In the 75 years since it was published, few other novels in the English canon have had the cultural impact of George Orwell's 1984.
Phrases such as 'Big Brother', 'Thought Police' and 'Double Think' have all made it into our political lexicon.
The book remains prescient, says Peter Marks emeritus professor of English and writing at the University of Sydney.
Marks is the author of George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture.
Photo: RNZ
“The surveillance that he portrays in 1984 is very much government surveillance, state surveillance, the big brother state.
"And we still have that sort of surveillance, but these days, especially with our phones, with our credit cards our activities are under surveillance are being monitored, not just by governments, but by companies, Meta and Google, who are taking the information that we're supplying to them and monetising it.”
Written just after World War II, the Nazis were defeated but Stalin’s Soviet Union was an emerging totalitarian super power, Orwell was worried that the some on left in the UK had succumbed to the “Soviet myth”, Marks said.
“He sees this totalitarian possibility, not just in the Soviet Union, obviously the Nazis have been defeated, Fascism has been defeated, but also potentially coming into being in the Britain that he was living in, he was very wary of he was very wary of intellectuals in the way that they might, in fact, be complicit with this sort of world.”
The book foresaw the dangers of manipulating language, Marks says.
“In the last five or 10 years, in America particularly, the notion that language and facts are manipulable. And so, famously, when Kelly Anne Conway talked about alternative facts, talking about Donald Trump, the book went up the bestseller list in America.”
The book has been banned by oppressive states around the world in its 75 years, Marks says, because it is still a revolutionary text.
“It wasn't published in the Soviet Union until the 1980s, it was supposedly passed around amongst the intellectuals within the party in the Soviet Union, to show what the West thought of the Soviet Union. So, but it was for their eyes only.”
Despite the fact 1984 has leached into the general culture it is probably not Orwell’s best work, Marks says.
“He said himself that he thought he botched it. He was writing it when he was very ill. And literally at times he was typing it in bed, because he was so ill he couldn’t get up you're so ill, he couldn't get out. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 46. So, he's very young, and very ill when he was writing this book.
Orwell himself said it was a good idea spoiled, Marks said.
“So, I think in that sense, 1984 isn't his best work. But I think it's obviously his greatest work in terms of its public influence.”
