Reviews with content warning for Antisemitism - 1984

2021 review:

I first read 1984 in high school. Being homeschooled, there wasn't any discussion or context for it, my mother just handed me a list of classic books she read in high school and told me to have at it. I remember very few of the books I read off that list, but I do remember I hated 1984. Absolutely loathed it. I read a lot of dystopian back then, but it was young adult dystopian where there were rebellions and the heroic protagonists overthrew the evil government by the end of the trilogy. A dystopian book where the protagonist wasn't "good" and the evil government won was inconceivable to me. Plus there was sex in this, and I was very much not comfortable with that.

I picked it up again because I read Brave New World, another classic dystopian written a little bit earlier, and I wanted to compare the two. I didn't end up doing a lot of comparing, though, because I ended up reexperiencing the story. With the benefits of being not a sheltered high schooler and having enough adult awareness to see the many ways the world is screwed up (and the maturity to not immediately throw the book in the "not suitable for Good Christian Readers" pile the instant sex is mentioned), I was able to read it in a whole new light.

From endless wars where the enemy changes but the demand for patriotism doesn't to constant government surveillance to strong stratification between upper and lower classes, much of this book maps directly onto my modern experience. The Party has a distinctly communist feel, but I don't know if that's because George Orwell actually feared the oppression would come from communism or because he just took a lot of imagery and ideas from the Soviet Union to make it. (Wikipedia suggests he just opposed totalitarianism in all forms, not specifically communism.) I found the telescreens used to both broadcast and spy highly ironic, because I'm pretty sure TVs don't have the technology to broadcast our actions or words back to anyone but our phones sure do and we voluntarily take them everywhere.

You can read this as an interesting dystopian with elements of current reality, or you can let it make you really depressed. I went back and forth on how I was experiencing it. But I finally understand why this is a book people make high schoolers read.

Since this is a reread, this review has more been about my changing understanding of the book than the book itself. It is well written, with a solid world dominated by a totalitarian government and a fairly unlikeable narrator that you manage to root for anyway, and a really horrifying amount of brainwashing torture that spans roughly the last third of the book. It's quite good, and shockingly prescient considering it was published 72 years ago. I don't think it's one that I'll reread repeatedly, but reading it with adult eyes was definitely worthwhile.

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