The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
What Orwell needed? A woman’s touch
In rewriting ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ from Julia’s perspective, Sandra Newman has pulled off a deft trick
400pp, Granta, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£18.99, ebook £14.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
It’s a formidable task, to take on a classic and remake it from a new perspective. The bar is set high by Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which in telling the story of Bertha Mason – the first Mrs Rochester, the madwoman in the attic – is both response and prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), the reader sees a different side of Odysseus’s tale; more recently Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships (2019) offered another feminine perspective on the Trojan War.
But all these are, in some way, oblique views of the books from which they spring. In Julia, the American novelist Sandra Newman courageously takes on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, by mirroring the tale through the eyes of Winston Smith’s lover. Spoiler alert: she succeeds, brilliantly.
We know the story, or at least we think we do. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, Orwell’s final work before his death the following year. The novel is set in a dystopian future of totalitarianism and perpetual war, and it seems almost ridiculous to remark on the way in which its vision and language have entered our culture: Newspeak, doublethink, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength”, and of course, Big Brother himself. Smith and Julia attempt to resist the power of the State but cannot, finally, succeed. “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!” Winston cries when faced, in Room 101, with rats, his worst fear.
But who is Julia? Tucked into Orwell’s novel is the seed for Newman’s. “In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda,” Orwell writes. “Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs that fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, ‘just to keep people frightened’.”
So Newman builds her Julia: cynical, practical and forged by suffering she barely perceives – since she was so young when it began – into a ruthless survivor. If you want an argument against the ghastly canard that the protagonists of novels (particularly when they happen to be women) must be “likeable”, Julia is a fine example.
“All her life, Julia had obeyed the unwritten rules that kept her far from guilt,” Newman writes of her (anti)heroine. “She had known who was safe, and felt an unfeigned disgust for unsafe people. Instinctively she’d loved the lucky and the clever. If she ever took a risk, it wasn’t for fools. It wasn’t for the dead or those half-dead. It was actually cruel to give them hope.”
She works, as Orwell’s Julia does, at the Ministry of Truth, toiling as a mechanic on the great machines that produce Fiction for the Party; now that all our work is being gobbled up by the great machines of AI, the work the Ministry does is eerily familiar. She lives in a dormitory, schemes with and betrays the other girls who live there; falls for Winston for the violence she sees in his face. Their lovers’ trajectory follows the path of Nineteen EightyFour – until it does not.
If you want my advice, don’t re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four before reading Newman’s take: go back when you’ve finished. You will then feel how powerfully Newman inhabits and remakes Orwell’s text, in her careful use of language, the images she chooses to echo or change, the way she remoulds Orwell’s characters into something truly original. For instance: Newman engages deeply not only with sex but also with the consequences and costs of sex, with the blood and depth of it. This is truly a book about being in the body of a woman.
Julia is a fascinating, violent novel; it’s perhaps a little too long, but so atmospheric that one can forgive it for that. Newman accomplishes the challenge she set herself – and then some.