Classics Club Book #6: Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell

Because I graduated from high school in 1984, I’ve always had a connection with both the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell and the rock album 1984 by Van Halen. Over the years, the former has grown in my estimation and the latter has declined. The album by Van Halen is something you outgrow. The novel by Orwell is something that grows with you.

I put Nineteen Eighty-four on my Classics Club list because I knew my daughter would be reading it in her senior high school literature class, and I wanted the chance to talk to her about it. Besides, it’s been at least twenty years since I read it, and I wanted to experience it again with more life behind me. I’m glad I did.

For those unfamiliar with the novel, it was published in 1949, and depicts a bleak world set thirty-five years in the future, hence the title, Nineteen Eighty-four. The protagonist Winston Smith lives in the totalitarian state of Oceania, in the province called Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain). Big Brother, the Party leader, watches everyone through two-way TV screens; independent thinking and individualism are snuffed out by Thought Police; and the past is constantly being rewritten to support the Party’s agenda. Winston gets curious about the world before Big Brother, and as he begins to assert his independence he has to watch his every step to evade the Thought Police and avoid being sent to the dreaded Room 101.

The last time I read Nineteen Eighty-four I was teaching Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to seventh graders, and I was trying to educate myself in classic dystopian literature. At the time I also read Huxley’s Brave New World, and I watched Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. Honestly, in the years that have passed since, they had all blended together like some kind of dystopian goulash. It was good to read Nineteen Eighty-four on its own.

Of course, there were some things that I remembered clearly from Nineteen Eighty-four: Big Brother, doublethink, the Thought Police. But I had no clear memory of how the novel ended, and I must say that Part III was as harrowing and disturbing as anything literature has to offer.

If you’ve never read it before, Nineteen Eighty-four is one of those books you shouldn’t miss. And if you haven’t read it since high school or college, pick it up and see how much it has to say to you now.

Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell
First edition London: Secker and Warburg, 1949
Kindle edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013
Print length: 322 pages