Name: Matthew Jackson's review of 1984 by George Orwell
Item: 1984
Rating: 4
Author: Matthew Jackson

George Orwell

Written more than 70 years ago, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever...

Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the Party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. But as he starts to think for himself, Winston can’t escape the fact that Big Brother is always watching...

A startling and haunting novel, 1984 creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the novel’s hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions—a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.

1984

George Orwell’s 1984 takes on new life with extraordinary relevance and renewed popularity. “Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.”—The New Yorker In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be. Lionel Trilling said of Orwell’s masterpiece, “1984 is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present.” Though the year 1984 now exists in the past, Orwell’s novel remains an urgent call for the individual willing to speak truth to power.

Ruby Long

It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love

Mr Charrington only pretending to be old to trick Winston so he would seem reminiscent of the past. When O’brien says the Brotherhood transform peoples appearances it never occurs to Winston that the Party do the same. 

Evie Sprite

Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply. A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared; Winston suddenly realised whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the telescreen. Mr Charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was still recognisable, but he was not the same person any longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the hrst time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.

Winston has been lulled into a stupefied sense of safety. It affirms his own beliefs so he no longer feels alone. 

Orwell may also be reminding audiences that the warning he is delivering is one they already know?

The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction.

The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. 

Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the armchair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimnes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it ata different place and found himself at the third chapter.

In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be perfect.

Doublethink. The Party is even able to use this to their advantage as it becomes another event to hate Goldstein for. 

 a scrap of paper was slipped into speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot.

creates link between sex and hate week, reinforcing his idea that sexual frustration is weaponised by the Party. 

On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the flms, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpil- lars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns-after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the two thousand Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces-at just this moment it had been announced that VCeania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war With Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally. 

Oranges and lemons,' say the bells of St Clement's, 

You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's, 

When will you pay me?' say the bells of Old Bailey, 

When I grow rich,' say the bells of Shoreditch.

Probably you will not even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a different person, with a different face.

Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing he had read and dreamed about. Like the glass paperweight or Mr Charrington's half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like that of blackberry jam, and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it. He set down the empty glass.

We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organisation working against the Party, and that you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought- criminals. We are also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves In any other way, we are ready.

But they do. This foreshadows O’Brien saying the Party’s goal is to squeeze people empty and fill them with ‘ourselves’ —> signifies the destruction of humanity. 

‘I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you - that would be the real betrayal."

 She thought it over. ‘They can't do that’, she said finally. 'lt's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything-- anythingbut they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.’

To be human is to have private loyalties. 

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture (…) could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, has remained in this condition. 

it had consisted in--a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopters blew them both to pieces.

did O’Brien torture Syme into giving up Winston? Perhaps Syme did see through Winston’s frail attempt at orthodoxy?

'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien. That is not only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an expert. His name has slipped my memory for the moment.

he realised how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.

The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

Thus associates the rat with goldstein. the rat came out from the wainscotting immediately below the picture of the church covering the telescreen. The rat is a warning

She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during the Two Minutes Hate.

Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.

Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; ‘they', meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could. She seemed to think it was just as natural that ‘they' should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used Newspeak words, except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organised revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation-people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

She obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked

No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

He sat down with a friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pickaxe right into the middle of it. 

He had absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her. There was no enquiry he could make. She might have been vaporised, she might have committed suicide, she might have been transferred to the other end of Oceania: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.

Matthew Jackson

Lynn

This book is deeply disturbing. I DNF'd this book 2 years ago around 30% and although I'm happy to have finished it now. This classic did not tickle my fancy in the slightest. The ideas it poses are important and incredulously gore. The last chapters are what turned me off, the deliberate description of torture were not something I thought I signed up for. The dystopian features of this book and historical commentary did bring value to the book. However, I would not pick this up again. Basically the only thing that got me through it was Stephen Fry's narrating.

Gavin

Intentionally mind-numbing. The prose isn't up to his extraordinarily high standard.

Cathy Trình

"You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words"

Claire Jorgensen

Easily one of my must-read-in-this-lifetime book

Carisha Yabora

ebrar

I wish this book didn't sound so familiar

Ara Ascher

WORST BOOK EVER WRITTEN. CONTAINS NO RELEVANT STORY LINES!

Lacy W

Title: 1984
Author: George Orwell
Genre: Adult Dystopia
Format: my own paperback book
Star Rating: 2.5 stars

tw: misogyny, antisemitism, war, parental death, assault, burning, torture, mind control

So, I read this book back in high school, over 10 years ago. I know, I am old. I remember thinking “Oh this is such a good book!” I also felt really proud of myself for reading an “adult” book. Up until that point, I had normally read young adult books. I found a beautiful paperback edition, while I was thrift shopping of course, and thought “Great! I’ll give this another go and see if it holds up!”

Ugh. This book sucked and I am so disappointed that I did not like it the second time around. Sure, the message was good. Big Brother is always watching, etc, etc. It’s a metaphor for the government and how if it goes left unchecked, bad things will happen. I get that. My problem was with the main character, Winston, and the ending. I’ll explain both. 

Winston is the absolute whiniest main character I’ve ever read about and I read Shadow and Bone (if you all have read that book, you know who I’m talking about). He wanted to kill a woman because he was attracted to her. Who does that? In fact, he dislikes all women and had nasty things to say about them. He would constantly shit on women because they used their feminine wiles to get people to join some sort of group. He also had such an ego about him that was completely undeserved. He knew he wasn’t a catch but at the same time, still acted like he was better than everyone just because he didn’t think like the others. 

The ending made me so mad. This is going to be a spoiler of sorts so read this next paragraph if you don’t care about spoilers or if you have already read the book. We were made to root for Winston, fighting against the Party. That things were going to go well for the Rebellion and that maybe we would see the Party getting taken down. But no. Winson learns to love the party and therefore loves Big Brother due to mind control. I don’t remember if I liked the ending or not when I read it in high school. I really just remember being confused. But now, I’m just mad. Thank god I only spent like one dollar on this book. 

Overall, I believe this is an important book about government control. But don’t rely on Winston to be an example of how to defeat said government control. He is nothing but a whiny, misogynistic wuss. I still recommend this book. Just be prepared to be mad about the ending and about Winston.

Nineteen Eighty-four [ 1984 ] (Italian Edition)

Andrea Bruno

Non leggetelo se in questo momento pensate che la società sia allo sfacelo. Molte delle cose che sembravano assurde quando questo libro è stato scritto ora sono possibili. È possibile controllare l'informazione e "cambiare il passato" senza che nessuno possa avere prove che alcun cambiamento sia stato fatto. Il libro è molto bello, ma leggendolo viene da pensare che qualcuno abbia pensato che Orwell stesse scrivendo un manuale...

Down and out in Paris and London.

Bleak, harrowing and enlightening. Like all Orwell's work I've read there are lessons in this book that are as relevant today as I'm sure they were when they were written. This is a fairly boring read for long stretches though.

Liam Richardson

Down and Out in Paris and London

Charlotte Dann

Rok 1984

Alienthe 

podobała mi się mimo ze prawie nic się nie działo 

jedna z lepszych lektur w kanonie. dodatkowy plus za to ze jest napisana normalnym językiem i da się to czytać

— lae

relatable because i too would defy society and betray the leader for some pussy

thank god this book wasn’t required for us to read back in high school because i’ve understood things but still my braincells are dumb for this. anyway what scares me is that looking at my country’s current situation–a former dictator’s son winning as president–i’m scared something like this or parts of it might happen or is happening but let’s hope not.

I was surprised I like this book. Overall very thought provoking. Despised every single character though, so it wasn't a very fun read.

Anna

Anna Ureta

HOMG! How did kids in high school read this? 

I'm only giving it a 4/5 because Part 1 is BS - like I could barely understand what was going on. 
Like I get what it was trying to do.... but no. Like Part 1 was just no. Like it needed to be rewritten better. 

Part 2-3 IS WHERE IT'S AT!!!!!! 

Now I see why this book is a big deal! 

I'm glad I waited until I was older to read this because I don't know necessarily that I would have loved it in high school - and let's be honest most teenagers don't have the concentration to sit and read something like this. Most people just used Spark Notes.

a novel

Nineteen eighty-four

victoria

I'd like to start by saying I don't think it's George Orwell's best work, the story itself is very interesting but the presentation and writing didn't hold me much.
 I think everyone knows how the plot is so I don't need to explain but I can definitely say that it's intense, the main character is kind of lacking - which makes sense in the story, since that's exactly the purpose of Big Brother - so you remain invested in the story solely out of a desire to discover more about this utopia and not out of identification or interest in the protagonist. Despite being super slow paced, I was stuck reading and I confess that at least until the 50% of the book it took me a while to read but from the key moment of the plot, the reading ended super fast, I really liked the development of this last part and I would like it very much had an alternate ending, I'd love to know if there really is a resistance and if at least people had some hope.

I wholeheartedly believe that everyone should read this book. It’s a book that leaves you feeling so many emotions, whilst feeling numb. The last line is just chilling; after witnessing everything the main character has had to go through, it’s a stomach dropping ending and it truly deserves the title of ‘best dystopian novel ever written’ 

Whilst I would say Animal Farm is a better classic to start with, this book is a more gripping read, where you can properly emerge yourself in the grim world.

I’d recommend for anyone looking to read about the importance of history, an example of abuse of privacy, or just wanting to read a good classic!

I wholeheartedly believe that everyone should read this book. It’s a book that leaves you feeling so many emotions, whilst feeling numb. The last line is just chilling; after witnessing everything the main character has had to go through, it’s a stomach dropping ending and it truly deserves the title of ‘best dystopian novel ever written’ 

Whilst I would say Animal Farm is a better classic to start with, this book is a more gripping read, where you can properly emerge yourself in the grim world.

I’d recommend for anyone looking to read about the importance of history, an example of abuse of privacy, or just wanting to read a good classic!

A classic that lived up to its billing. Harrowing how accurately it portrays elements of modern life.

Fred Rivett

When I read this my freshmen year of high school, I skipped the book. Glad I didn’t this time!

paun

It was okay but I kind of got bored and had to use the audiobook to not dnf it.

1984 is considered a work of political prophecy that continues to grow more haunting as it becomes more real with every passing day. It was published seventy years ago. English political novelist George Orwell wrote this dystopian tale as a warning against totalitarianism that told us what the world would be without the freedom to think. It has now become one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. This novel tells the story of Winston Smith, who lives in a society that follows a totalitarian ideology propagated by the party. In this repressive world big brother controls everything, telescreens see everything, police helicopters circle overhead all the time, the thought police uncover every Act of betrayal, the Ministry of love deals in pain and despair, the Ministry of peace wages war and dissent is not tolerated in the mind. Despite all this, in his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal. The terrifying glimpse into a future that Orwell gives us in 1984 where everyone is a slave to a tyrannical regime has made it perhaps the most influential book of the 20th century. With this special edition, we celebrate the 70th anniversary of this masterpiece.

primarily intriguing in its discussion of language however the politics were predictable and didn’t offer a fresh perspective. overall solid book

Reinier Terblanche

In 1984, Orwell creates a dystopian world ruled by a totalitarian political regime whose slogan reads: "War is Peace - Freedom is Slavery - Ignorance is Strength". It is a dark, unrelenting, and terrifying book. It essentially sketches what it would look like for a totalitarian regime (not unlike that of Stalin and Hitler) to conquer the West. The book shows how political propaganda fueled by deceitful but powerful ideologies can be used to control the minds of entire nations. This message is highly relevant to our time as we face ultra-woke ideologies that seek to take the seat of power in every sphere of society, especially in politics and education. "Groupthink", "doublethink", "thought crime", and "vaporisation" (cancel-culture) are some of the means that the fictitious party of Orwell's book employs to dominate the minds of ordinary people. Sound familiar? 

I think the book is scarily accurate about the origins, means, and results of totalitarian regimes. Furthermore, it points to the necessity and power held within the Judeo-Christian concept of free speech. 

1984 has something incredibly significant to say to our cultural moment.

Sintia

4.5 stars

A great dystopian novel, fascinating and scary at the same time.

Matthew Jackson &
1984 by George Orwell

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