"Rich and compelling. . .Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory.” --George Packer, The Atlantic An authoritative, wide-ranging, and incredibly timely history of 1984--its literary sources, its composition by Orwell, its deep and lasting effect on the Cold War, and its vast influence throughout world culture at every level, from high to pop. 1984 isn't just a novel; it's a key to understanding the modern world. George Orwell's final work is a treasure chest of ideas and memes--Big Brother, the Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, 2+2=5--that gain potency with every year. Particularly in 2016, when the election of Donald Trump made it a bestseller ("Ministry of Alternative Facts," anyone?). Its influence has morphed endlessly into novels (The Handmaid's Tale), films (Brazil), television shows (V for Vendetta), rock albums (Diamond Dogs), commercials (Apple), even reality TV (Big Brother). The Ministry of Truth is the first book that fully examines the epochal and cultural event that is 1984 in all its aspects: its roots in the utopian and dystopian literature that preceded it; the personal experiences in wartime Great Britain that Orwell drew on as he struggled to finish his masterpiece in his dying days; and the political and cultural phenomena that the novel ignited at once upon publication and that far from subsiding, have only grown over the decades. It explains how fiction history informs fiction and how fiction explains history.
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If this book had ended a chapter sooner, I would have given it a solid five-star rating. Instead, in the last chapter, author Dorian Lynskey succumbed to the most boring, cliched, overwrought hysteria imbibed by the boring and overwrought to discover in the not-leftist-of-the-moment if not the true Big Brother, then something that could pass for Big Brother if one squints just right.
Oh, bother.
Up to that point, this book is something of a tour de force.
It has three broad sections. The first section surveys all of the influences that preceded Orwell's “1984.” I say preceded rather than influenced because it is not clear whether or how much influence earlier authors and books had on Orwell. Thus, we are introduced to the Utopian genre and its classics before moving into the dystopias that began cropping up after the Russian Revolution. With respect to the latter we get a discussion of Zamyetin's “We” and Huxley's “Brave New World,” both of which seem to contain elements that Orwell would combine in 1984. There is a longish section on H.G. Wells - virtually a mini-biography - who developed the utopian and anti-utopian sub-genres of science fiction. We learn that Orwell and Wells knew each other, that in his later years, that Wells became something of an egotistical crank, and that Orwell didn't much get along with Wells.
The second section is simply about Orwell and the book itself. This section gives a relatively brief survey of Orwell's life and his writing of Animal Farm and 1984. He wrote the latter while fighting tuberculosis; he would die of TB in 1949 barely appreciating the success of 1984.
1984 is a rare book that captures both a moment and speaks to eternity. Totalitarianism was very much in the air in 1948, but it was also a new - and yet, somehow, ancient - form of government. 1984 spoke to the specific moment of a totalitarian superpower taking over the ancient countries of Europe. It also spoke to what was timeless about that moment; the eternal quality of government power unhindered by human virtue.
The third section speaks to the legacy of 1984. We are told how 1984 shaped political discourse and pop culture. We are told about plays, TV shows and movies. (I've been inspired enough to purchase the 1984 version of 1984 on DVD.) We get a surprising bit of information about David Bowie and his fascination with 1984, albeit maybe too much, but, on the other hand, Bowie and rock music have something to say to and about popular culture. As much, perhaps, as a movie or a play.
Lynskey seems to have dug into the Orwell archive. I've appropriated this quotation as a nice way of capturing my concerns about Antifa street thugs:
“Orwell wrote in his review of Borkenau, anticipating the title of Emmanuel Goldstein's book in Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. “The sin of nearly all leftwingers from 1933 onwards,” he later wrote, “is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.”
Lynskey, Dorian. The Ministry of Truth (p. 47). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Lynskey cites a letter to Arthur Koestler as a source. (“The sin of nearly all leftwingers”—Orwell, “Arthur Koestler,” CW XVI, 2548, p. 394.)
This makes for a pithy aphorism:
“The sin of nearly all leftwingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.”
- George Orwell
It also seems to explain the Antifa totalitarians in the streets who pride themselves on being “anti-Fascist” without reflecting on the role that their predecessors played in supporting the equally monstrous but longer-lived totalitarianism that Orwell wrote about.
And that leads up to my complaint.
In the last chapter, Lyndsey joins the party line and reveals that Donald Trump is not Big Brother exactly, but horrifically employing the dark arts of the Inner Party:
“Still, there are precedents in Orwell's writing. During Trump's campaign against Hillary Clinton, it was hard to watch the candidate whipping supporters into a cry of “Lock her up!” without being reminded of the Two Minutes Hate and Orwell's description of the Party mindset: “a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party.”
Really? Was it the “Two Minutes Hate” or, to play the devil's advocate, was it a democratic expression of community outrage that “laws are only for the little people” while those with connections can get away scot-free with acts that would see someone who was not a Clinton indicted? This sense grows only stronger now that we have seen how the former Director of the FBI can violate security clearance laws, leak information, start a baseless investigation for two years, and, then, escape indictment, while opponents of the state can live to see SWAT teams breaking in their doors at 3 am with CNN stationed across the street because they have misremembered a date.
Which is more Orwellian?
Likewise, although painting Trump as an incipient fascist, Lyndskey says nothing about the street-level thuggery of Antifa or how leftists are suppressing speech on college campuses or how leftists are using their clout with internet companies to “deplatform” competing ideas.
What would Orwell have thought about that, one wonders?
We get the obligatory Kellianne Conway mentioned “alternative facts,” as an Orwellian abandonment of objective truth, but apparently the modern delusion that people with penises can be “women” is nothing like 2+2=5.
Of course, my writing that will probably cause this review to be unpublishable....and how Orwellian is that?
It must have been so very rewarding for Lynskey to drop into conventional, boring, cliches, but it was so very stupid. Equating Trump in any way to Stalin, let alone Big Brother, does a disservice to the resistance to totalitarianism and to the victims of totalitarianism. Certainly, it is a quick way to earn five-star ratings and loud applause from the coastal elites and their fellow-travelers, but it is so brain dead and obscures deeper insights.
It also insults the intelligence of us who don't buy into the potty ideologies of the left or right. It offends those of us who are anti-totalitarian, and not merely anti-fascist.
