Orwellian brilliance

There can be little doubt that the writer Eric Blair (who adopted George Orwell as his pen name), even considered, that this amazing novel should bring the adjective "orwelian"' into common parlance. Such was the force of the author's understanding of totalitarianism and its threat in all its forms,; that 1984 is considered both the model of a dystopia and a regrettable path onto which our nightmares take us.

Written during a time when Orwell was experiencing the pain and indignity of his demise from tuberculosis, the subtext of fear always overcoming love always brings a shudder along the spine of any thoughtful reader.

Written at the pinnacle of his vocation as an author, the novel is borne from a horror of fascism which he observed from personal experience in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930's, the experiences of downtrodden English coal miners and their families in his home country, and hos own experience of poverty (recounted in Down and Out in Paris and London).

For the reader coming to 1984 for the first time, this is not merely a novel of ideas, nor a political tract. We sympathise and even empathise  with the main character, Winston Smith. We come to a dilemma in comprehending Julia, we pity Parsons and his fecklessness, we do not sympathise with O'Brien but the novel never invites us to hate him despite his brutal pragmatism. We are invited rather to gate the machinery that creates monsters.

From the novel's first line when we learn that the clocks have struck 13, we realise that we are entering another world. Sadly, that other world may be attempting to seduce us into its brutish future.