Book Review: 1984

         Don't you just love when dystopia novels start to become a reality?!?!!? Isn't it great that George Orwell predicted the future in his cautionary novel about exactly what not to do???  LIFE IS SO GREAT WHEN THAT HAPPENS!!!!!!!111!!!!!!!!!!!1111!!!!!!!

SPOILERS!

         So things in our current timeline aren't as bad as they could be but there's a lot in 1984 that's far too similar to just shake off as a coincidence. Like the fact that Orwell predicted photoshop (pg. 38) and our modern day acronyms we use while texting and on the internet. Yes, I know acronyms were very popular in the early 20th century, just we've come to a point where we do it for almost everything. Which is not to say it's a bad thing. That's just how language evolves. It's just creepy how Orwell kinda predicted this in his Newspeak. (Also, I'm a child that laughed at the oh-so-clever name of Pornosec when I saw it on pg. 39). However, what's different between Newspeak and our modern day lingo is that we have the choice to participate in it or not whereas the people of 1984 have been stripped of all their freedoms, from the ability to speak to even love.

After reading the book the shows are a million times more disturbing.

         All that being said, going into this book I didn't really know anything about it other than it coined the word Big Brother. When I started reading I was surprised by how much this book defined so many cliches and tropes in modern dystopia Sci-fi. And not just for that genre but across the literary spectrum.

        Orwell was beyond his time, yet, classical all the same. His prose is absolutely amazing. He writes in such a fluid and easy fashion it's like he's speaking directly to me as a friend. I think this also goes on to set the mood and tone of the novel through our protagonist's Winston Smith. Who, I believe, holds the longest record of a POV protagonist not speaking, (doesn't open his mouth until pg. 43), so there's that! Winston was an interesting character to get into and live in this world with through his view of it.
           Then as we meet our love-interest in Julia I rather like them. It's not hard to root for the two once they finally speak and interact. And I think this falls on the fact of the culture within 1984 and ours which makes you think/feel that even the want for human touch and love/lust is wrong.The chastity of being in the Party and society of 1984 is painfully reminiscent of Scientology and parts of my upbringing (not that I was in Scientology). To halt ones need for human touch and want for love (or lust), there's something so cruelly sinister and evil about it. (Yes this is more of a reflection on my upbringing.) So when two people do find each other and they just choose to love or lust after one another it's truly refreshing and for me inspiring given this setting.

God, I wish that were me

         Now I do have a problem with Julia. Kinda. It's that she's literally the Not Like Other Girls trope. I mean she says, "Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!" (pg. 108) soooo. But at the same time, I think this might be part of the whole experience of 1984 and not entirely on Julia. For instance, later on she tries to recapture her feminity which is awesome, its just one of those things I can't see if the author was intentionally trying to do or if that's just Orwell's perception of how women really are or should be so  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
          Given this, I do like how the romance or lust-mance was shown not just through sex scene after sex scene, though they did have their fair share, but also through the small things. Like Julia recapturing her feminity for herself to maybe appease Winston a bit more. (Julia, honey, Winston would literally hump a dead seal at this point so you'll do just as you are.) Or how Winston gets all excited when their hands bump together in a crowd. I love those small moments, they mean everything when building up a romatic tragedy.
        And does tragedy come swift! Part 3 of 1984 I completely devoured in a day it was so damn compelling! I haven't done that with a book since I read The Outsiders for the first time. When Winston gets the book and begins to read it, a paragraph/chapter really stuck out to me, particularly:

         "War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting, and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude toward it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious."- pg.153. 

         Why does this sound so familiar? Then it's followed shortly by: "(Proles) can forget for long periods of time that the war is happening."- pg. 178.
          If that wasn't what it was like growing up during the Iraqi War.  Between 2001-2005 the war was everywhere, but as I grew up no one seemed to care anymore. It's like Waiting for the World to Change came out and people just gave up. I'd go months on end without thinking that my country was at war. (Given I was in elementary school and wasn't keeping up with it that way). But in school, you'd learn about the World Wars and see how it affected everyone in the nation/world but it didn't feel like that during the Iraqi War. That it only affected small groups of people. That we weren't doing anything to better the situation. I mean I do remember in 2nd grade we wrote to soldiers and everything but, again, after 2005, it was like nothing existed or mattered. Which is needless to say, awful! People are out there dying because of this war and people at home couldn't be bothered. I think that speaks more for the reasons of war than the soldiers or civilians themselves.
        Which brings me to the paragraph of 1984 that was mined from the caves under the Mountain of Literature Gods:

          "Now I will tell you the answer to my question... The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power... Only power, pure power... We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."- pg. 217. 

Members of the Party congratulating each other

         I think that has to be one of the best Evil Dude Monologue's I've ever witnessed! The freakiest thing about the above quote is that it mirrors something I had written in my story Buzzcut Season. Which is weird because I wrote it between September 25, 2016- August 3rd, 2017 and I started reading 1984 on August 21, 2017. You can imagine that I was freaking out pretty hard.

George Orwell

  Overall my feelings for this book can be summoned up pretty neatly in one word; Wow. From start to finish this book encaptured me entirely. I loved the plot being set up and how it fell into place perfectly. I loved how Orwell set up everything and how the plot fell into place perfectly, absolutely loved it. I'm beyond ecstatic that I finally got the chance to read this amazing classic! Thank you for this, scarily, timeless masterpiece Mr. Orwell!
      If you haven't read 1984 go on over to Goodreads and find where you can buy your copy!

     

 So I do have to ask:
         Do you think Julia was pregnant at the end of this? Because I got some vibes that she was at the very end of it or that she was before Room 101happened. I mean that could be a craze fan theory but let me know!
        Who else thought of these three assholes when the Parson kids showed up?

Just try and tell me you weren't thinking the same thing.

     Favorite quotes:
         "...It never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage."- pg. 10
         "Everything melted into mist."- pg. 38
         "It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not live ones." - pg. 43
        Over the course of this book I grew an odd fondness for the phrase "old boy"- pg. 50
        "The capitalist owned everything in the world, and everything else was their slave."- pg. 63. Where the lie at though?
         "You're only a rebel from the waist down."- pg. 129
         "We are the dead."- pg. 145
         "The object of waging war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war."- pg. 155. TRUTH
         "The privileged minority had no function."- pg. 157
         "The war is waged by each ruling group its own subjects... object is to keep the structure of society."- pg. 164.
         "...As long as they have no standards of comparison they needn't know their oppressed." pg. 171.
         "Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."- pg. 208

         "To die hating them, that was freedom."- pg. 231. 

          I want this tattooed on my face. On my stomach. On my eyebrows. On my inner eyelids so every time I blink I see these words. I want this on my car, on my cat, on my bed, on my laptop, I want this everywhere. And I can't really explain why. It's kind of horrible but it's poetic soooo balance?



Overview:

1984 by George Orwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. What can I say but wow! I really enjoyed this book from start to finish. I loved how Orwell set up everything and how the plot fell into place perfectly, absolutely loved it. I also loved Orwell's writing voice, it's just so easy to get into and flows so naturally. Also very impressed and disturbed at how many things Orwell predicted that actually came true. (like Photoshop for instance). There are amazing quotes in this book and I think that every spy movie I've ever seen has some way or another been influenced by this book. I saw so much of our current media and ideas that we have in storytelling come from this. I'm glad I finally got the chance to read this amazing classic. I'll probably write more on this later after I've had some time to think about it, but all I can do is give a slow clap to George Orwell for this book!

View all my reviews

   Until next time!

       

❤CJ❤