When you're recovering from surgery...

... you finish books quickly!

Image from a movie adaptation of George Orwell's 1984

I feel a bit like I flew through 1984 -- which surprised me, since I didn't really expect to like it.  But I loved it.  And I hated it, at the same time.  As you can probably tell, 1984 provoked strong emotions in me.  I got caught up into Winston's life as he struggled to control his every flicker of emotion and thought so as not to be found out by Big Brother, and went about his job of basically changing the past all the while struggling to conceal his knowledge that he knew on some level the whole thing was a fraud.  I loved the opening to the novel -- Winston's purchase of the journal with creamy white pages, an act of treason.

I was captivated by the middle part of the novel, Winston's relationship with Julia.  Few books have evoked for me such a sense of paradise in the midst of ugliness and danger.  I, like Winston, wished that period could have lasted forever.

But why, Winston!  Why couldn't you have just let well enough alone and kept on hiding your vibrant life with Julia from Big Brother for as long as you could!  It was inevitable, I suppose -- that in this world of 1984, no true human happiness -- no true humanness -- is allowed to last for long.

The last part of the book, I hated.  I hated it because I was meant to hate it -- it was ugly and painful and dehumanizing.  And yet, it was the right ending for this disutopia.  And the ending of the book -- absolutely brilliant!  If you haven't read the book yet, I won't spoil it for you.

One thing that struck me as I read the book was the concept of being able to change the past by changing all historical documents.  In 1984, the party is able to make it as if a person had never existed, simply by going back and erasing any written record of them having existed.  One of the running motifs of the book is that Oceania (the country in which Winston lives) is always at war with either Eastasia or Eurasia, and an ally with the other superpower.  However, every few years, they switch -- if they had been at war with Eastasia, now they're at war with Eurasia.  AND they're supposed to have always been at war with so-and-so, because the party cannot admit of change or mistake.  That would be weakness.  So, every few years they literally go back and reprint newspapers, books, etc. that refer to the war in order to reflect the current state of things.  They destroy all the old copies and print new copies.  In such a world, it's hard to know what is "true" and what is "historical."

Imagine if George Orwell had been writing these days, after the rise of the internet!  Talk about easy to eradicate the past!  It makes me really, really glad that 1984 is fictional...

On a side note, apparently my subconscious was quite taken with this book as well: a few nights ago I had a dream in which I was trying to maintain a relationship with someone without Big Brother finding out!