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 disappointment that some readers feel after finishing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. They have heard the novel is devastating. They have been told it is one of the great novels of the twenty-first century. They sit down to read it and find, on the page, a quiet first-person…
Every reader who has worked through the Western dystopian canon has, whether they noticed or not, been trained to expect one of three endings. The first is the tragic ending. The regime wins. The protagonist is broken. The novel closes with the reader feeling the full weight of the loss, and the warning the book…