Title 1984 or Nineteen Eighty-Four Series --- Author George Orwell Cover Art Christopher Corr Publisher Penguin - 1990 First Printing Martin Secker & Warburg - 1949 Category Speculative Fiction Warnings Torture Main Characters Winston Smith, Julia, O'Brien Main Elements Dystopia

Title 1984 The Graphic Novel Series --- Author George Orwell Illustrator Fido Nesti Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt - 2021 First Printing Jaguar - 2020

Winston Smith is a low-rung member of the Party, the ruling government of Oceania. He works in the Ministry of Truth, the Party's propoganda arm, where he is in charge of revising history. He is but a small brick in the pyramid that is the Party, at the head of which stands Big Brother. Big Brother the infallible. Big Brother the all-powerful. In a totalitarian society, where individuality is suppressed and freedom of thought has its antithesis in the Thought Police, Winston finds respite in the company of Julia. Originality of thought awakens, love blossoms and hope is rekindled. But what they don't know is that Big Brother is always watching...

Graphic Novel

In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called the Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.

With evocative, immersive art from Fido Nesti, this vision of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece provides a new perspective for longtime fans but is also an accessible entry point for young readers and adults who have yet to discover the iconic story that is still so relevant today.

Note - I have lumped this under science fiction, but in fact science has all but been eliminated, this is speculative fiction and social commentary

I read this first in high school and felt it was about time to revisit this dystopian tale again, I even still had the notes and went through them as I read the book. I guess the first point I want to make ties in to a comment I saw on a review site, it said "I felt it was boring, simplistic and heavy-handed, so I guess people are just giving it high ratings because they are nostalgic about its historical impact. Heck I even gave it two stars, so I'm also guilty of inflating ratings beyond the actual intertainment value"

Hmm, well Orwell didn't set out to "intertain" you, he set out to make you sit back and think, to warn you. This is not a Star Wars with flashing lightsabers. He didn't even really care to create particularly indepth characters because what he wanted you to understand the world they live in and how they got there, and for you to keep an eye out for similar things happening in the world around you. The characters and the plot are just props used to get his point across. You don't read this book for fun, or for the story, but to open your eyes to what is going on in the world around you.

Think this world can't exist? Well, North Korea is a suprisingly good match. There are giant posters of their "Big Brother" plastered everywhere and children a brought up to worship him. People will report others to the "Thought Police". People live in deprivation, while the government churns out weapons of mass destruction. There is state control of the media. There are only a few things that North Korea is lacking, the main one being they are not big enough so cannot help but be influenced by the world outside, no matter how hard they try to block it out. Also Big Brother is more a concept than a person so he can never really die, no one ever sees him, only hears his voice, he can be eternal since no one knows who he is, where he is, or how old he is. In fact no one person in the party in 1984 can really be the one with all the power, instead the actions of the party members must be for the greater good and the survival of the party, not of any one person. That, among a few other things Orwell believes is necessary for such a dictatorship to continue forever and not to rise and fall like Nazism, or Communism (which didn't fall in his time but is struggling now, even where it persists it has a different form).

And even now I shudder to look at the United States (and I pick on this one in particular because it is the epitome, or was supposed to be, of democracy). I'm not American, none of my business who is president, so I'm not going to say who I support and who I don't. But when any world leader runs around saying he won't leave the position, and then tries to pardon himself of any crime he might get accused of while he still has the power to do so...well, let me put it this way. Hitler was elected, and he just refused to leave too. I'm not saying Trump is Hitler, there is a big difference between wanting to build a wall to keep the unwanteds out versus mass execution of them, but you can see how this behaviour is gnawing at the edges of democracy.

Now imagine if the leader of a country had the actual power to reach out, and CHANGE every single copy of a document, how could you prove he did once say X instead of Y? If your memory is the only proof of something, it's not only not proof, it's not even reality, since reality is what has been written down and recorded. Nowadays with the internet, and easy access to books and newspapers that seems a near impossible concept, but media is being silenced or controlled, or was considered desireable to control, in many places in the world. And a lot of the times there will be supporters of this from the masses, since only their view can be right and the other view must be silenced.

In fact that is the premise of Farenheit 451, books and media were silenced because people just didn't want to be disturbed by conflicting thoughts. No government came in and said "burn all books", it was more the masses saying, "don't make me think bad thoughts, I want to be happy, give me comedies not speculative fiction dystopias that scare me", and the government said "sure, if that's what you want, we'll help you out, for your, umm, greater good, yeah."

A third book I read this year was Brave New World. This one is in some way a complete opposite of 1984, everyone is made to be happy instead of miserable, although with the exact same goal, to make people so happy/unhappy they don't think to overthrow the government. In 1984, people's hate are turned outwards and blame dropped on other countries, Big Brother only brings you the good things. In Brave New World, you're too high on happy pills to care to revolt, and too genetically engineered and brainwashed to not want to do what you do. Where in 1984 sex was prohibited except for procreation since they wanted to eliminate love and pleasure and promote hate and duty, in Brave New World they tried the opposite, you had to have sex, a lot of it, with everyone and anyone, but with the same end result, you could not grow attached to any one person. You would get to have pleasure, but never love. In both worlds, love had to be eliminated.

In my copy of Brave New World, Margaret Atwood wrote an intro describing how in the past century we've kind of wavered back and forth between heading towards Brave New World and 1984. And of course her own Handmaid's Tale, which she created by not making much of it up, merely stitching together things that have been done somewhere, somewhen in the world. Sure, none of them ever happened all together, but we also haven't had a crisis where most women go infertile to force the issue. And one other thing these books have in common that may reduce their "intertainment" value is the fact they don't have happy endings. There is no Hunger Games revolt to overthrow the powers that be (not that Hunger Games really ended happily but at least the reader got the satisfaction of overthrowing one regime, though perhaps at the cost of a worse one), in fact our "common man" tends to get broken down and our protagonist actually loses the fight. These books don't even give you the hope that things can be fixed, all the more reason to ensure we don't end up in that situation in the first place!

So even after a second read 25 years later, 1984 is still one of my favorite books because it does what it does so well and is still so disturbing relevant. Farenheit 451 hit me at the core as a book lover. Brave New World didn't impact me as much since, well, it was almost a utopia really, if freedom of individuality and the right to be allowed to suffer isn't that important to you, it might be a world that'd be kind of nice to live in. Even if you were genetically modified to love your job, you'd never know any different and you'd still be happy, so that world didn't scare me quite as much as the other three. I guess their party motto would be "Ignorance is Bliss" instead of "Freedom is Slavery" though that one could apply too.

I guess it's been interesting reading dystopias in a pandemic year, kind of puts things in perspective.

October 2022

The Graphic Novel - Well, it hadn't been so long since I last read 1984, so I'll admit I was a little bored re-reading it so soon. See the graphic novel is essentially the text of the book, with even a few pages which were entirely text and no images. But then, not sure what I was expecting, the novel has very little dialog or action other than Winston's internal thoughts. I did think the illustrations were appropriate, everyone looked so old and worn and grey, the colour scheme of greys and reds worked very well. I'm sort of on the fence here. Normally I think it's silly to create a graphic novel that just takes every bit of text of a novel and puts pictures around it, especially since the pictures already cover much of what the text would otherwise have had to describe. But in this case, 1984 isn't really about the plot, the settings, the characters...its about the ideas, and if you don't take the time to set those down, you lose the point of the entire book. Thus in the end I decided that it was a very good interpretation of the novel, but it's just not a book that should be read every two years, it doesn't have the same impact as when you go in not remembering all the details, to have the horrors unfold. Of course being reminded of what could be, reminds us to watch what is happening around us, to hopefully stop us from walking down that path, or the path of any of the other major dystopian novels. (Personally I'm more concerned of living in a Farenheit 451 world at the moment, although the burning of books in 451 is perhaps not all that different from the altering of books in 1984, either way the past rewritten or lost to the benefit of those in power, I see this same thing happening right now but in a third way that authors didn't predict, the flood of fake news burying the truth, instead of restricting/controlling information we just let it run rampant and overwhelm everyone, allowing people to find versions of the truth that matches their beliefs, rather than learning the real truths because they simply cannot find those truths in the masses of information available to us now).