Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 06 Dec 2019

The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey

Is there really space for another book about how Orwell wrote his masterpiece? It’s a crowded landscape if you include the multitude of books that find themselves ostensibly addressing some other aspect of Orwell’s career but which end up unable to escape the gravitational pull exerted by this particular novel. It’s certainly a tough ask to bring even a glimmer of originality to the territory but Lynskey has managed to muscle in effectively enough and find a space for himself without trampling too much on the feet of his predecessors.

I think that the trick he’s pulled off here is essentially twofold: his Orwell is a quintessentially human portrait of the man that avoids the absurd adulations or the equally absurd condemnations he usually attracts from admirers and critics. Secondly, he is pretty determined not to get bogged down in the ideological mud-slinging that has grown up around almost everything Orwell wrote, said or did.

The fact that Orwell, like the rest of us, was a person full of contradictions is undoubtedly true and has been so well documented elsewhere that it need not detain anyone too long I wouldn’t have thought. However, the sport of pronouncing on why he is or isn’t an infallible saint is a never-ending one that seems to appeal to those stupid enough to think his ideas are to be dismissed if they are not in some way unalterable and consistent across his whole lifetime. It’s to Lynskey’s credit that he has no time for this pea-brained approach to Orwell’s life and work and as a result his book feels much more relaxed than many others I’ve read that cover similar ground but in a very different way.

Lynskey’s central premise – that the roots of 1984 can be traced back to Orwell’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War – won’t stop any clocks. I guess the question for anyone reasonably well steeped in his life and work might well be why go back to that point when you can make a case for going back still further. Lynskey suggests that it was his Spanish War experiences that decisively politicised him and that his time in POUM and that party’s experience of encountering the totalitarian menace of the Communist Party, which gave him, perhaps unwittingly at the time, the frame of reference for 1984. I wouldn’t want to argue with the central importance of his Spanish experience but I would want to extend that to say it played a major role in shaping Orwell as man and writer across all of his later thinking and not just his ideas about totalitarianism.

In my view, it would have been equally legitimate to go back to Orwell’s experiences as a policeman in colonial Burma to seek the roots of 1984. Everything he wrote about that experience – oddly largely missing from this book – seems to confirm that the values behind the British occupation of Burma and the colonial values of Empire are also to be found later in his dystopian future novel. The text of 1984 itself has been pored over in mind-boggling detail and just about every interpretation you could ever imagine has been given to the contents : such is the fate of great books I suppose. Lynskey lines up most of the important ones for us and manages to steer us effectively and interestingly through most of the more insightful stuff. I think he’s at his most valuable and engaging when he’s writing about the writers and the books that most interested Orwell himself and which can have a fair claim on being part of the mix that went into the creation of 1984. There are also some very interesting and useful commentaries on Coming Up For Air and Animal Farm which turn this book into a much wider appreciation of Orwell’s talents than might be suggested by the title.

The last third of the book dedicates itself to a consideration of the longer term cultural influence of 1984 and the place it occupies in the minds of musicians, film-makers and artists. This was an interesting addendum to the story of 1984’s creation but I’m not sure I personally got too much out of that section that was new to me or particularly revealing. I was also more irritated than perhaps I should have been by the inclusion of a summary of the plot of 1984 at the end – which I can only assume must be there for people who don’t actually want to read the book?!

On the whole I thought this was a three-stars-out-of-five kind of book. I’m glad I’ve read it but I’m not sure I’d have been much more intellectually impoverished if I hadn’t.

 

Terry Potter

December 2019