Endings are where novels make their final argument. Everything that precedes the last pages, the characters, the plot, the accumulating weight of the world the novel has constructed, converges in the ending and is given its final shape. The ending does not simply conclude the story. It tells you what the story was for, what…
There is a novel that does everything. It is comic and tragic simultaneously, in proportions that shift without warning. It is a realistic political satire and a work of magic realism and a folktale and an epic and a love story and a bureaucratic farce. It is set in a fictional African country called Aburiria…
There is a line in 1984 that functions as the novel’s most quoted political statement and its most carefully concealed trap. If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles. Winston writes this in his diary early in the novel, before he has met Julia, before O’Brien has revealed himself, before the machinery…
There is a reading of Julia that has become so standard it is now essentially invisible. In this reading, Julia is Winston’s love interest. She is younger than him, more physical, less intellectual, more practical, less ideological. She does not care about the theory of the regime. She does not want to understand the mechanics…
Most readers understand Room 101 as a horror device. The room where your worst fear waits. The room that breaks you. The room that the Party uses as its ultimate instrument of compulsion, the place beyond which there is nothing left to threaten because it contains the thing you cannot bear. It has entered the…
Begin with a simple observation that becomes less simple the longer you sit with it. The narrators of the greatest dystopian novels are, almost without exception, people who cannot fully see their own situation. Winston Smith does not understand the true nature of O’Brien until it is too late. Offred admits repeatedly that she is…
There is a comparison so frequently made that it has become a reflex. North Korea is 1984. Kim Jong-un is Big Brother. The portraits on the wall, the mandatory worship, the surveillance, the rewriting of history, the enforced public grief when a leader dies, the citizens who inform on their neighbours, the prison camps where…
There is a theory of language buried inside 1984 that most readers encounter without recognising it as a theory. They read about Newspeak. They understand that it is a reduced language, that the Party is shrinking the vocabulary of English, that words are being eliminated and simplified and flattened until the range of expressible thought…
There is a particular kind of reader who finishes 1984 feeling that Winston Smith was unlucky. If he had been more careful. If he had not trusted O’Brien. If he had found a better hiding place for the diary. If Julia had not broken first, or if the Brotherhood had been real, or if the…
There is a sentence that has been quoted so many times it has stopped being read. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Most readers who encounter this sentence for the first time register a small jolt — the number thirteen, unexpected where twelve should be — and…