offending their own views and hurting their feelings.”

Many opponents of free speech borrow – and distort – an argument first aired by Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes in an American court in 1919 that people have no right to cry ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre. Holmes said that there was no freedom ‘falsely’ to cry fire in a crowded theatre. His ruling against a US socialist activist assumed that Schenk could be punished after the fact for what he wrote in a leaflet against military conscription in wartime. He didn’t try to prevent its publication beforehand as Gordon Brown’s government did with the controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders when he was banned from entering the UK in 2009. That was prior constraint and State censorship of an elected representative.

This raises the question, who decides? How can we make an informed decision if we cannot hear what a person has to say? The fire-in-a-theatre argument has generalised from a specific set of circumstances in order to shut down ideas that the offended person doesn’t like and doesn’t want anyone else to hear. Hume offers another quotation from Holmes, made in 1929. “If there is and principle in the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought – not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.”

Words will always hurt me

We used to recite a wee verse that “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Today that has been turned on its head. Recently, Katy Hopkins – a B List attention-seeking celebrity motor-mouth who has re-invented herself as a professional troll – faced a petition to sack her from her Sun column because of ignorant and stupid comments she made about would-be migrants from North Africa drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. In fact there was more outrage and indignation over her shit-stirring article than there was over the actual deaths of would-be migrants.

Hume blames the rise of what he calls identity politics as a major cause of the modern outbreak of thin-skinnedness. When someone identifies with a particular identity group, they become fixed in it and will not accept any challenge to their worldview. It’s not only you-can’t-say-THAT, but YOU-can’t-say-that! The result of this is that we have privatised blasphemy and virtually criminalised criticism. Identity activists consciously and conspicuously go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. They look for something to be offended by. They stifle public debate by their insistence that speech is policed to protect hurt feelings of the few who claim to have been offended.

Taking offence has become the acceptable face of political censorship today. Of course, anyone is entitled to take offence at anything said or written by someone else but taking offence does not give them any right to take away that other person’s freedom of speech.

Hume attributes one ‘-ism’ as the most powerful factor in this outbreak of self-righteous umbrage – narcissism; I feel superior by my sense of outrage and offence at what these dreadful people are saying. It’s an outrage. It upsets me. It shouldn’t be allowed. The 2008 EU ‘hate-speech’ laws were drafted in order to promote tolerance and equality. One EU commissioner admitted that they were actually intended to “preserve social peace and public order” by protecting the “increasing sensitivities” of “certain individuals” who “have reacted violently to criticism of their religion”.

That went well, didn’t it? Hume argues that the hate-speech laws seem to have inflamed things by sanctioning the notion that offensive speech is a crime that ought to be suppressed or outlawed if it upsets someone, so speaking disrespectfully of Mohammed or of other Islamic symbols deserve punishment. By this reckoning, the murderers of the Charlie Hebdo staff privatised the penalty due for causing such offence. Thomas Jefferson argued that the State should keep out of religious disputes. “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods on no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Today people can be locked up or fined in the UK and Europe for expressing an opinion deemed insulting or offensive to someone else’s religion or identity group. Ask Pastor James McConnell of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in north Belfast, who is awaiting trial for a sermon in which he claimed that Islam was spawned in hell and was of the devil. It looks like the State will be wading into religious disputes in future, if somebody makes a complaint.

Liberals used to campaign for disadvantaged groups to share equality with the rest of us; not special privileges for a self-identified group. Anyone can be and has the right to be offended but not to use that feeling of offence to curtail the rights of the rest of us.

Mind your Ps – Qs – Ns & Ys

Hume recounts a Football Association dinner he attended that was entertained by the black American comedian, Reginald D Hunter, who told amusing stories of how soccer baffled ‘this nigga’. A huge media shitstorm saw Hunter pilloried for racist language and behaviour. The FA’s anti-racism lobby group, Kick it Out now ‘condemns racial slurs, irrespective of context’. According to this idiocy, Hunter calling himself ‘this nigga’ is just as outrageous as a Klansman shouting ‘lynch that nigger’ at him. Fans of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club have similarly found themselves in trouble for calling themselves the ‘Yid Army’.

A similar storm of outrage burst over the head of the award winning actor Benedict Cumberbatch in a January 2015 interview when he referred to ‘coloured actors’. Never mind that he was speaking out against racism. He used a slightly old fashioned term to describe people of colour and was denounced on both sides of the Atlantic for his use of these dreadful words of power. According to the theorists of ‘irrespective of context’ Cumberbatch might as well have gone around whipping slaves and forging new chains for them by reminding their descendants of the bad old days of segregation and slavery. He was forced to make a grovelling apology for his hate-speech.

We are entering a cultural age where people like Hunter, Cumberbatch, the Yid Army or any one of us can be sacked, censured or censored for saying the wrong word, regardless of where they said it or what they meant by it.

Liars and holocaust deniers

Hume describes the recent trend for people who question the dominant view or current orthodoxy to be branded as ‘deniers’. ‘Denier’ is a religious term just as ‘witch’ was in the seventeenth century. To brand someone as a denier alleges a moral failure. That person is not just wrong but has no right to be heard. You don’t debate with deniers; you shut them up or lock them up or burn them. That’s what happened to Michael Servetus who was burnt at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva in 1553. He denied the Trinity. In Scotland, Thomas Aikenhead was hanged in Edinburgh in 1697 for denying the Trinity and the deity of Christ. All questioned the unquestionable and denied the prevailing orthodoxy – the ‘accepted version of truth’. All were regarded as subversive, dangerous and morally debased.

Holocaust denial is now the biggest thoughtcrime in the West. It has become a crime in almost twenty countries in the past two decades since the Holocaust became transformed from a historical event into a pseudo-theological universal symbol of absolute moral evil that must be taught in schools. The best way to deal with such nonsense is not to shut it down by locking up its proponents but to expose its fallacies and errors to the light of day. It”s not as if there’s any shortage of evidence.

Like all heresy hunters, the defenders of orthodoxy don’t just want to silence their opponents but to punish them for their secular blasphemy. Denial is meant to be “a refusal to acknowledge an unacceptable truth or emotion, or to admit it into consciousness.” A ‘denier’ is someone refusing to acknowledge what everyone knows is the undoubted truth, not a sincere doubter but a despicable liar.

Similar terms are now being used to refer to persons who doubt the current orthodoxy on man-made climate change. As the debate is settled and the question closed such doubters should be silenced. This is contrary to the opinion of John Stuart Mill who wrote, “To refuse a hearing to an opinion because they are sure it is false is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. That’s for popes, not scientists.”

Elitists believe that the ‘sheeple’ – ordinary people – need to be protected from the media. Their lack of faith in free speech reflects and reinforces their lack of belief in humanity. Hume argues that this is the main reason why there was an official cover-up of the scandal in Rotherham where gangs of Asian men abused white girls with impunity. The story was not suppressed by the authorities for years because it was false but because it was true. Social workers and officials feared accusations of racism and that community tensions would be inflamed if the full truth came out.

Today those who think of themselves as enlightened often demand less free speech and want to restrict press freedom. The puritans of the past look like open-minded humanists compared with today’s misanthropic illiberal liberals.

The right to free speech is not sectional. It has to apply to everyone – no matter how obnoxious – or it becomes undermined for others. Once media freedom is made out to be a problem the ‘solution’ offered is more state intervention and regulation. Orwell wrote that “A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”

The crux of Hume’s argument is that free speech is not the problem but that fear of it is. “Without fighting for the heretical right to offend against society’s consensus views and to question the unquestionable orthodoxies of the age, many of the great political, cultural, scientific or artistic breakthroughs that we now take for granted would have been hard to imagine.”

Reverse-Voltaires claim that we will gain is a safer, more civil society where people will have to respect each other. Hume argues that we are all in danger of losing the meanings of words. Rules and codes shift and narrow the terms of debate as Benedict Cumberbatch learned to his cost. In fact, they close down any chance of debate which prohibits any proper discussion on the important issues of the day.

David Kerr

Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? by Mick Hume. William Collins Books ISBN978-0-00-812545-5 £12.99

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Review: 1985 – A Sequel to George Orwell’s 1984 by Gyorgy Dalos

December 30, 2014 at 8:28 am · Filed under Books ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

380 words, 2 minutes read time.
This book begins with the unthinkable – the death of ‘Big Brother’. The orthodoxy of the totalitarian system is threatened by this, the ensuing power struggles and the near destruction of the Oceania air force by Eurasia. Using the characters and framework of Orwell’s classic, 1984, Dalos moves the plot further. Elements of the Thought Police recognise the need for Perestroika (Reconstruction) and Glasnost (Openness). Leading secret policeman O’Brien explains:- “Earlier during the rule of Big Brother… we were content if people were afraid of us. Today we want them to support us. And that without pressure – of their own free will and intelligently”. O’Brien sees the need to “create a kind of public sphere – naturally under our control.”  The book gives two reasons for this: – to put pressure on Party cliques through public opinion – to convert the functionaries of the Outer Party to the new policies required by changing conditions. It is interesting to compare this thought process with what Gorbachev (himself a former KGB leader) attempted to practice in the former Soviet Union. As this book was first published in 1982 we should credit the authour with prescience. The decision to create a “public sphere” inevitably leads to a number of consequences which O’Brien had not anticipated. For political activists this book is very amusing. Written through the accounts of the different main players the accounts are highly subjective and often contradictory. The language parodies each character. The most amusing example of this was to my mind, the compromising survivor Julia Miller. Her writings use language to qualify and excuse. It reflects the logic of what she thinks is a dialectical process; in writing of O’Brien, for instance:- “But it is a fact that O’Brien, so long as he was not ruled for a pathological greed for power, played a certain positive part in the beginning of our Reform Movement.” This “misuse” of language is familiar to those of us who still read Marxist publications…. 1985 is different from 1984 in many ways. There is more humour in 1985 and, to begin with at least, less of an all enveloping sense of evil. In 1984 you begin to believe that, as the Daleks would say, “resistance is futile”. In 1985, even O’Brien seems uncertain, worried and hesitant…. Reviewed by Pat Harrington

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Book review: 1985 – A Sequel to George Orwell’s 1984

December 19, 2009 at 6:57 pm · Filed under Books ·Tagged ,

This book begins with the unthinkable – the death of ‘Big Brother’. The orthodoxy of the totalitarian system is threatened by this, the ensuing power struggles and the near destruction of the Oceania air force by Eurasia. Using the characters and framework of Orwell’s classic, 1984, Dalos moves the plot further.
Elements of the Thought Police recognise the need for Perestroika (Reconstruction) and Glasnost (Openness). Leading secret policeman O’Brien explains:-

“Earlier during the rule of Big Brother… we were content if people were afraid of us. Today we want them to support us. And that without pressure – of their own free will and intelligently”.

O’Brien sees the need to “create a kind of public sphere – naturally under our control.” Two reasons are advanced for this:

.......... to put pressure on Party cliques through public opinion 

.......... to convert the functionaries of the Outer Party to the new policies 
           required by changing conditions.

It is interesting to compare this thought process with what Gorbachev (himself a former KGB leader) attempted to practice in the former Soviet Union. As this book was first published in 1982 the author is to be credited with prescience.
The decision to create a “public sphere” inevitably leads to a number of consequences which O’Brien had not anticipated.
For political activists this book is very amusing. Written through the accounts of the different main players the accounts are highly subjective and often contradictory. The language parodies each character. The most amusing example of this was to my mind, the compromising survivor Julia Miller. In her writings, language is used to qualify and excuse. It reflects the logic of what she thinks is a dialectical process; in writing of O’Brien, for instance:-

“But it is a fact that O’Brien, so long as he was not ruled by a pathological greed for power, played a certain positive part in the beginning of our Reform Movement.”

This “misuse” of language is familiar to those of us who still read Marxist publications….
1985 is different from 1984 in many ways. There is more humour in 1985 and, to begin with at least, less of an all enveloping sense of evil. In 1984 you begin to believe that, as the Daleks would say, “resistance is useless”. In 1985, even O’Brien seems uncertain, worried and hesitant….

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