I prefer the version starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, but it's not available on YouTube
Whenever I tell somebody that I enjoy reading, some assure me they like reading too, and follow it through with "Do you have any favourite books?" When I answer "1984", they are surprised. "Wow, so many!" they reply.
"It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen." That first arresting sentence of George Orwell’s "Nineteen Eighty-Four" transports us immediately into a world that is real enough (the swirl of gritty dust, the acidic sickly gin, the smell of boiled cabbage) but is also alien and fantastic. Even now, in the age of the 24-hour clock, that number thirteen startles you, for no clock ever does physically strike thirteen, and its undercurrent of unluckiness adds to the sense of unease. It’s one of the best opening sentences I’ve ever read.
When I first read the book, the year of the title seemed impossibly far away. It was science fiction. But Orwell’s genius lay in making fantasy seem real, and the images have haunted me ever since, the nightmares reaching a climax in memories of Room 101 and the terrifying spectacle of a mind broken on the wheel of its own worst fear: rats.
In today's world of unfettered majoritarianism and repeated lockdowns, it deserves to be read again ... and again ... again. Click here.
A quote from "1984", as applicable today as it was then:
| "So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult." [page 67] |
