Two books this month - one about George Orwell and one written by him that I hadn't read before.
On Nineteen Eighty-Four by DJ Taylor is described as a 'biography' of Orwell's most famous book. It's divided into three parts looking at the sources, creative process and reception given to the novel.
The first section examines the elements of Orwell's personal history, career and previous novels that fed into the development of the key themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four - the paranoia, the malleability of truth, and the brutal reality of totalitarianism. I found it fascinating how the themes of powerlessness follows most of Orwell's main protagonists who are trapped in various circumstances although none as blatantly evil as poor Winston Smith's world.
Before reading this book I didn't know that Orwell spent some of the second world war developing propaganda, in a building that matches the description of the Ministry of Truth where Winston works. Orwell's boss there had the initials 'BB', the same as Big Brother.
Another major influence on Orwell was his experience fighting against fascism during the Spanish Civil War. Here he saw first hand how lies were spread by his own side by Stalinists operating on instructions from the Soviet Union. A lot of his anger about that was channelled into Animal Farm which is an allegory for the way the communist revolution in Russia morphed into grim totalitarianism. But several of his experiences in Spain reappear in more subtle ways in Nineteen Eighty-Four as well.
The second section details the process of writing the novel and particularly the impact on Orwell's health. Taylor paints the picture of Orwell writing out of a sense of urgency, feeling he had to get Winston Smith's story written to explain exactly why totalitarianism was so dangerous. I was left in no doubt that his sense of mission to complete the book pretty much killed him. He died not long after publication, although he was aware that the book was a massive success.
The third section is an account of what came next as Nineteen Eighty-Four took the world by storm. It covers how the book was weaponised by the CIA and banned in the USSR, turned into stage plays and movies (one of which had different endings on different continents) and of course added several words and phrases to the lexicon (which I wrote about in the early years of this blog).
I haven't read many books about books because it feels a bit meta, but I was captivated by this story about a book that took the life of its author and then proceeded to take on a life of its own.
And so on to book 2 for the month...
Fresh off the back of reading about Nineteen Eighty-Four, I finally read Homage to Catalonia, which was George Orwell's account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War. This was a contemporary account of the conflict, printed before the war was resolved. As a result it assumes the reader knows what's going on - so I spent the first few chapters looking things up on Wikipedia.
Orwell is very honest about how serving at the front was a mix of extreme boredom interspersed with moments of chaos and naked danger. He discusses how he is aware of his conflicting feelings - that war is terrible, but glorious; that it's a good thing to shoot and kill fascists but that the men in the other trenches aren't really that different to him; and that this was the most important thing he could be doing and at the same time felt completely pointless.
But Orwell's main message is directed at his readers when this was published. He wants to set the record straight about what was really happening in Spain behind all the propaganda that was being published in the papers back home. The misinformation war is nothing new and this is one of the earliest examples - as the Stalinist faction in the forces fighting against Franco's fascist uprising gradually took control and saw the liquidation of their political enemies on their own side was of prime importance.
As they took control, the Stalinists perpetrated various untruths about their erstwhile allies while imprisoning and disappearing many of them. Orwell had been attached to an 'anarchist' militia unit and suddenly found himself regarded as a traitor and an enemy. Fortunately he was able to escape alongside his wife who was also in the country, while many of his comrades in arms were caught by the secret police and thrown in prison.
Orwell's fury at the betrayal of what he considered to be a genuine egalitarian socialist revolution that he saw when he first arrived in Spain is palpable. He is unequivocal in blaming the Soviet Union and their agents for this and grieves for the opportunity that the ordinary Spanish peasants and workers had taken away from them because the Soviets deemed it expedient to discourage, and then suppress, an actual revolution.
There are lighter moments, and the usual one sentence observations that cleverly summarise an injustice or political worldview. Orwell is good at picking almost farcical elements in stories that make them memorable - whether that's the inefficiency of the Spanish secret police turning over his wife's hotel room in Barcelona, or his account of taking a sniper bullet through his throat and what he thought about his 'final thoughts' when he assumed he was done for. The short conclusion to the book after leaving Spain ends with a prescient vision of sleepy England being rudely awoken by war.
Homage to Catalonia has been critiqued several times by historians. Some of Orwell's account lacks veracity. But that's easy to say from the safety of the 21st century, with Franco safely long-dead and Stalinism a distant, unstudied memory. Orwell acknowledges his own biases and invites the reader to consider their own. He has the advantage over most of his critics because he was actually there. At times his descriptions are vivid enough to make me feel like I was too.
