Nineteen Eighty-Four

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High Flying Flag said:
Ordering 1984 and Animal Farm in a combined hardcover in a few days, $20 is a great deal. Already read Animal Farm as school work, but can't wait to get into 1984
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If you have an e-reader, or don't mind reading off your computer screen, you can download Animal Farm as a free e-book from the Gutenberg Project Australia website.

I just re-read Animal Farm quite recently, actually and I re-read 1984 about 12 months ago. Both stand out as beacons in the panoply of English literature.
 
Kong said:
Haha, don't joke about that, you're probably not far off the truth.

Reading the book, although it was obviously in England which is more relatable to Australia (good thing), I couldn't help but think of China, and how many similarities there are (see: Tiananmen Square).

Any signs of protest results in death and diappearance from history.
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As well as being a portrait of he saw Britain heading at the time, Stalin was head of the USSR.
This type of disappearance, often before any action was taken by a possible dissident, was common in Stalin's version of the Soviet Union. And fairly common up to beyond Gorbachev (and allegedly not unheard of under Putin, although those who hear of them tend to wind up missing or dead in ways totally unrelated to the government).

Doublespeak and groupthink are very much the order of the day in the media of the western world these days. No doubt they wereback then too, after all a war had just ended with all the nationalist propoganda that entailed.
 
Read it a couple of times and also audiobooked it in the car. Not many books I read more than once.

I agree with the theories behind how O'Brien knew about the rats. I thought they gathered that info from the hidden telescreen in the apartment where Julia and Winston trysted. Kinda like the direct betrayal from Juila though - it fits more into the theme of the book.

What I think is so great about this book is that Orwell makes the implausible plausible. I mean, if I describe some of the book's ideas to one who hasn't read it, they sound crazy. But reading the book, he kind of makes it plausible. This could happen - maybe even does happen in places like North Korea.

Ending depressing? Hell yeah. The last couple of sentences - they just punch you in the guts. I sometimes draw parallels with that concept to our everyday lives. ;-(
 
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I finally finished it yesterday.

Brilliance in every sense of the word.

I think it may need a re-read to fully comprehend the meaning behind it all, but Goldstein's book was perhaps the embodiment of Orwell's life and beliefs.

For me, Big Brother and Goldstein are completely fictitious characters.
 
The endngs of both Orwell books mentioned here are depressing, but I think the impact is more powerful because of that. No Disney happily-ever-after endings here, just cold hard brutal dream-crushing hopeless reality.

As to the knowledge about the rats, I also thought that was from the hidden telescreen.

Both great books. This thread has motivated me to go back and read them again.
 
I remember watching the Animal Farm movie in about Year 9 at High School. Without wishing to spoil it, the ending is different to the book, which bothered those of us who had read the book. In a way the movie ending is more optimistic, but it another way it is equally depressing, suggesting the ongoing cycle of hope and despair, and that power corrupts.

It is very very rare to find a movie as good as or better than the book. I haven't even watched the 1984 movie and by the comments on this thread, I don't think I will bother.
 
All the more ironic given that Orwell was informing on his own "kind" to the Thought Police at the very time he was writing/gestating the work.

For me, one of the driving themes of the whole piece is memory. Orwell is quite explicit about this - memory holes.

One of the most poignant scenes is when Winston works up the courage to talk to a prole about what it was like before The party took over. Its important to remember that the Party rule is relatively knew. Winston knows he lived in a time before the Party was "seemingly" omnipotent, but he was child and he can't trust his own memory. But the old prole in the pub doesn't remember, or most likely never knew, the stuff Winston wants to know.

I'm reminded of this because AA Gill just wrote a fantastic feature on the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, in this Weekend Oz mag.

At the very end a man from a village called Deir Rassin (or similar, don't have the link in front of me) approaches Gill and talks about how the entire village was destroyed in the fighting. He says it is gone and will never come back and asks Gill to just put the words on a page for the West so that the village might live on somehow, that people will read the artice and remember.

That is what 1984 i about ... the fact that what we live now can and will be very easily forgotten.
 
Read it once, felt extremely depressed after, probably wont touch it again even though it really is a classic.

It must be remarkably similar in some ways to how life is in a place like Iran or North Korea - that constant feeling of being watched and having to guard your thoughts and actions so closely.
 
I started it Monday night and finished it last night. It honestly blew me away. My mind was a mess after I finished it. Some spoilers here for anyone who hasn't read it.

And this was Orwell's idea of what Communism would lead to? It's a shame he died before the height of the Cold War.

While I was reading, my mind was constantly drawing parallels with the stories that are told in another book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. (A great book, btw.) The distrust of others around you, the constant fear of people, even those closest to you, turning you into the authorities, the food rations, the propaganda, the lies spread about production, the omnipotent, omnipresent leader and the frenzied emotion experienced in love and in hate.

I think I've seen too many Hollywood 'happy ending' movies. I kept hoping desperately for a happy ending, but as I got closer to the end I realised it wasn't going to happen. Didn't stop the last few pages from depressing the * out of me.

Just a thing on the rats and how O'Brien knew what he was thinking, I thought maybe he could have been sleep talking? It isn't explicitly stated that's how, but Winston in the beginning, talks about sleep-talking and how it is the only thing you can't control. Also, Parsons, who worked with him was arrested because he said 'down with Big Brother' while he slept. And the Party say they have been watching him for seven years.

Anyway the fact that O'Brien knew what he was thinking without really knowing how adds more to the power of the party.
 
Copernicus said:
Read it once, felt extremely depressed after, probably wont touch it again even though it really is a classic.

It must be remarkably similar in some ways to how life is in a place like Iran or North Korea - that constant feeling of being watched and having to guard your thoughts and actions so closely.
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Absolutely nothing like life in Iran.
 
kickazz said:
Always interesting to reflect on 'Orwellisms' that you see in everyday life. Sure, the world he creates seems much more extreme than ours, but things like Prolefeed and Doublethink (especially in a corporate environment) really ring true in the world I inhabit.
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Sometimes at the footy when you see people going apeshit usually at the umpires but sometimes at the opposition it reminds me of the "two minutes of hate" or whatever it is called. People who have no power or will to direct their hate towards the people they should be going after (namely big business crooks and politicians) take out their anger/hate/frustration at the footy so they can go back to their everyday jobs and families and be productive members of society.
 
Not to mention there are numerous examples of "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" - the bin Laden / Goldstein link was already made and there's also the "changing alliances" seen over the last couple of decades with Iraq and Iran - in the 80's the US supported Iraq and Hussein and then when it was no longer beneficial it was "we are at war with Iraq and we've always been at war with Iraq" - same with Iran 10 years ago they were part of the "axis of evil" and recently they were trying to build a nuke to bomb the west and their crazy leader was going to blow up the world, now the US are negotiating with them to go after ISIL/Isis in Iraq.
 

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After reading this thread I pulled out Animal Farm to read again - I have the 50th anniversary edition illustrated by Ralph Steadman. Hadn't read in years and what struck me is how similar a lot of the themes were to 1984. Probably obvious in hindsight but it felt like a different way of telling the same story.
 
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