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of human totality, personified by Orwell in the all-wise, benevolent, almost god-like father figure of Big Brother. Obviously Communism represented the `above the line' masculine attributes of strength, power, discipline and order. But it also claimed to speak in the name of the selfless `feminine' values, the need to fight on behalf of all those `below the line, to protect the oppressed. In holding out its Utopian vision of the ideal Socialist society, in which all egotism and exploitation have been abolished and all its members can march towards the `radiant future, bound together in total unity, it projected a universal image of fully-realised humanity: body, mind, heart and soul in perfect balance. But this was no more than a colossal act of make-believe. There was no genuine balance to Communism. Certainly it represented power and organisation. but only as expressions of collectivised egotism, to be imposed on others. It had no lifegiving feminine qualities at all. It was utterly heartless and soulless. It represented the `dark masculine' in the grip of the `dark feminine, the ego masquerading as the Self.

This is why Orwell's novel is still so powerful, because, without using such language, it captures all this so accurately. Winston Smith comes to recognise that the system is all a lie, a dark inversion of the truth, and it is this which connects him to Julia, the anima-figure who represents instinct, individual feeling, everything the system cannot tolerate. But in the end the brutalised `dark masculine' hits back, crushing them into submission, stamping out their feelings, their desire for truth, every last, selfless `feminine' quality within them. In this sense, as a complete inversion of the book of job, it can be read as one of the darkest stories ever conceived.

What Orwell was not to know, since he was writing in 1948 when Stalin's tyranny was at its height, was that the time would come, only a few decades later, when the whole of this particular system of tyranny would come tumbling down, for precisely the reasons he intuitively grasped in his novel. All over the Soviet empire, from Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov in Russia to Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement in Poland, individuals would see how the claims of that ruling consciousness represented by the Party did not match up to the bleak, heartless, soulless reality based on lies they saw all around them. Eventually, from `below the line', they would develop sufficient inner strength to bring the entire, decayed, corrupt, `above the line' structure crashing in ruins. In this sense Winston Smith was destined ultimately to win: because, like the Savage in Brave New World, he represented that Self, that core of individual human identity, which can never be wholly suppressed. In the end, it will always somehow re-emerge, because the archetypes programmed into the human psyche cannot be cheated and can never die.3

`Everybody is suspected in turn, and the streets are full of lurking agents whose allegiances we cannot know. Nobody seems guiltless, nobody seems safe; and then, suddenly, the murderer is spotted, and - relief? - he is not, after all, a person like you or me. He is a villain - known to the trade as George Gruesome - and he has been caught by an infallible Power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly where to fix the guilt.'

Edmund Wilson, `Why do people read detective stories?; The New Yorker, 1944

One particularly fascinating consequence of the psychological revolution in the way stories are told over the past two centuries is the way it has given rise to a wholly new type of plot. Furthermore, it is one which has provided the modern world with one of its most popular forms of storytelling.

The essence of a story based on the Mystery is that it begins by posing a riddle, usually through the revelation that some baffling crime has been committed. Our interest then centres round the efforts of its central figure to unravel this riddle, as by tracking down the identity of the person responsible for the crime. Obviously