Book Review: More Than This by Patrick Ness

*Spoiler Alert: it is difficult for me to review this book without discussing a plot twist. As such, it may be better left until you've already read the book.

Occasionally, upon sitting down to write a review, I find myself trying to picture George Orwell in his 'cold and stuffy' bedsit writing reviews. And as I do so, I try to ask the question: 'What would Orwell think?'

I admire George Orwell for his capacity to strip away all veneer of style and get straight to the meaning of a book. He's a total utilitarian; if a book doesn't do something, or if it doesn't reflect a political view he is comfortable with, it is slaughtered. The clarity of his critical eye amazes me, even where I disagree with the execution of it. And by thinking of him, I try to engender greater critical assurance in my reviews.

Were Orwell alive today and asked to review More Than This, I fear his vicious pen would be scathing. For Ness comes perilously close to presenting without outrage a fictional world in which global collapse has resulted in humanity willingly swapping personal liberty for something safe and comatose. There is even a character known as the Driver whose job it appears to be to ruthlessly maintain the status quo against any challenge. To Orwell, writing in the 1930s and 40s, More Than This would have seemed startlingly reactionary.

And yet, in making this comparison I find myself realising how different modern society is to that which Orwell would have recognised. Reviewers of today will be likely to frame discussion about this book as another statement of Patrick Ness's implacable refusal to cow-tie to the supposed conventions of what young adult fiction can and can't be about. Ness is every bit as radical as Orwell, though as thinkers they are possibly as opposite as it is possible to be. If there is a central concern in Ness's literature it is that human beings are sympathetic, even when at their most horrible, and that an understanding of the world lies in understanding people, warts and all. Where Orwell lives in the black and the white, Ness is in all the shades of grey between. I admire Orwell for his certainty about the world, but I love Patrick Ness for his uncertainty.

More Than This begins with a teenage boy, Seth, dying in icy cold water, his drowning body smashed against the rocks. Yet he wakes up naked and exhausted in a dusty, abandoned world that appears to be the suburban English street he grew up on. Is this an afterllife? Is he in hell, forced to spend eternity on his own, with vivid agonizing memories of his life assaulting him whenever he shuts his eyes? Memories of the tragedy that drove his family across the Atlantic to America, memories of friendship, love, and betrayal, and all that led up to his death. As Seth explores his new world and tries to understand what is going on, we can't help wondering: what is going on?

More Than This is at its best when it is least dramatic. The plot begins being about life after death and turns into a science fiction distopia in which humanity has abandoned a dying planet to live in a networked virtual reality and yet doesn't ever quite get anywhere. But around this, we have a story about feeling trapped as a teenager and certain that there must be more than this to life yet not knowing where or how it will happen. There is a wonderfully touching, supportive loving relationship between Seth and his best friend Goodmund, that will see it challenged by homophobic people the world over, but which shows everything that young love should be. Ness is a writer with absolutely no time for thoughts about what young adults should and shouldn't be exposed to. If it exists, it is fair game is his approach, and I congratulate him for it.

More Than This doesn't grab me as intensely as his other books have. The distopia feels underdeveloped, the afterlife underwhelming. But the flashbacks are brilliant. I may like to try and imagine what George Orwell would think about a book, but I don't need to agree with him. Patrick Ness is a phenomenal writer. More Than This isn't a phenomenal book, but well worth reading nonetheless.

More Than This was published by Walker Books in September 2013. ISBN: 9781406331158

Book Review: 1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) by Haruki Murakami

Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin

When 1Q84 was published in Japan in 2009, bookshops all but sold out within a day. More than 1 million copies were sold in that first month alone. Ever since, English language readers have eagerly awaited its release. In an effort to expedite publication, Murakami’s US publishers Knopf took the unusual step of commissioning his two regular translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, to simultaneously work on different parts of the book. Rubin translated Book One and Book Two, published together here, Gabriel, Book Three which is published next week.

The tactic appears to have worked. Expectation has built steadily over the past two years, pre-orders have gone through the roof, and bookshops even opened at midnight to satisfy the demand of Murakami’s dedicated fans. Like the Harry Potter phenomenon, this hype has inspired people to have fun with books which is never a bad thing in my book. But away from all this Murakami-mania to which I and the entire media has whole-heartedly subscribed, the question of whether it is any good remains largely unanswered. Quite honestly, the answer is no. And yes. I cannot decide. Is 1Q84 the Magnum Opus that sums up Murakami’s worldview? Or an experiment with narrative that badly backfires? Very possibly it is both at the same time.

It is a long book – some 600 pages in Book One and Book Two alone, a further 350 in Book Three. The story is a familiar one: twenty-something drifters have their lives thrown into question by a series of unusual events over which they have little control. All the familiar Murakami tropes are there: Jazz, classical music, and 1960s rock provides the soundtrack to a novel essentially about disaffection, free will, love, and loneliness. Along the way, alternative worlds, cats, and cult religion ensnare the characters, forcing them to reappraise themselves and the world around them.

One departure from the familiar comes with the choice of a female protagonist. We meet Aomame as she sits in the back of a taxi that is stuck in stationary traffic on the Tokyo expressway. She is on her way to an important engagement that she cannot miss. So when her driver tells her of a hidden emergency staircase that she can use to get back to the city below, she grabs the opportunity with both hands. But beware, the driver warns, “things might look different to you down there.” They certainly do. Aomame finds herself in a subtly different world to the 1984 Tokyo she left behind. She names it 1Q84, the Q being a big question mark over what is going on, and continues on to her appointment.

Meanwhile, Tengo is an aspiring writer who agrees to rework a remarkable though poorly written novel to help it scoop a literary prize. The book, Air Chrysalis, is the work of a seventeen-year-old girl named Eriko Fukada, and seems to be based on her own experiences. With Tengo’s help it not only takes the prize but rapidly becomes a bestseller. But as the publishers work to prevent the truth about who wrote Air Chrysalis from getting out, Tengo finds Eriko’s world permeating every part of him and is drawn into the dangerous reality of Air Chrysalis, where two moons hang next to each other in the night sky, and the Little People emerge from the carcass of dead goat.

Amidst all that Aoomame and Tengo begin to realise how much they mean to each other, even though their last contact was a brief clutch of hands between two lonely outcasts in a school classroom when they were ten-years-old. Yet as each of their stories influence the other it comes to feel as though they are matryoshka dolls stacked inside each other. What is real? What is story? Chekhov’s gun hangs on the wall, but whether it is used or not depends, ultimately, on whether this is a story or real life.

Like most of Murakami’s novels, 1Q84 is, at its heart, a love story. Only a love story in which other things keep getting in the way.  “It’s like the Tibetan Wheel of Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn’t move.”

Nearly everything that I love about Murakami is present here. The plot carried me along. At times it was almost un-put-downable. The smoky urban landscape simmers along with an after-hours feel. However, the biggest problem comes in the way in which it is narrated. In 1Q84, Murakami has switched for the first time from his reliable first person style to a moving third person viewpoint. It turns out that his familiar conversational style does not translate will to this new voice. Where in the first person he successfully elucidates the quirky lives of his various protagonists, drawing the reader into their small everyday lives, in the third person his prose becomes inelegant and cliché ridden.

The result is a stylistically ugly experience that prevents the reader ever fully engaging with the characters. Through them, Murakami presents thoughtful insights, not least the subjugation of women in Japanese society, but because neither Tengo nor Aomame really work as characters in their own right, they feel like merely vehicles for the plot to move around, and through which to explore these issues, rather than people to engage with. For an author whose reputation has been built on character driven works, this is a major disappointment. For me, 1Q84 cannot recover from this narrative weakness. It seeps into everything. There are long flabby passages of italicised first person rumination that only make everything worse, and in the end, quite honestly I was glad to finish it.

And yet.

There is one area in which 1Q84 succeeds. Critics have so far been rather scathing of the Orwellian metaphor that the title conjures, but to me it works spectacularly well. Although the dialogue around Nineteen Eighty-Four is somewhat dull, the metaphor Murakami creates serves as a comment not only on his entire body of work, but half a century of social change as well. Where Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book about the dreaded future as the 1940s feared it, with homogenising political forces using ideology to cement their power, 1Q84 is that same time period as it would be written now. Politics is almost entirely absent from the lives of the characters. Even a formerly ideologically driven commune has morphed into a pseudo religious cult, and citizens couldn’t care less whether Big Brother – in the form of the State, or God, or a mysterious group known only as the Little People – is watching them. Like Winston Smith, Aomame and Tengo are drawn into a dangerous game of cat and mouse with forces more powerful than they, but unlike Winston, they care only about emerging unscathed, and finding each other while the rest of the world gets on with life as it chooses.

By placing these two competing visions of 1984 alongside each other, Murakami demonstrates the changing social and political climates of the past fifty years effectively. He has spent his career writing about urban alienation and the world as it has become. His entire opus has been a statement about the importance of the micro over the macro. The importance of love, and music, and literature, and food, and all those sort of things, over and above politics. His work captures the spirit of the age, the sense that politics has failed, but nothing other than empty technology has stepped into replace it. In this globalised world, Murakami speaks to an audience about loneliness, boredom and powerlessness just as effectively as Orwell spoke about the tendencies of communism and fascism. And like Orwell did more than sixty years ago, it perhaps says more about the world we live in that we really want to accept.

For all the narrative doesn’t work, this makes 1Q84 a thought-provoking read. There are successful, even fascinating aspects, but the overall reading experience is a convoluted one. By the end I was exhausted.

But beware, with Book Three still to come, it is unclear how things may evolve. There are questions that remain unanswered: a crow keeps appearing, just what happened to the NKH subscription collector who stabbed a client, and will Aomame and Tengo ever manage to find each other. In typical Murakami fashion, he places a warning about judging the book before the end on the very first page where Aomame ruminates on Janicek’s Sinfonietta, considers its relationship to the following years in Czech history, and ultimately comes to the conclusion that the most important proposition that history teaches us is this: “At the time, no one knew what was coming.”

1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) was first published in the UK by Harvill Secker on 18th October 2011. 624pp, ISBN: 9781846554070
1Q84 (Book Three) is published by Harvill Secker on 25th October 2011. 368pp, ISBN: 9781846554056

Book Review: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Read: August 2010

We in one tweet-sized chunk:
A compelling dystopian story of love and rebellion with a mathematical style all of its own creation. 

Yevgeny Zamyatin completed We in 1921, only for it to gain the dubious honour of becoming the first book to be banned by Glavlit, the newly created Soviet censors. Yet while it remained unpublished in the USSR until Glasnost, a manuscript escaped and has had a lasting influence on literature ever since. It is considered one of the first dystopian novels, and George Orwell read and reviewed a French translation only eight months before starting Nineteen Eighty-Four. There are many parallels between the two: for Big Brother, We has the Benefactor, for the telescreen, Zamyatin creates the Table, a formula that constructs every second of every citizens time. Similar parallels are noticeable with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, though Huxley apparently hadn’t read it before publishing in 1932. Yet regardless of any comparisons, We is valuable in its own right: a compelling story of love and rebellion with a mathematical prose all of its own creation.

The One State is the pinnacle of human social evolution, a mathematically perfect machine in which every citizen – every cog in the machine – lives in a condition of “mathematically infallible happiness” for the first time since the Garden of Eden. It was foolish desire for freedom that resulted in mankind’s banishment from Eden and it is now by abolishing freedom that happiness has been restored. Life is organised to ensure maximum productive output through complete equality and the removal of strife. The sky is perfectly blue, every cipher (citizen) is entitled to sex with any other cipher – so long as it is within certain Table determined times of the day and requested with the use of a pink ticket – and no-one dreams at night. They live in a calm clean panopticon, known only by numbers and watched over at all times by the Guardians.

D-503 is one such cipher. A mathematician, he is the builder of the Integral, a spaceship which will soon enable the One State to export the “great flywheel of logic”, as he terms their way of life, to the “barbarians” in the rest of the solar system. Called on to create works dedicated to the beauty and majesty of the One State to form part of the cargo for that first voyage D-503 sets out to record what he sees and thinks, or, more exactly, “what we think” as his ode to rational utopia. But when he meets and falls for I-330, a rebel seeking to bring down the state, his rational and ordered world is thrown into turmoil. He discovers an imagination of his own, dreams rise unbidden, and he is placed on a collision course with that system he loves.

One of the things that makes We so compelling is that D-503 completely and implicitly believes in the One State and spends a great deal of time extolling its virtue. He is a rather Panglossian in his ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ attitude which can make him painfully blind to the abuses of the state - public torture, execution, and violence are common and merciless – and the rationale behind his arguments is indicative of this. They convey a certain clarity of thought which makes them somehow compelling, even while disagreeing completely. For instance, crime:

“Freedom and crime are so indissolubly connected to each other, like…well, like the movement of the aero and its velocity. When the velocity of the aero = 0, it doesn’t move; when the freedom of a person = 0, he doesn’t commit crime. This is clear. The sole means of ridding man of crime is to rid him of freedom.”

Mathematics is the language that underpins everything. Zamyatin, a mathematician himself, writes prose that reflects this. His sentences are exact and balanced, with colons used in a way that is almost like an = sign, to convey cause and effect. Furthermore, Zamyatin was synaesthetic - to him every letter and word has its own colour, its own visual representation – and in a book which relies so much on colour – the peaceful one state is blue, I-330 is yellow, O-90, D-503s former regular sex partner, is pink as are most other women – this provides an added texture through which to experience the increasingly impressionistic dreamscapes.  

There are some beautiful phrases too, particularly those early on in which he observes the beauty of machines and order:

“And then I thought to myself: why?...The answer: because it is non-free movement, because the whole profound point of this dance lies precisely in its absolute, aesthetic subordination, its perfect non-freedom.”

I often perceived a similar ordered beauty while staring out of my university bedroom window and watching cars going round and around a roundabout, stopping at the traffic lights, awaiting their turn, continuing on, all in perfect order and harmony. Whereas in Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World we are expected to react with revulsion to the monstrous systems of state and industrial control, the responses of the reader are a little more nuanced in We. There are positives as well as negatives and this results in a compellingly three dimensional fictional world.

What is particularly interesting, is that while Winston Smith (in Nineteen Eighty-Four) finds rebellion through love attractive and liberating, an act of self-determinism worthy in its own right, it sends D-503 mad. He compares it to the time when Ö-1 “happened” to him, that is, when he discovered the existence of the imaginary or irrational number. Obsessively drawn to I-330 by a love he neither fully understands nor controls, he sees his newly found imagination as a sickness. It is an eyelash in his eye that he can’t ignore no matter how he wishes too. The dreams he has gradually overtake his daily life to the point where it becomes impossible to determine where reality stops and dreams begin.

Despite its ban in his homeland, the Soviet state is not the specific target of We, though there are inevitably aspects there. It is a rather wider critique of the colonising uniformity that he perceived as inherent in industrial civilisations the world over. As Orwell notes, it is primarily “a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again.” It is satire, but not limited solely to Soviet politics. Philosophical ideas are targeted, often in witty parodies of their original content. For example, Marxist thought on determinist historical progression is satirised in a conversation between D-503 and I-330.

“Do you realise that what you are suggesting is revolution?”
“Of course, it's revolution. Why not?"
“Because there can't be a revolution. Our revolution was the last and there can never be another. Everybody knows that.”
“My dear, you're a mathematician: tell me, which is the last number?”
“But that's absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can't be a last one.”
“Then why do you talk about the last revolution?”

And there’s similar treatment for Rousseau’s Discourse on Equality and Dostoyevsky in general. We is playful, experimental satire of a fictional future state where individual liberty is of the lowest priority. It is exact and interesting and thought-provoking. For the first fifty pages I was convinced that it would go down as one of my favourite novels. But when the dreams begin it all became a little too unfocused for my liking. Although I am aware that this is a personal preference rather than a genuine criticism, the increasingly blurred boundaries between the real and the imagined proved disorientating to me. Although very different in content, the longer We went on, the more it reminded me of The Famished Road by Ben Okri with its endless blending of colour and dream. Many will love it for this reason, but it frustrated me somewhat and made the plot and characters slightly difficult to follow.

Nonetheless, it is a book that should be read. If you like dystopian literature which makes you think about the world and society you live in, We is a must read right up alongside the many other great works of dystopian writing from the first half of the twentieth century.

Vintage Classics, 2007, 9780099511434, 203pp

7.5 our of 10

Other Reviews:

George Orwell

Eve’s Alexandria

Green Man Review

Amazon

Wikipedia

Book Review: Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day four I revisit J.M. Coetzee's masterpiece, Waiting for the Barbarians.

Read: April 2008
Waiting for the Barbarians in one tweet-sized chunk:
Waiting for the Barbarians is the clearest enunciation of Coetzee's primary concern: individual shame for collective crimes.
 

“‘When some men suffer unjustly...it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it.”

Set in the harsh, desolate frontier lands of a nameless Empire in a timeless age, Waiting for the Barbarians is a sparse, allegorical novel, devastatingly powerful in its depiction of one mans complicity in barbaric acts of so called ‘civilisation’. It is the clearest enunciation of the concerns which run through much of Coetzee's fiction: independent thought in the face of a single public conscience, the surprising involvement of the outsider,  moral conviction, peace. It is a beautiful and powerful book; probably my favourite of all his works.

For years the Magistrate has presided over the affairs of a small, peaceful frontier fort, collecting rents, settling petty disputes, and excavating the ruins of fallen towns, unconcerned about rumours of an impending war with the Barbarians. But when interrogators from the shadowy Third Bureau arrive it seems they are intent on turning his peaceful harmony into a raging battlefield. And following a case of barbaric torture, the Magistrate is jolted from his comfortable complicity into an act of quixotic rebellion and he begins to learn just how lonely martyrdom can be.

Waiting for the Barbarians sees Coetzee tackling big issues: complacency and complicity in the face of barbarism, the boundary between freedom and incarceration, and the devastation war inflicts on both our psyches and ways of life. It is too easy to say it is an allegory for apartheid in South Africa - though undoubtedly it is – for Coetzee’s real success is in expanding theses small particulars, to a general treatise on human nature and the social systems we build to, supposedly, protect ourselves from the barbarian outsiders.

Many writers have meditated on the collision between conscientious individuals and harsh, repressive regimes. Kafka did it in The Trial, Camus in The Outsider, Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley in Brave New World, and the list goes on and on. If there is a twentieth century literary concern this is probably it. But Coetzee takes it that stage further than others, to analyse the complicity of the Magistrate himself, to question the arrogance of one man standing righteous against the tide of popular opinion, the pointlessness of it all. Coetzee doesn’t merely make his Magistrate a victim of the bureaucracy, but he is complicit within it, and knows even as he fights back that he is just doing so to cleanse his own narcissistic guilt. He is by no means a shining white night of freedom but a flawed person just trying to live his life in his own way.

Furthermore, the sense of place Coetzee creates is exquisite: the vast, empty wilderness a bleak uncompromising landscape looming ominously over the entire novel. The nomadic austerity of life in that wasteland strikes a chord with the barren emotional prospects of its central character. It is evocative of Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dan, an untamed world, shorn of romantic connotations, a greater threat to the lives of man than ever the Barbarians could be.

You don’t read Coetzee to enjoy a stroll through the park, you read Coetzee because, perhaps more than any other modern novelist, he knows what it is to be human, and he is able to convey it all so simply, in so few words that it leaves you stumped. You shake your head regularly, unsure whether you love or hate the characters, uncertain how such stripped down life can be portrayed so beautifully. Because above all else, Coetzee is a beautiful writer, his prose flows from pen to paper to reader invisibly, reads so smoothly you barely realise what an accomplishment it is. And he presents his situations starkly, vividly, but with an equanimity and reluctance that leaves you devastated. The scarcity of the prose, the barren landscape of possibility, the simple power of his storytelling, each of these is exquisite.

This is a very, very great novel. And despite everything it carries no message, save perhaps a call for recalcitrance in the face of force. As the Magistrate says: 

“I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.”

You know what? I think I agree with him.

9 out of 10

Review: Keep the Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris.

Read: on a train back from Edinburgh - August 2009

Keep the Aspidistra Flying in one tweet-sized chunk:
Bitingly satirical, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is packed with ideas but let down by its infuriating narrator.

“Before, he had fought against the money code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself—to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground. He liked to think of the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes… He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost kingdom, below ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself for ever.”

George Orwell wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying in 1934/35 while working at a bookshop in Hampstead and it was published in April 1936, just a few months before he left to fight in the Spanish Civil War. It is a novel of its time, capturing something of the ideological conflict, sociological concern, and economic distrust which so characterised the 1930s.

The story is of Gordon Comstock, a copywriter with an advertising agency who walks out of his ‘good job’ – “the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket” as he terms it – to embark on a long, deliberate and painful slide into penury. Disgusted with the money obsession he sees all around him, and frustrated by the social constraints which are interlinked with this, Gordon takes a position as a poorly paid bookseller and eagerly begins his new life as a poet.

Already the author of one “sneaky little foolscap octavo” which can now be found lining the remainder shelves of bookshops all across London, he is unbowed and feels his magnum opus, London Pleasures, swelling inside him. Lines rise unbidden, he scribbles furiously, determined to stick it to all those that have ever stood in his way. This will be his revenge on all those pathetic ancestors who whittled away the family fortune leaving him to work for a living rather than pursue his muse.

“Outside, all was bleak and wintry. A tram, like a raucous swan of steel, glided groaning over the cobbles, and in its wake the wind swept a debris of trampled leaves. The twigs of the elm tree were swirling, straining eastward. The poster that advertised Q.T. Sauce was torn at the edge; a ribbon of paper fluttered fitfully like a tiny pennant. In the side street too, to the right, the naked poplars that lined the pavement bowed sharply as the wind caught them. A nasty raw wind. There was a threatening note in it as it swept over; the first growl of winter’s anger. Two lines of a poem struggled for birth in Gordon’s mind.”

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a book of conflict between the internal and external, between who Gordon wants to be, and what the world makes him into. What he finds in his painful descent through London is that no matter how miserable life is being a slave to money, it is infinitely worse without any at all. Poverty does not free him from expectation and responsibility; it does not give him the ability to do whatever he wants. It chains him to doing nothing.

This is a biting piece of realist satire targeted against those who put literary pretension above economic reality, those who romanticise poverty, and those Raskolnikovian protagonists who expect the world to fall at their feet yet never do anything for themselves. It is a bleak, uncomfortable novel, whose satire is inherent rather than demonstrative and which rarely elicits so much as a chuckle from the reader. Gordon is frustrating in a pull-your-hair-out-just-to-feel-something sort of way. As events progress he grows ever more listless and depressed. His obstinate determination to follow his renunciation of the money game through to its conclusion, whatever that may be, makes for painful reading. He is incredibly fortunate – a good education, talent, friends willing to go out of their way to help him, a sister who puts his wellbeing before her own, and a former colleague named Rosemary whom he loves and who, inexplicably, seems to feel the same about him – yet can only see his own petty misfortune. He is too proud to ask for help, to do so would be to embrace failure.

One of the reasons Orwell has become so universally popular is that his style is at once readable and poetic, to the point yet visually stimulating. He has an exceptional eye for descriptive prose, both in regard to his characters and the settings they inhabit. Just as Dickens often reflected the nature of his characters through their names, so Orwell does through their bodies. Gordon is a typical small and frail man with a chip on his shoulders. He worries that no-one is really paying attention to him, that life would be different were he taller, wealthier, more gregarious. He wants to be seen, celebrated, respected. Elsewhere, those interested in money above all else are fat and gluttonous, and those of the upper class tall and thin and elegant. Orwell treats all those characters who pass under his microscope with a sort of loving yet laconic disdain, like that of an especially critical parent. There is a great phrase where he describes a fat man as “[filling] his trousers as though he [has] been melted and then poured into them”, and there are plenty more of these witty physical descriptions.

Yet for all the fluid prose it is the society itself which provides most fodder for thought. Set in what Marx would have understood as the final phase of Capitalism, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a fascinating and utterly unfamiliar portrayal of a social milieu now almost totally defunct. An aspidistra (for those like me who had no idea) is a hardy house plant popular in the Victorian era but which had fallen out of fashion by the 1930s, becoming a lower class pretention of wealth, a reflection of the “mangy, lower-class decency” Gordon is desperate to avoid. As he walks the streets of London he sees them in almost every window he passes, a sort of symbol for the aspirational rather than revolutionary working classes.

“There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.”

This is a society in which there appears to be a genuine battle of ideas between socialism and capitalism, an age in which it is only clear in hindsight which direction history will take. What struck me while reading was a sense of what we have lost in the last seventy-odd years. When did we grow so used to consumerism that we stopped questioning its relevancy? When did the desire for something new and the money to purchase it become so central to our lives? What I realised with some sadness was that I have never known a time when the simplistic slogans and garish stereotypes of advertising haven’t been present all around me. I cannot conceive what life without marketing would be like. Gordon, it seems, can. And he doesn’t like the world as it is becoming. Orwell is careful not to let his own politics influence the direction or inflection of what takes place, but just being present in such an environment really brought home to me how completely that element of thought has disappeared. I like to consider myself a socialist, yet that is in a modern liberal context rather than this. The ideas of Gordon and some of his friends are as alien to me as feudal agrarianism would be. It reminded me of my grandfather, John Ruddock, who was a founding member of a communist leaning actors organisation, and made me wonder what he, and all those others like him, would make of the world of today? What would Orwell think?

I hope this does not come across as me romanticising a past time for that is not the aim. Some of the descriptions of the mental and physical realities of poverty are incredibly moving. Before long, Gordon has slipped into a listless and depressed malaise. He cannot afford a drink in a pub with friends, or to go to the cinema. His only pleasure becomes an illicit cup of tea in his cold room before crawling into bed. He is too cold to write anymore, and when he tries all he sees is the faults of what is already written. He edits, endlessly, but never composes. When finally he earns some money through poetry he is so drunk on potential that it brings nothing but further misery.

Like 1984 and Animal Farm, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is hard-hitting social satire rather than political programme. Gordon rejects socialism just as heartily as he does consumerism, and the only obviously socialist characters are middle or upper class young men with good intentions but who remain oblivious to the realities of the poor. This is not a book to turn anyone communist. But in portraying a society in which debate and discussion appears rife, Orwell gives today’s reader a chance to appraise the world of today in a different light. Doing so reminded me of things I have forgotten to see.

Yet it is often considered one of Orwell’s weaker novels. Partly this is due to the changes to some of the slogans that his publishers imposed at the last minute for fear of litigation, partly because Orwell disowned it later in life, considering it a writing exercise which he had only published because he needed the money. But it is also because, although blessed with the same tight and visual prose that makes much of Orwell’s oeuvre so readable, it is not in the same league as his later works. There are elements of biography to much of what takes place, and although Orwell does not speak through Gordon, anyone familiar with Down and Out in Paris and London will note that the descriptions of life on the streets and poverty come from personal experience.

Between it’s infuriating narrator and bleak demeanour, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is not a book to fall in love with. Not for me anyway. Rather the significance of it lies in its portrayal of a forgotten era in history, one I didn’t realise had so completely disappeared until I delved inside. This is probably a better book to review than it is to read.

6.5 out of 10

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

So begins probably the single most important works of literature in the Twentieth Century. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the book which characterises an age of dictatorship and control, haunts us with inconvenient truths, and offers a warning to anyone seeking to further centralise control. Where Animal Farm is subtitled A Fairy Story, Nineteen Eighty-Four might as well be classified a nightmare. For what it presents, above all else, is the nightmare of all free thinking individuals: a homogonous and all encompassing state in such complete control of every aspect of the life of every citizen that it is no longer even possible to think freely, let alone communicate that thought to anyone.

Winston Smith is a party man, loyal and dedicated. Deep inside the Ministry of Truth he rewrites the past to fit the current party line. With a flash of his pen news stories are transformed, lives deleted, events fabricated. But inside, Winston struggles against the totalitarian state, and dreams of freedom. Then, one day he begins an affair with a fellow worker named Julia, and in the midst of their romance, he begins to realise how much truth and beauty still exists outside the all-seeing eye of Big Brother. But in such a state, can love even exist? Does Big Brothers control even extend into the realms of love? And if not, what price must Winston pay to let his heart and head be free?

In a world of Newspeak, where Big Brother watches over every act of daily life, and the punishment for transgression might lie in interrogation Room 101, does Winston’s rebellion have any chance of success? And if not, does it matter?

No book more defines the middle part of the Twentieth Century than Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is a portrait of a world on the brink, a warning of what could follow, a call to arms for people everywhere. And it is also a thoroughly exciting story. There is furtive sex in a forest in the middle of nowhere, a chase through the back streets of London, a love affair doomed to failure. There is something so exciting about acting out against such impossible odds. It is like a teenager trying to smoke undetected in his bedroom. The rebellion becomes self-fulfilling, the mere act of rebellion becomes romantic. If this were a sci-fi movie, it would be the biggest, grandest, most sensationally impossible movie ever made. Almost any dystopian idea since has adopted Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism. Not only have ideas such as Big Brother and Room 101 crossed over into modern parlance, so too has the bank of TV screens, the sky-high buildings, the grey concrete bureaucracy and the barely contained terror.

It is not so much that our world can be seen in the dystopia of Oceania, but it is a nightmare, full of exaggeration and impossibility, a warning of what could happen should we forget the importance of civil liberties, or fall under the sway of powerful leaders whose only goal is power at all cost. This is complete Totalitarianism as it has never existed in the real world, totalitarianism where you literally cannot evade the watchful eye of the state. In terms of historical accuracy, we should refrain from seeing it as an accurate portrayal of Purge era USSR, or China during the Cultural Revolution. Instead we should see Nineteen Eighty-Four as a classic of twentieth century literature because it catches an intellectual mood of fear and disgust perfectly. It is a warning of the direction history was moving in. In the life of Winston Smith we see the struggle of those living under any form of totalitarianism, so immediate as to be unavoidable. And in seeing it so clearly, we understand the freedoms which we sometimes ignore, but cannot live without. By staring the nightmare exaggeration in the face can we heed the warning and fight against totalitarianism wherever it raises its ugly head.

Few novels can compete with the sheer number of phrases which have crossed over into popular usage, and few novels tell a story which offers a more passionate call for freedom of thought and speech than George Orwell’s final masterpiece. Nineteen Eighty-Four is essential reading in every possible sense, and with such an engrossing plot, you will love reading it too.

9.5 out of 10

Animal Farm - George Orwell

How often do you find a writer who is able to distil grand ideas into a tiny novella? Who can compose a biting, scathing satire yet tell it all as a fairy tale story about a group of farmyard animals who rise up to oppose the farmer and take control of the farm?

Everyone who picks it up loves Animal Farm because on every single page there is something for everyone to relate to. It can be read by children, literature students, those seeking a fun beach read or those looking for something of substance to wile away an evening at home. It is above all a great story, witty, ironic, involving, exciting. Yet it is also a history lesson which covers the first twenty or so years of the Russian Revolution, a political satire on the abuse of power, a classic of twentieth century literature. And it fits in your pocket weighing about the same as a bar of chocolate. What more could you ask? Until virtual reality books are invented and you can climb in, meet the characters and join their adventures, this is about as good as books get. If there is any book which every single person should read, then perhaps this is it.

Animal Farm is packed with glorious caricatures: from Old Major (Karl Marx) who brings the ideas of revolution to the animals, to Boxer and Clover (workers) the old cart horses, Snowball (Trotsky) and Napoleon (Stalin) the rival pigs, Benjamin the wise old donkey (intelligentsia), and the ever bleating masses of sheep (people). Everything that happens has its historical precedent, from building the windmill to the bitter and lasting winter. It is such an achievement to make events on the farm mirror history so accurately.

And as with 1984, there are phrases which have made their way into the popular mindset, from the repeated motto of the revolution, “four legs good, two legs bad,” to the subtle work of revisionist propaganda “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” And then we come to the immortal last words which bring this novel to its scandalous close: “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

And all of this is crammed into less than 100 pages! Buy Animal Farm. Read Animal Farm. Love Animal Farm. The three follow one after the other as certainly as the knowledge that, in the end, all dictatorships begin to crumble.

8.5 out of 10