1984

WARNING! MAJOR SPOILERS THROUGHOUT!
For a spoiler-free scoring of the book, scroll past the line of ===='s below!

All but finished the book this morning, and polished off the final chapter and the afterword when I got a chance to later this afternoon. Thoughts, in brief:

PRO
+ Orwell's Goldstein's point about three regional superpowers (Oceania, NATO; Eurasia, Warsaw Pact; and Eastasia, "China + India") and his battleground for the three which none of them either particularly cares about nor ever fully acquires nor ever successfully "democratizes" (Africa, Middle East) was pretty spot on. Said one friend, "Ryan, I think a lot of people in 1949 could have figured that out," but I'm not as convinced they could have. I think Orwell had some profound insight into the way things would play out as far as this one goes.

+ He stayed true to the requirements for a dystopic novel without turning me off. That in itself is a feat. I was pleased by his portrayal of Smith ultimately succumbing to the brainwashing yet doing so in a way which made Smith seem heroic all the way up until the book's very final chapter. Even the final chapter, disgusting as it was to read, wasn't so disgusting as to make me put down the book. It is different from, say, Huxley's out-of-nowhere suicide of John the Savage which leaves readers both furious and confused. I was neither furious nor confused with Winston's fate. Just disgusted, as one would be by a booger or a fart. Really sad but really necessary to tell it the way it would be (in such a world).

+ There were a few truly suspenseful moments in the book where Orwell captivated me, and I only wish that more of the book had been this alive. These were, in order of appearance:
1) when Winston was being pursued by Julia (who I did not yet know by name) and, certain that she was a member of the Thought Police, was thinking of smashing her head in with the paperweight
2) when Winston read from Goldstein's book
3) from when the hidden telescreen in Mr. Charrington's went off to when the chapter (and Part II) ended
4) from when Winston awoke in the Ministry of Love (beginning of Part III) to when Winston finished his first interrogation with O'Brien
5) Winston's version of Room 101

CON
- Orwell seems at times to be an expert writer clashing with an amateur writer, and nowhere is this more clear than in the section of the book (towards the end of Part II) where Winston is reading from Goldstein's book. Goldstein's writing (and thus Orwell's writing) is expertly legible, succinct, and engaging. I found Goldstein's section of the book to be an absolute pleasure to read because of how much information it conveyed but so quickly. Nowhere else in the book did Orwell display such prowess of condensation! And yet unfortunately it was also in Goldstein's (and thus Orwell's) writing that I found major disappointment organization-wise. Orwell must have thought himself clever to have had Winston flip to Chapter 3 and read it before finishing Chapter 1, but in the end it did readers a disservice because of some glaring organizational errors. For example, it was in Chapter 3, not in Chapter 1, that Goldstein (read: Orwell) explained to readers what Chinese "Death-worship"'s real name was and then went on to just use the term "Death-worship," it being understood what it meant. Unfortunately, he used the terms multiple times in Chapter 1 as well. In real life, an author who used it in Chapters 1 and 3 would have defined in the first chapter in which it occurred, not in the second (or possibly third). A more blatant organizational problem was that Chapter 3 contained zero references to previous or to future chapters whereas Chapter 1 contained several references to Chapter 3. This is ass-backwards, as normally editors (not authors) who do this sort of thing either do it in only one direction -- in the forwards direction -- or they do it in both directions or they do it none at all. Yet Orwell selected the unrealistic 4th path, the option of doing it exclusively in the backwards direction. To me, this suggests that Orwell the real-world writer confused Goldstein the in-book writer. There is no way that ordinarily Goldstein, as the in-book writer, would have had reason to write in such a manner.

If you think these complaints are trivial, fine, but know this: that section of the book was but one example. I feel that the book contained numerous examples, sadly, of exquisite prose juxtaposed with clumsy amateurish writing. Very perplexing, very odd. Like finding sugar cubes mixed in with a package of powdered sugar.

- Orwell makes many assumptions which I am willing to lend him about the human nature, but there are yet several avenues he did not explore by which Oceania and the other totalitarian states could be brought to their knees. The first of these is intervention from beyond, i.e. alien invaders. This does not rule out the possibility of the totalitarians having claimed victory over the crushed human spirit, but at the very least it would disprove O'Brien's belief that Oceania can never crumble.

- The second way in which they could crumble is from within, specifically from the emergence of superbugs or other life forms on Earth which compromise human civilization. O'Brien himself points out that Oceania is little concerned with science outside of psychiatry, necessary to interrogate and before that to identify suspects, and engineering, necessary to monitor people by means of telescreens and the like. O'Brien goes so far as to claim that even if people only lived to be 30 years old, the Inner Party would still live on, generation after generation. As I see it, though, Orwell's Inner Party is still exposing itself to something Orwell ought to be intimately familiar with: a bug not unlike the so-called Spanish Influenza.

- But most importantly, I do have this one serious contention with Orwell's dystopia, and that is its assumption that there could ever be a significant number of world leaders for whom the desired goal was not power as a means but instead power as an ultimate end or goal. That is to say, yes, you may always have one O'Brien, one lunatic who rants and raves about power for power's sake, but most world leaders today who seek power do so for the purpose of reaching some goal, whether or not that goal is good or bad; and I think it is an enormous leap, rather than an insignificant hop, skip, and a jump, to go from saying that Mankind's leadership views power as a means to an end to saying that Mankind's leadership views power as both the means and as the end.

That is to say, Orwell's dystopia required multiple like-minded individuals, and not merely one or two or even three (one for each continent) madmen to band together and to consolidate their power and to seek power for power's sake. Orwell's dystopia requires thousands of such individuals to get the ball rolling. And I dare say, maybe out of a self-reassuring fear more than anything else, that the odds of finding such a person is thankfully still less than 1 in 1,000,000, and thus our planet would have at most 6,000 such individuals, of whom we can be sure that few if any have managed to secure world leadership or revolutionary leadership positions.

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Overall, I would give 1984 an 8 or a 9 out of 10 for books I have read in general, definitely a 10 out of 10 had it been a schoolbook (as it was for many students, I know). Interestingly and rarely enough, 1984 strikes me as a book well-positioned to be re-read and re-enjoyed. This is one of those very rare times where knowing how things will end can actually enhance one's (re-)reading of choice details planted by the author earlier in the book. For example, I would pay much closer attention to the conversations Winston had with particular characters.