Posts Tagged dystopian

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

Leave a Comment

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.

Click on image to buy book

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)