In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [58]
Animal Farm is one of the most spectacular Emperor-Has-No-Clothes books of the twentieth century, and it got George Orwell into trouble accordingly. People who run counter to the current popular wisdom, who point out the uncomfortably obvious, are likely to be strenuously baa-ed at by herds of angry sheep. I didn’t have all that figured out at the age of nine, of course—not in any conscious way. But we learn the patterns of stories before we learn their meanings, and Animal Farm has a very clear pattern.
Then along came Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. Thus I read it in paperback a couple of years later, when I was in high school. Then I read it again, and again: it was right up there among my favourite books, along with Wuthering Heights. At the same time, I absorbed its two companions, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I was keen on all three of them, but I understood Darkness at Noon to be a tragedy about events that had already happened, and Brave New World to be a satirical comedy, with events that were unlikely to unfold in exactly that way. (“Orgy-Porgy,” indeed.) But Nineteen Eighty-Four struck me as more realistic, probably because Winston Smith was more like me, a skinny person who got tired a lot and was subjected to physical education under chilly conditions—this was a feature of my school—and who was silently at odds with the ideas and the manner of life proposed for him. (This may be one of the reasons Nineteen Eighty-Four is best read when you are an adolescent; most adolescents feel like that.) I sympathized particularly with Winston Smith’s desire to write his forbidden thoughts down in a deliciously tempting secret blank book: I myself had not yet started to write, but I could see the attractions of it. I could also see the dangers because it’s this scribbling of his—along with illicit sex, another item with considerable allure for a teenager of the 1950s—that gets Winston into such a mess.
Animal Farm charts the progress of an idealistic movement of liberation toward a totalitarian dictatorship headed by a despotic tyrant; Nineteen Eighty-Four describes what it’s like to live entirely within such a system. Its hero, Winston Smith, has only fragmentary memories of what life was like before the present dreadful regime set in: he’s an orphan, a child of the collectivity. His father died in the war that has ushered in the repression, and his mother has disappeared, leaving him with only the reproachful glance she gave him as he betrayed her over a chocolate bar—a small betrayal that acts both as the key to Winston’s character and as a precursor to the many other betrayals in the book.
The government of Airstrip One, Winston’s “country,” is brutal. The constant surveillance, the impossibility of speaking frankly to anyone, the looming, ominous figure of Big Brother, the regime’s need for enemies and wars—fictitious though both may be—which are used to terrify the people and unite them in hatred, the mind-numbing slogans, the distortions of language, the destruction of what has really happened by stuffing any record of it down the Memory Hole—these made a deep impression on me. Let me restate that: they frightened the stuffing out of me. Orwell was writing a satire about Stalin’s Soviet Union, a place about which I knew very little at the age of fourteen, but he did it so well that I could imagine such things happening anywhere.
There is no love interest in Animal Farm, but there is one in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston finds a soulmate in Julia, outwardly a devoted Party fanatic, secretly a girl who enjoys sex and makeup and other spots of decadence. But the two lovers are discovered, and Winston is tortured for thoughtcrime: inner disloyalty to the regime. He feels that if he can only remain faithful in his heart to Julia, his soul will be saved—a romantic concept, though one we are likely to endorse. But like all absolutist governments and