My 1984 stocktake

I'm slightly envious of the guy who collected 1,984 copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and turned them into an art exhibit. It just feels like a really cool idea. As someone prone to collecting, and who had a meaningful number as a collecting target in the past, it's one of those ideas I wish I'd had.

But perhaps it's a good thing I didn't have the idea! I don't have space for 1,984 copies of the same book. But I do have a few different copies. 

This is my favourite cover. I didn't need to buy this when Penguin released it a few years ago, but come on... it's perfect.

You can see how the 'censorship' black-out strip is over an embossed title, so it can be read more clearly if the book is tilted slightly.

The write-up on the back is quite minimalist. Penguin were packaging George Orwell's work as "Great Orwell" at the time. 

Keeping to the minimalist theme, there is no introduction. There is a page of quotes by authors and reviewers though.

Here's an older copy that I acquired from my Grandma's house. I kept a few of her books. This cover feels very cluttered and chaotic, in keeping with the way the Party both demands order but pursues disruption.

The writing on the left continues round onto the spine and then the back of the book.

The back cover features a quote from Andrew Motion, who might have been poet laureate when this copy was published. (It doesn't give an issue date but the existence of an advert for Penguin Books's website implies it was published after 1999 when Motion took up the role.) There is a brief author bio in the front but no intro.

My other Penguin edition is my 'reading copy' and has an issue date of 2008. It also has a 4-page introduction by Peter Davison (the literary professor, not the actor who played Dr Who!)

The cover design by Shepard Fairey is quite striking and they designed covers for Animal Farm as well (as seen on the back).

The two endorsements on the back are from comic Jo Brand and author Margaret Atwood. They feel like an unlikely pairing.

I blogged two years ago that several companies have started printing Nineteen Eighty-Four because the copyright on the book has expired (as has the copyright on all of Orwell's writings) so it's been a bit of a publishing free for all. 

But, despite seeing lots of attractive copies I have resisted the temptation to fill out a shelf with them. However, I did buy this version in TK Maxx recently. It is published by Wordsworth Classics and I bought it because it had an interesting-looking long introduction and several other essays by Orwell included. 

Plus the cover designed by Becky Surridge was very cool. It has real Fritz Lang 'Metropolis' vibes. Given the opening line of the book, the man in the clock in the 8 is striking. It could be Winston. It could be whoever is spying on Winston.

The introduction by Sally Minogue, author and academic, is 30 pages long. And adding even more value to this edition is a selection of essays and other bits, like book reviews.

There are no endorsements on the back. The write-up lists all the words and terms coined by Orwell in this book - something I blogged about way back when in the early years of this blog.

The list of additional content looks intriguing. I'm interested in what he thought of Wells and Huxley, both of whom were authors of speculative fiction too. (I've categorised 'speculative fiction' previously.)

So, those are my copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four. I have two books about the book as well. I reviewed DJ Taylor's book On 1984 back in 2023. I also have a copy of The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey, which will hopefully make it off the reading pile and onto the blog at some point!

For now, it's sitting in my 1984 collection.

Books of the Month - a trio of twentieth century novels

Recently TK Maxx has had a great selection of books available below list price. (Including several different editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which felt a bit odd.) Over the last couple of months I've bought some older fiction that caught my eye. I'm going to review them in chronological order, starting with the oldest.

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

I'd never read any Hemingway, and this might not have been the best novel to start with. However, it sounded interesting from the blurb on the back. The basic premise is that a bunch of dissolute American ex-pats living in Paris in the mid-1920s decide to go to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls and the bullfight there in the fiesta. 

It's not all bullfights and drinking. Along the way some characters go fishing. There's a deep love for angling in the writing, almost as much as there is fascination for bullfighting. Within the group of tourists there is a woman who is the object of attention for several men, including the narrator, who is carrying a war injury. It's never spelled out but the inference is his wound prevents him from functioning sexually. 

And that's about it. The various infatuated men either get with the woman or don't. The narrator seems detached from all their drama. The Spanish and French characters are just background or mainly there to be patronised. There's some antisemitism and a one character discusses a black boxer he admires using the N word to describe him. 

And fair enough, the book was published in 1927 so what else would be expected. It's an outsider's viewpoint with an ingrained superiority and yet a hollow sense that the people they are so superior to actually have more authenticity. The main characters flit through and observe, are amused by what they see, and then flit off and in the process are utterly meaningless. The fiesta would happen with or without them.

Overall it hasn't inspired me to actively seek out any more Hemingway. It had its moments. (If you like fishing, I think you'd like that chunk of the story!) But I wasn't sorry to finish reading it. 

Coming Up For Air - George Orwell

From the mid-20s to a novel published in 1939 and full of semi-prophetic foreboding about the looming war between Britain and Germany. There's a weighty inevitability to the coming conflict that is reflected throughout this novel - but it's what will come after that really terrifies the protagonist, an era of secret police and endless propaganda. 

When I read On 1984 by DJ Taylor, which was a book about how Orwell wrote that book, this novel and Homage to Catalonia were mentioned as feeding into the key ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Having read both books now, I see what Taylor meant. There's a lot here about the way memories preserve things that have been otherwise obliterated by progress and how the world was going to change. 

The book is set in four parts. In part 1, George, the 45 year-old protagonist is unsettled in his life as an insurance salesman, married with kids and trapped in suburbia. In part 2, he recounts his life growing up in a little Oxfordshire village, his experience in the First World War and his subsequent career in sales,  made possible by the social upheavals caused by the war. In part 3, the hatches a plan to use some money that his wife doesn't know about to fund a trip back to the village he grew up in. And in part 4 he makes the trip which ultimately ends up in disappointment and realising that you can never truly go back. 

There is quite a bit of humour in the book, particularly George's life story. There are several vignettes that capture some true-to-life experiences and observations of people. We stray into some unprogressive views when George the protagonist (and possibly George the author) shares some negative opinions about women, although in fairness several male characters come in for a verbal bruising as well. 

Orwell is good at describing archetypal characters, like men living on faded glories, the genuinely wealthy, the penny-pinching middle-class who don't have funds to match their status, the tory-voting suburban families desperately working to pay their mortgages, and the hard-working, perpetually screwed-over poor. He has particular fun mocking the earnest young men who are various shades of communist and argue fine points of political dogma as if any of it matters. George (and probably George as well) are older and wiser than that and recognise it's all futile.

Despite that negative cast to the story, and the depressing conclusions drawn by the protagonist as his trip doesn't work out as he naively expected, I enjoyed reading this. I find Orwell a very readable author. His character's inner monologue is engaging, and while George the protagonist makes no claim to be a hero or a good person he is extraordinarily sympathetic. I might not have felt that if I had read the book when I was younger, but now I'm in my 40s and slightly horrified how long ago my school and university days are now, I get where he is coming from. 

The Stepford Wives - Ira Levin

And so this trio of reviews jumps forward to the 1970s. This is a very short book, with incredibly lean prose. A lot is left to the imagination with one sentence or a short paragraph summing up key events that move the story forward.

I knew the basic outline of this story without ever having read it or seen any of the film adaptations. The main character is Joanna Eberhard, who moves with her husband, Walter, and children to the seemingly idyllic community of Stepford. She soon notices there is something odd and docile about most of the other women in the town and the few free spirits she encounters seem to be creepily changed somehow after a few months living there. 

The basic gist is that the men of the town have a secret society and have found a way to turn their partners into "perfect" housewives. Joanna realises she needs to escape from Stepford to avoid a similar fate and the story takes a tense turn as she flees. That section was very well written and I had to keep reading to find out whether she made it out or not. 

The edition I read had an introduction by Chuck Pahlahniuk, the author of Fight Club and several other novels. I read the intro after I had read the book - to avoid spoilers. (That proved to be a good choice!) Chuck thinks The Stepford Wives is a warning of a backlash against feminism and that Levin is just illustrating a more fundamental truth - men will just find a different way of putting women in boxes. It's an interesting take and shows that even a comparatively short novel can have depth and layers to it. 

I recognised the titles of most of Levin's other novels and would like to read more of his work, which I think is the highest credit a reader can give. The Stepford Wives really captivated me and I've found myself thinking about it several times after I finished the book. 

"It's a little bit Nineteen Eighty-Four...

...when it feels like every book on the shelf is Nineteen Eighty-Four!"

What's your favourite cover?

This photo was taken at TK Maxx, where the shelves are groaning under Orwell's books at the moment. TK is where I bought the book about Nineteen Eighty-Four and a copy of Homage to Catalonia that I reviewed last year. 

The book is out of copyright so any publisher can produce a copy. There must be a vibe in the zeitgeist that's making so many publishers send this to the printers at the moment. 

Books of the Month - a double dose of George Orwell

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. 

Categorising "speculative" fiction

I was in a recent conversation about what classed as 'speculative fiction' and how it was different to science fiction. This followed an observation that when established authors decide to write stories set in the future they prefer to describe it as speculative fiction rather than science fiction. 

To me there is a difference. Speculating on how the world might turn out doesn't necessarily relate to changes in our scientific understanding of the world, which is a cornerstone of science fiction, nor does it depend on the ability of humans to deploy science to push back boundaries.

There was also a question of alternate history (alt-hist), which is also 'speculative', but that seems quite clearly defined already so we can save the term 'speculative' to apply to stories of a possible future instead of a different version of now. 

A suitably spacey photo...

I also divvy up sci-fi into science fiction and space fantasy (also occasionally called 'space opera'). This roughly follows the rules of 'hard' and 'soft' science fiction, although I'm not keen on those distinctions. They are dated and don't really capture the intersections of scientific progress.

The old rule used to be that 'hard' science-fiction bent or changed one rule of science, while in 'soft' science-fiction, pretty much anything goes. Keeping the former as science fiction, I'd describe space fantasy as advanced technologies separated by vast time periods from our present, or unconnected to current human history at all, like the Star Wars films being set 'a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away'. 

Here are some examples of books I've read in the four rough categories...

Alt-hist - changes details in the past to create a different set of events, or a different contemporary reality. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth explores how the USA could have adopted Nazi ideology in the 1930s. I'd also include Jasper Fforde's books about Thursday Next here and any other books about a world that looks a bit like ours but is different in some way.

Speculative fiction - starts (broadly) with where we are now and predicts what might happen in the future. This can drift towards science fiction when something novel is introduced (like triffids, for example) but the emphasis is always on the human side of things rather than the technology. Well known examples would be The Handmaid's Tale, or Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World (in a previous generation). JG Ballard's books The Drowned World and The Drought fit more here rather than in science fiction.

Science fiction - stories that revolve around or focus on a particular discovery, advance in knowledge or change in technology. 2001: A Space Odyssey and I, Robot fit here because humans discover or introduce something that changes the world. I feel this is getting rarer as a genre in terms of new releases. However, the Expanse novel series is a good example of how this genre can still produce new compelling stories.

Space Fantasy - examples would be Dune by Frank Herbert, the Culture novels by Iain M Banks, novels set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and several of Alastair Reynolds's books. I enjoyed reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's books Children of Time and Children of Ruin, and both of those belong in this category. 

These are just my own categories and I'm probably inconsistent. But then I'm only classifying books for my own enjoyment, so it probably doesn't matter which category books end up in.