The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  CHAPTER 10

  Winston awakes with the conviction that the future belongs to the proles. His optimism is destroyed when a metallic voice from a concealed telescreen announces that he and Julia are under arrest. Mr. Charrington reveals himself to be a member of the Thought Police. The paperweight shatters.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 1

  Winston wakes up in a windowless white cell in the Ministry of Love. His cellmates include Parsons (who has been reported by his own daughter), Ampleforth and an old woman who might be his mother. Some of the prisoners are taken to a place called Room 101. O’Brien arrives and reveals that he has been working for the Party all along.

  CHAPTER 2

  Winston is tortured for weeks and confesses to numerous imaginary crimes. One day he is strapped to a bed and interrogated by O’Brien, receiving an electric shock every time he gives the wrong answer. O’Brien tells him that he is insane and must be cured before he is killed.

  CHAPTER 3

  The interrogation continues. O’Brien claims that he and fellow members of the Inner Party co-authored the book credited to Goldstein. He explains that the motive of the Party is pure power, which must be demonstrated by constant terror and control over reality. When Winston protests that the spirit of humanity will prevail, O’Brien forces him to look in the mirror and confront his physical ruination. He is broken, as he predicted, except in one respect: he has not betrayed Julia, although O’Brien claims that she has betrayed him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Weeks or months have passed. Winston feels much better now that he has succumbed to doublethink and the wisdom of the Party. But he still loves Julia and he still, to his surprise, hates Big Brother. O’Brien tells him he must go to Room 101.

  CHAPTER 5

  Room 101 contains the worst, most unendurable thing in the world. For Winston, that is a rat. Threatened with hungry rats tearing at his face, he betrays Julia. He is utterly defeated.

  CHAPTER 6

  Winston is drunk and alone in the Chestnut Tree Café, waiting for the news. Oceania is at war with Eurasia: Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. He recalls meeting Julia in the park, similarly crushed. They felt nothing for each other. He remembers his mother and sister for the last time. News of military victory in Africa fills him with joy, as does the thought of his execution. He loves Big Brother.

  APPENDIX: THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK

  A scholarly explanation of Newspeak, looking back at the events of 1984. The date and author of the appendix are not supplied.

  FOOTNOTES

  1. Over the last century, the Russian secret police has had many names, including the Cheka, OGPU, the NKVD, the KGB and the FSB. The mentality of the organisation has remained remarkably consistent.

  2. It may even have saved his life by removing him from the front before the Republican assault on Huesca a few weeks later, a bloody fiasco that wiped out around nine thousand anarchists and POUM members.

  3. That didn’t mean Orwell thought Mosley was harmless: “Mosley will bear watching, for experience shows (vide the careers of Hitler, Napoleon III) that to a political climber it is sometimes an advantage not to be taken too seriously at the beginning of his career.”

  4. Verne wrote a similar tale, Paris in the Twentieth Century, in 1863 but his publisher rejected it, saying, “You have taken on an impossible task.”

  5. Orwell meant concentration camp in its original sense of an internment camp, in this case a British one.

  6. This belief was not unusual at the time. The novelist E. M. Forster thought “that if Fascism wins we are done for, and that we must become Fascist to win.”

  7. See Winston’s estranged wife Katharine: “She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan.”

  8. H. G. Wells was ahead of the curve with The Autocracy of Mr. Parham, a patchy 1930 satire about a right-wing academic who falls asleep during a seance and dreams of becoming a world-conquering dictator. “Reality has outdone fiction since,” he wrote in 1934, “and Mosley fooling it in the Albert Hall with his black shirts makes Parham’s great dream-meeting there seem preposterously sane and sound.”

  9. Kipps is the kind of novel Orwell meant when he referred to Coming Up for Air as “Wells watered down. I have a great admiration for Wells, i.e. as a writer, and he was a very early influence on me.” Note “as a writer.” Not as a thinker.

  10. Malcolm Muggeridge told Orwell that the Webbs, his aunt and uncle by marriage, had withheld inconvenient facts about the USSR from their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, a shameful whitewash.

  11. The phrase science fiction began to replace the earlier scientifiction in 1929.

  12. The British humorist was hugely popular in Russia. According to historian Brian Moynahan, “Every station bookstall from Moscow to Harbin had a copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.”

  13. St. Petersburg became Petrograd in 1914 and Leningrad in 1924, returning to its original name in 1991.

  14. It was widely rumoured that Gorky was poisoned on Stalin’s orders in preparation for the show trial that commenced the Great Terror in August.

  15. Take this Orwell-like passage: “The word truth itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole guide; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organised effort, and which may have to be altered as the necessities of this organised effort require it.”

  16. Contrast this with his party loyalist in Darkness at Noon: “Truth is what is useful to humanity, falsehood what is harmful.”

  17. The two accounts of this meeting don’t tally at all. According to Hemingway, a paranoid Orwell asked to borrow a gun. The story that the poet and anarchist Paul Potts claimed to have heard from Orwell involved a raucous drinking session but no firearms. Orwell himself never wrote about it. Memory is doubly unreliable when the desire to tell a good story gets in the way.

  18. Groupthink, a term coined by the psychologist Irving Janis in 1971 to describe “a deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgements as result of group pressures,” was an explicit homage to Newspeak.

  19. Attlee nonetheless became an Orwell fan. After Churchill’s death in 1965, he wrote, “Some of the generals out in the field thought he was like Big Brother in Orwell’s book, looking down on them from the wall the whole time.”

  20. Ayn Rand somehow contrived to misread it as “the mushiest and most maudlin preachment of Communism . . . I have seen in a long time.”

  21. He was less strict about unofficial sanctions. When Ezra Pound was vilified for his viciously anti-Semitic, pro-fascist wartime radio broadcasts, Orwell did not leap to his defence: “Antisemitism . . . is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person. People who go in for that kind of thing must take the consequences.”

  22. The essay only appeared in the US. Mrs. Wilkes, who ran St. Cyprian’s with her husband, continued to block UK publication up until her death in 1967.

  23. While Orwell was living in Islington, he and Paul Potts had spotted a notice in a newsagent’s window reading, “Rooms to let all nationalities welcome.” Orwell turned to Potts and said, “That’s a real poem, for you.”

  24. By way of comparison, various editions of Animal Farm had earned him £12,000 by the time of his death, equivalent to £400,000 today.

  25. Coincidentally, the controller of the BBC Television Service from 1947 to 1950 was the novelist Norman Collins, who had edited Orwell’s work when he worked at Gollancz (he suggested that Orwell had “some kind of mental instability”) and crossed paths with him again in the Overseas Talks Department. The British media was a very small world.

  26. Brainwashing had entered the lexicon in 1950, due to the Korean War, and was retrospectively applied to Winston’s climactic transformation.

  27. “[Flair] is a leap into the Orwellian future, a magazine without contes
t or point of view beyond its proclamation of itself.”

  28. By far his most quoted (and misquoted) line in Parliament was “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” And some references were more accurate than others. Lord Balfour of Inchrye cited “the book written by the late Mr. George Orwell called 1980.”

  29. It’s worth quoting from Schlesinger’s introduction, with its powerful echoes of Edward Bellamy in the 1880s and H. G. Wells in the 1900s: “Western man in the middle of the twentieth century is tense, uncertain, adrift. We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilisation, of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach for them, like shadows in the falling dusk.” Perhaps every generation feels like this at some point.

  30. It could have been worse. The movie’s first screenwriter suggested inserting a scene in which Napoleon dispatches a pig to Mexico to assassinate Snowball, in the hope that it would appeal to Trotskyite viewers.

  31. The story of the list leaked out slowly. In 1980, Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick revealed the existence of the notebook in a single line, but nobody seemed to pay attention. In 1996, the Public Record Office released Orwell’s first letter to Paget. In 1998, the list in his notebook was published. Not until 2003, after Paget’s death, did the Foreign Office release Orwell’s edited list. This meant that for several years critics and defenders alike were jumping to conclusions.

  32. Both books were in fact forcefully anti-Orwellian: quasi-utopian visions of a cleaner, freer, wealthier future. Like Lord Gladwyn’s Halfway to 1984 and Ronald Brech’s Britain 1984: Unilever’s Forecast, both published in the 1960s, they exploited Orwell’s date as a handy promotional gimmick.

  33. The exception was 1965, when Nigel Kneale revamped his BBC adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four for a season of Orwell programmes and a new radio version starred Patrick Troughton as Winston, just before he became a household name as the Doctor in Doctor Who. Coincidentally, Troughton had made an uncredited appearance as a telescreen announcer in the 1956 movie.

  34. Bowie was referring to the post-apocalyptic gang in William Burroughs’s 1971 novel The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. Ziggy Stardust’s appearance merged The Wild Boys with A Clockwork Orange.

  35. Like Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Bowie briefly worked for an ad agency, which he called “diabolical.” He was fascinated by Vance Packard’s study of the industry’s psychological manipulations in The Hidden Persuaders.

  36. Benn was especially alarmed to hear himself named as a menace by Woodrow Wyatt, who had travelled an awfully long way in the twenty-seven years since he had scolded Orwell for being insufficiently pro-Labour and was now firmly on the Conservative right.

  37. In 2016, 2000 AD published its 1,984th issue. The cover portrayed a giant poster of Dredd reading, “The Justice Department Is Watching You” and the tagline “Orwell That Ends Well . . . ?”

  38. The magazine seemed to be trying to memory-hole a 1978 article by David Goodman, which identified 137 separate predictions in the novel and concluded that more than one hundred had already come true.

  39. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, like Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, revived utopian science fiction with the countercultural politics of the 1970s, thus bypassing Orwell’s influence completely.

  40. While visiting the set, Marvin Rosenblum received phone calls asking whether Apple’s “1984” was a clip from the film, leading him to threaten Chiat/Day with legal action, but that ship had sailed.

  41. That year Time ran an article called “Are Comics Fascist?,” in which Jesuit professor Walter J. Ong called Superman “a super state type of hero with definite interest in the ideologies of herdist politics.”

  42. The word prole, Orwell noted while writing about The Iron Heel, comes from the Latin proletarii: those whose sole value to the state is producing offspring.

  43. The survivors included Stephen Spender, Tosco Fyvel, Malcolm Muggeridge, Anthony Powell, Julian Symons, Jacintha Buddicom, George Woodcock, David Astor and Paul Potts. Richard Rees, Inez Holden and Jack Common were long gone. Fredric Warburg, Arthur Koestler and Avril Dunn had passed relatively recently.

  44. In her 1989 book Newspeak: The Language of Soviet Communism, Françoise Thom’s analysis aligned with Orwell’s: “it must show that power is at once arbitrary and limitless and it must also incarnate the violence of power. Newspeak does so in two ways: by flying in the face of all evidence and by not bothering to conceal its own contradictions.”

  45. V for Vendetta writer Alan Moore revisited Nineteen Eighty-Four in his 2007 graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, which opens in London after the fall of Ingsoc.

  46. Like Woody Allen’s 1973 comedy Sleeper before it, Idiocracy kept alive the tradition of Looking Backward and The Sleeper Awakes, with an ordinary man waking up after a five-hundred-year slumber.

  47. In another coincidence, BBC Radio 4 had recently broadcast a season of Orwell adaptations. Christopher Eccleston starred in Nineteen Eighty-Four, making him the fourth actor (alongside Peter Cushing, Patrick Troughton and John Hurt) to have played both Winston Smith and the Doctor.

  48. McCarthy’s protégé Roy Cohn became Trump’s mentor in the 1970s, as if passing on a virus.

  NOTES

  EPIGRAPH

  “It’s a sad commentary on our age”—Margaret Atwood, “Writing Utopia,” Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing 1970–2005 (Virago, 2005), p. 89.

  “There was truth and there was untruth”—George Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell IX: Nineteen Eighty-Four (Secker & Warburg, 1997), p. 226. All twenty books in the Complete Works series are edited by Peter Davison, assisted by Ian Angus and Sheila Davison.

  INTRODUCTION

  “largest audience to ever”—White House press conference, January 21, 2017.

  “alternative facts”—Meet the Press, NBC, January 22, 2017.

  “an apocalyptical codex”—Anthony Burgess, 1985 (Arrow, 1980), p. 51.

  “for a novel that is not designed”—Fredric Warburg, All Authors Are Equal: The Publishing Life of Fredric Warburg 1936–1971 (Hutchinson & Co., 1973), p. 115.

  “Orwell was successful”—Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 170.

  “free intelligence”—“Charles Dickens,” March 11, 1940, The Complete Works of George Orwell XII: A Patriot After All 1940–1941 (Secker & Warburg, 2000), 597, p. 56.

  “something shone through”—Arena: George Orwell (BBC, 1983–84).

  “forced into becoming a pamphleteer”—Orwell, “Why I Write,” Gangrel, no. 4, Summer 1946, The Complete Works of George Orwell XVII: I Belong to the Left 1945 (Secker & Warburg, 2001), 3007, p. 319.

  “It matters not what you think”—Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books, 2002), p. 211.

  “old maids bicycling”—John Major, speech to Conservative Group for Europe, April 22, 1993.

  “political thought disguised as a novel”—Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (Faber & Faber, 1995), p. 224.

  Bookshop shelves began filling up—see David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (Profile, 2018); Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning (William Collins, 2018); Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (Bodley Head, 2018); Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth (William Collins, 2018).

  “a nonfiction bookend”—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin, 2017).

  “I was asleep before”—The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2017).

  “If you pretend”—Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell V: The Road to Wigan Pier (Secker & Warburg, 1997), p. 199.

  “For me it’s like a Greek myth”—Author interview with Michael Radford, London, August 9, 2018.

  “It’s a mirror”—Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, 1984 (Oberon Books, 2013), p. 21.

  �
��Every time I read it”—Backlisted podcast, August 20, 2018.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1: HISTORY STOPPED

  “We are living in a world”—Orwell, CW V, p. 158.

  “I’m going to Spain”—Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Penguin, 1982), p. 312.

  “History stopped in 1936”—Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” The Complete Works of George Orwell XIII: All Propaganda Is Lies 1941–1942 (Secker & Warburg, 2001), 1421, p. 503.

  “Until I was about thirty” and “simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man”—Orwell, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” The Complete Works of George Orwell XIX: It Is What I Think 1947–1948 (Secker & Warburg, 2002), 3409, p. 379.

  “lower-upper-middle-class”—Orwell, CW V, p. 113.

  “odious little snob” and “Your snobbishness”—Ibid., p. 128.

  “Failure, failure, failure”—“Such, Such Were the Joys,” CW XIX, 3409, p. 382.

  “I was educated at Eton”—Orwell letter to Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, April 17, 1940, The Complete Works of George Orwell XI: Facing Unpleasant Facts 1937–1939 (Secker & Warburg, 2000), 613, p. 147.

  “a boy with a permanent chip”—John Wilkes, quoted in Steven Wadhams, Remembering Orwell (Penguin, 1984), p. 11.

  “he was more sardonic”—Christopher Eastwood, quoted in Wadhams, p. 17.

  “In order to hate imperialism”—Orwell, CW V, p. 134.

  “sentimental nonsense”—Ibid., p. 137.

  “an immense weight of guilt”—Ibid., p. 138.

  “How can you write about the poor”—Jack Branthwaite, quoted in Wadhams, p. 84.

  “in the process of rearranging himself”—Crick, p. 221.

  “no interest in Socialism”—Orwell, CW V, p. 139.