1984

What It Is

A short novel, written between 1946 and 1948 on the island of Jura in the Hebrides, in a farmhouse with no electricity, by a man dying of tuberculosis. Secker and Warburg published it in June 1949. Orwell was dead seven months later, at forty-six.

It is not a prophecy about the year 1984, and Orwell said so, irritably, when the first reviewers read it as one. Nor is it only about the Soviet Union, though he had watched Stalinism at close range in Spain and never got over it. He described it as a satire, and its target is an idea rather than a country: the idea that power might extend not just to what people do, but to what is true.

The world he builds is not sleek. It is a world of broken lifts, bad gin, boiled cabbage, blocked drains and blunt razor blades, and that grubbiness is the most brilliant decision in the book.

Why It Matters

Orwell handed us the words we now use to describe the thing itself. Doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, memory hole, unperson, Big Brother, two plus two equals five. A novelist who alters the vocabulary of politics in every language on earth has done something no argument could.

His real subject is narrower and more frightening than tyranny. It is the manufacture of truth: what happens to a society when the past can be edited, when language is engineered to make certain thoughts unavailable, and when a state stops caring whether you obey and starts caring what you believe. Read his essay Politics and the English Language, written in 1946, and you can watch him arriving at it.

It is also the most abused book on this list. Everyone quotes it against their opponents; almost nobody applies it to themselves. Reading it properly is partly a matter of resisting that temptation for three hundred pages.

Before You Read

Three hundred pages, seven to nine hours, and it moves. Read it in a few long sittings; it is constructed as a build-up of pressure.

Be warned that it is not a thriller, and Orwell is not writing to entertain you.

There is one long stretch that many readers skim, and some editions even encourage them to. Do not. It is the argument the whole novel is built to test.

Whatever edition you buy, check that the appendix on the principles of Newspeak is in it, and read that too. It is not an afterthought, and it is doing more than it appears to.

Which Edition to Read

• Wordsworth Classics (2021), with an introduction and notes by Sally Minogue — recommended. The best value in print: the complete text with the Newspeak appendix, a genuinely useful introduction, and notes that explain the wartime and post-war English world Orwell was writing out of, which most editions leave you to guess at. The cost: it is a budget paperback, and it feels like one in the hand. Minogue's introduction discusses the novel in full, so save it for afterwards. View on Amazon →
• Penguin Modern Classics, with a foreword by Thomas Pynchon (2003). The standard British edition, and Pynchon's foreword is a real essay, sharp on how the book was captured by the Cold War Right and what it does and does not say. The cost: the foreword ranges across the whole novel, so it is another one to read last, and the edition is otherwise unannotated.
• Signet Classic, with an afterword by Erich Fromm (1961). The American paperback that generations read at school, cheap and everywhere. The cost: small type, and Fromm's afterword is now a period piece, more interesting as evidence of how 1961 read the book than as a guide to it.

Take the Wordsworth for the notes, the Penguin for Pynchon, the Signet if you want the copy your parents had. The Folio Society issued a fine edition in 2014, illustrated by Jonathan Burton and introduced by Alan Rusbridger: the one to own, not the one to carry.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read Orwell's essays alongside it. Politics and the English Language, Notes on Nationalism and Why I Write are all short, and together they show you that the novel is not a fantasy but a position arrived at by argument.

Watch the language, not the plot. Every time a word is redefined, something is being done to somebody.

Pay attention to the objects: the coral, the diary, the razor blades, the smell of the stairwell. Most imagined tyrannies gleam. Orwell's smells of boiled cabbage, and that is why his is the one that convinces.

The commonest mistake is to read it as a book about somewhere else.