Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell D. J. Taylor
In an age of populism, Orwell’s writing offers warnings of the dangers of dictatorship
B(Yale, £18.99) ELIEFS change, thoughts change, but there is some inner part of the soul that does not change,’ wrote George Orwell, a statement that perennially provides grounds to connect new generations of readers with the writing of their forebears. In Orwell’s case, the continuing fascination nearly 75 years after his death has more precise and concrete grounds. To Orwell’s work —as novelist, journalist, polemicist and letter writer—has been attributed an unnerving prescience: his imagining of police states of
inescapable, wraparound surveillance, totalitarian tyrannies, the hegemony of brutalism, whether that brutalism is expressed in Russian violence towards Ukraine or the elimination of political nuance in the use of X/twitter as a platform for presidential thinking.
Orwell is best remembered as the author of Animal Farm and 1984. His reputation does not rest, as he once hoped, on ‘enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings’, but on this brace of novels. ‘I am against all dictatorships,’ he wrote to a friend in 1945: in an age of populism, his writing continues to offer warnings of the dangers of dictatorship. Orwell’s fictional output also included the four novels before Animal Farm, in D. J. Taylor’s assessment all ‘about middleclass people on their uppers, trying to keep their heads above water in an increasingly hostile world’.
Here, Mr Taylor offers readers an absorbing companion to Orwell’s wide-ranging output arranged thematically; different chapters cover women, popular culture, class and, inevitably, politics. If the book’s title is excused by the prominence of 1984 in popular perceptions of Orwell’s work, it
may also lead to a degree of disappointment, as Mr Taylor’s evenhandedness means that Orwell’s dystopian novel occupies only the latter part of his survey. His account is detailed, illuminating, accessible and engagingly partisan. ‘Naturally, there are several things to say in Orwell’s defence,’ he comments: his defence of his subject is consistently robust. He examines the biographical and cultural context of Orwell’s output, including his unexpectedly powerful use of the Edwardian patois of his youth— ‘beastly’, ‘frightful’, ‘dreadful’— which peppers his writing like verbal underlinings. Only once was I less than convinced, in a discussion of Orwell’s persistent use of animal imagery that felt more descriptive than explanatory. Matthew Dennison