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I first read ��1984�� when I was about 17, so more than 40 years ago now. I decided to re-read it after learning it was at least partly inspired by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We��, which I read just before Christmas.

When a book is this famous, I usually try to make some personal rather than general comments, but I feel I ought to say how brilliant Orwell’s descriptive powers were in this book. There is the sheer grimness of Ingsoc London, the decrepit, verminous houses, the disgusting slops Smith is given to eat, the stink of unwashed bodies, and more. More striking still is the climate of constant terror, and the total powerlessness of the ordinary citizen in the face of the Party. Lastly of course, is the fact that the imagery of this novel was so powerful that the terms “Big Brother��, “Room 101�� and “memory hole��, became part of the English language - not to mention the title itself.

I remembered much of the book from my first read, but there were a few comparisons with Zamyatin’s novel that I had forgotten about. One was the Party’s view that the individual should have no individual consciousness. To the Party, an individual was no more than a piece of fingernail is to the human body. That seems an idea straight out of Zamyatin’s book.

On the other hand, I personally think that much of 1984 was derived from Orwell’s own life, especially his life in the late 1930s. Firstly there was his experience in the Spanish Civil War, when the small Marxist group that he joined, the POUM, was suppressed by the main Catalan Communist Party, the PSUC. Orwell evaded the crackdown because he was in hospital at the time, having been wounded at the front, but he had to flee to France to escape being arrested and quite possibly killed. To justify their actions, the PSUC claimed that the POUM were fascists in disguise. I think this probably inspired Orwell’s vision of the ludicrous propaganda claims made by the Party in ��1984��.

In the novel the world is run by 3 competing powers, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, and Oceania is always at war with one or the other, although it constantly changes as to which one. When a change occurs, everyone in Oceania switches overnight from hating one enemy to hating the other, and seems not to even remember the previous situation. I know from reading some of Orwell’s essays that he was struck by the way many people reacted to the signing of the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, by switching overnight from criticising to defending the Nazis, without the least difficulty. Then on 22 June 1941 they immediately switched back to their previous position. I can’t help thinking this influenced the whole Eurasia/Eastasia thing in ��1984��.

Thankfully, the full extent of Orwell’s despairing vision hasn’t come true, at least not yet, but there’s still plenty in here with parallels to the modern world. Anyone who wants to participate in “Hate Week�� can just go on to Twitter, where it runs for 52 weeks of the year. One element of the novel I hadn’t remembered was the Party’s ability to force people to deny objective reality, exemplified by their claim that 2 + 2 = 5, whenever they wanted it to. I remember a year or so ago there was a whole Twitter debate on that very subject. There’s also the aspect that Winston Smith’s job involved altering the past.

If you’ve never read the book, or if like me you last read it in school, then it’s still relevant and worth reading. Doubleplusgood!