Where the Rainbow Ends

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (314 pp.)--George Orwell--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

In Britain 1984 A.D., no one would have suspected that Winston and Julia were capable of crimethink (dangerous thoughts) or a secret desire for ownlife (individualism). After all, Party-Member Winston Smith was one of the Ministry of Truth's most trusted forgers; he had always flung himself heart & soul into the falsification of government statistics. And Party-Member Julia was outwardly so goodthinkful (naturally orthodox) that, after a brilliant girlhood in the Spies, she became active in the Junior Anti-Sex League and was snapped up by Pornosec, a subsection of the government Fiction Department that ground out happy-making pornography for the masses. In short, the grim, grey London Times could not have been referring to Winston and Julia when it snorted contemptuously: "Old-thinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc," i.e., "Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism."

How Winston and Julia rebelled, fell in love and paid the penalty in the terroristic world of tomorrow is the thread on which Britain's George Orwell has spun his latest and finest work of fiction. In Animal Farm (TIME, Feb. 4, 1946,) Orwell parodied the Communist system in terms of barnyard satire; but in 1984 (which, along with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain --see below--is the Book-of-the-Month Club's selection for July), there is not a smile or a jest that does not add bitterness to Orwell's utterly depressing vision of what the world may be in 35 years' time.

Absolutely Super. In Orwell's 1984, Britain is no longer Britain. It is merely part of the superstate Oceania (the British Isles and Atlantic Islands, North and South America, southern Africa, Australasia). From 1960 on, Oceania has been ceaselessly at war, sometimes as ally and sometimes as foe, with Eurasia or Eastasia, the only other existing powers. All three of these monolithic superstates have the atom bomb; none ever uses it because continuous, wasteful, indecisive warfare has become economically essential--"to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living."

Ideologically, Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia have no quarrel; they are alike as three blackjacks. But war has turned out to be the simplest way of convincing the masses that their countries and their lives are in a state of emergency, which can only be met if all thought, as well as all government, is subject to absolute dictatorship. Hence the three great slogans that Oceania's wretched citizens read and hear every hour of their lives:

WAR is PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Big Brotherly Love. Most of the shooting warfare in 1984 is carried on by specialists in the remote borderlands of the superstates or around the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. Nonetheless, London life is inexpressibly vile--a combination of super-Crippsian austerity and Dachau terrorism. To fall in love is a crime; all passion must be spent on nationalistic fervor and savage hatred of "Emmanuel Goldstein," the Trotzky-like leader of the anti-party underground. All adoration must be devoted to "Big Brother," the Stalinesque dictator whom no one has ever seen, but whose "black-haired, black-mustachio'd" visage, pregnant with "power and mysterious calm," stares from walls in the streets and living rooms. Oceania's ideal citizen is Comrade Ogilvy:

"At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a submachine gun, and a model helicopter. At six--a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules--he had joined the Spies; at nine he had been a troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies ... At 19 he had designed a hand grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed 31 Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At 23 he had perished in action ... He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy . . . He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally."

In Oceania only the poorly fed, beast-brained "proles" (proletariat) lead what might be called a natural life--in hideous slums. The rest of the population, comprising millions of abject party-members, live out their life-in-death under the all-seeing eye of the Ministry of Love, whose "telescreens" (which hear and see every move and sound and bark out harsh commands) are a fixture in every apartment. Each dreary day sees the disappearance of a colleague or relative into the Ministry's death-cellars. No one writes letters; no authentic records of the past are permitted; no memory is safe from the skilled glance of the Thought Police. Slowly but surely, the old English language, with its treasury of dangerous thoughts and mischievous expressions, is being steamrollered flat and converted into "Newspeak"--a toneless, crimethink-less cablese.

My Party, 'Tis of Thee. Heretic Winston Smith not only commits the crime of sexual pleasure with Julia, he also drags her with him into the underground movement--only to find that it is being run by the Oceanian bosses precisely as a trap for would-be rebels. In the torture chambers of the Ministry of Love he discovers how refined totalitarian dogma has become since the primitive days of Hitler and Stalin. No longer do party leaders pretend that they seized power for idealistic reasons and in the hope of creating a better world. Power is now frankly an end in itself. "God is power," explains the smiling, priestly torturer. Thus, to be Godlike, the man of 1984 must have such power over himself as to be capable of nothing but "utter submission" to the invisible Big Brother. By practising the Newspeak art of doublethink, he must learn to believe in the very core of his being that even "the stars can be near or distant, according as we [the party] need them." Only then can he become "immortal"--his identity lost in the deathless unity of the party.

Most novels about an imaginary world (e.g., Gulliver's Travels, Erewhon) have as their central character, or interpreter, a man who somehow strays out of the author's own times and finds himself in a world he never made. But Orwell, like

Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, builds his nightmare of tomorrow on foundations that are firmly laid today. He needs no contemporary spokesman to explain and interpret -- for the simple reason that any reader in 1949 can uneasily see his own shattered features in Winston Smith, can scent in the world of 1984 a stench that is already familiar.

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