#orwell_george

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland In 1931, the Governor of Hunan Province in China, distressed by the supposedly disrespectful idea of animals using human language, banned Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s fantasy and ordered copies of it destroyed.

Black Beauty Putting the words ‘black’ and ‘beauty’ together in a book title was thought too racy by South Africa’s old apartheid regime and Anna Sewell’s famous story of a horse’s life was banned.

Fahrenheit 451 In 1992, students at a California school received copies of Ray Bradbury’s science fiction masterpiece in which potentially corrupting words like ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ had been blacked out. Ironically, the book is set in a future society in which books are censored.

Animal Farm George Orwell’s political allegory seems to annoy just about everybody. As a vicious satire on Stalinism, it was banned in the Soviet Union for many years as ‘anti-communist’ but, in some US states, it has been banned from public libraries for being too ‘pro-communist’.

Czech novelist and short-story writer (1883-1924)

In the 1920s and 1930s people regarded Kafka as an unsmiling neurotic who depicted the human condition as a bureaucratic hell without explanation or compassion: Kafkaesque' was a synonym for nightmarish'. Kafka, by contrast, always regarded himself as a humorist, in the line of such surrealist East European jokers as Gogol. Each of his novels and stories develops a single idea to ludicrous, logical-illogical extremes. In Metamorphosis a man has to cope with the fact that he has turned into a gigantic beetle overnight. The prison-camp commander of In the Penal Colony' is so eager to show off a newly-invented punishment-machine that he turns it on himself. In The Burrow' a creature designs a defence-system of underground tunnels so complex and so perfect that it becomes the whole meaning of existence: it engulfs its own creator. The central figure of The Trial (Der Prozess) is arrested one morning although he has done nothing wrong, spends the book trying to discover the charges against him, and is finally executed without explanation. It is easy to treat such tales as psychological or political allegories. But it is also possible to read them as jokes, grimly funny anecdotes invented just for the hell of it. Perhaps keeping his face straight was Kafka's best trick of all.

THE CASTLE  (1926) An ordinary, unremarkable man, K, arrives in a strange town to take up the post of Land Surveyor. He finds that no one is expecting him, that the town and the castle which dominates it are a labyrinthine bureaucracy where everyone is responsible only for passing the buck to someone else, and each favour done, each door opened, leads only to more confusion. K's efforts to reach the heart of the mystery, to be given some official confirmation of his existence, are doomed, hilarious and have the logic not of reality but of a very bad dream indeed.

Kafka's novels are The Trial, The Castle and America. His short stories have been published in one-volume collected editions and in shorter collections such as Metamorphosis and Other Stories and The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works. Kafka’s correspondence with the two women with whom he conducted complicated and soul-searching relationships gives fascinating insights into this most enigmatic of writers and has been published as Letters to Felice and Letters to Milena..

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The Trail

America (the story of a naive young German who goes to the USA thinking that its streets are paved with gold, and goes on believing it despite being cheated and betrayed by everyone he meets)

To The Trail : see also pathway

Echoing Kafka's humour : Jaroslav HaÜek, The Good Soldier Svejk Joseph Heller, Catch-22 Joe Orton, Head to Toe Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Balso Snell

Echoing the idea of a 'Kafkaesque', nightmare society : Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller Alasdair Gray, Lanark George Orwell, 1984 Rex Warner, The Aerodrome

George Orwell, 1984

(repression and oppression in grim totalitarian future)

Bleak Prospects (nightmare scenarios for the future of human society)

Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves  ("civilised" woman in distress, rehabilitated by contact with aboriginal "primitive" people)

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid"s Tale  (grim future: totalitarian, religious oppression, anti-women)

George Turner, The Sea and Summer

Paul Theroux, O-Zone  (efforts to make a viable post-nuclear society in US wilderness)

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange  (crime and class-war in future Britain)

Inner Hell (the nightmare is inside us)

Will Self, My Idea of Fun

William Golding, Lord of the Flies  (choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity"s dark side)

Georges Simenon, The Murderer  (criminal psychologically destroyed by guilt)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness  (wilderness as a satanic, engulfing force, human evil symbolised)

Fay Weldon, Life and Loves of a She-Devil  (betrayed wife takes macabre, comic revenge)

The Ghastly Past (totalitarian, fundamentalist nightmares from "real" history)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter  (religious bigotry in Pilgrim Fathers America)

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop  (Catholic missionaries test their faith in 1870s Mexican wilderness)

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock  (crime and redemption in 1930s England)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  (repression of dissidents in Stalinist labour-camp)

British writer (1903-1950)

George Orwell' was the pseudonym of Eric Blair, In his 20s he worked for the Colonial Police in Burma (an experience he later used in the novel Burmese Days). He returned to England disgusted with Imperialism and determined never again to work for or support the system'. In fact most of his work thereafter was literary: articles, essays and books taking a jaundiced view of British society and attitudes. Commissioned to report on the industrial north of England, he wrote The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), an indictment not only of unemployment and poverty but also of the failure of idealists, of all political parties, to find a cure. Downand Out in Paris and London (1933) is a description of the life of tramps and other derelicts; Homage to Catalonia (1938) is a withering account of the failure of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. During the 1930s Orwell published three Wells-ian novels, about people dissatisfied with the constricting middle-class or lower-middle-class lives they led. It was not until 1945, when the second world war seemed to have blown away for ever the humbug and complacency which Orwell considered the worst of all British characteristics, that he published his first overtly political book, Animal Farm. In this Stalinist fairy story', pigs turn their farm into a workers' democracy in which all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others', and the rule of all quickly degenerates into the tyranny of the few. The success of Animal Farm encouraged Orwell to write an even more savage political fantasy, 1984.

1984  (1949) In the totalitarian future, Winston Smith's job is to rewrite history, adding to or subtracting from the record people who are in or out of Party favour. He falls in love -- a forbidden thing, because it arises from free will and not by order of the Party -- and is betrayed to the Thought Police. He is tortured until he not only admits, but comes to believe, that the Party is right in everything: if it says that 2+2=5, then that is so. The book ends, chillingly, with the idea that Winston has won the victory over himself: he is happy because he has chosen, of his own free will, to have no choice.

Orwell's 1930s novels are A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air. His essays, letters and journalism have been collected in four volumes in paperback.

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To the novels of the 1930s : Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists H.G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly

To 1984 : Franz Kafka, The Trial Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev see also pathway

Future-fantasies of a similarly bleak kind : Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess, 1985 (a right-wing riposte to 1984) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Yevgeni Zamyatin, We x

Mario Vargas Llosa, The City and the Dogs/The Time of the Hero (set in a Peruvian military academy, is that rare thing, an Orwellian political allegory which is also funny)