Eric Arthur Blair was born in 1903 in India.  He graduated from Eton in 1921.  He returned to India and became a member of the Burmese Indian Imperial Police.   His strategy was to become a part of a system that he hated, imperalism.  He was one of them for five years until he quit to become a writer taking on the pen name of George Orwell.

He published many books among them Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and his last 1984.  He died of tuberculosis at the age of 46.  He was married twice.  His second wife and he joined the anti-fascist militia in Spain in 1937. 

1984 takes place in London.  But, it isn’t the London of Westminster Abbey and of Her Majesty, the Queen coming out in full regalia to fascinate her citizens.  It is a most miserable place of squalor and degradation, of hiding to have sex and of needing a reason to be happy.  In an all out attempt to destroy the past that has brought them to such utter humiliation, the new government has made it its policy to disorient its population.  Nothing that you knew was unless they tell you it was.  Nothing that sounds right is right but wrong. 

The characters are actually names that Londoners would recognize.  Winston, the name of a prime minister is now the name of the main character Winston Smith who works for the Ministry of Truth.  He works for the Ministry of Truth not that he even has the satisfaction of telling people what the truth is.  His job is to analyze information as he is being told to analyze and he is never sure when he will unwittingly let slip some word that he was never told but should have known was against the government. 

The fact that he is married but separated sifts in and out of this novel like a smell of burned bacon.  He turns to a fellow disastified person Julia for comfort and finds himself having sex in a field.  They rent an apartment and are not wise enough to look behind pictures.  Why would they look behind pictures?  Because Big Brother is everywhere.  Big Brother has three truths.   War is Peace.

Because peace is a most dire consequence of War. 

Freedom is Slavery.

Because Slavery is the absolution of human desires to the state.

Ignorance is Strength.

Because in Strength is found endurance and one can only endure if one is ignorant of the truth.

Winston and Julia are caught by the Secret Police and sent to torture jails.  There they are put through torture that is reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.  The heretics must renounce their illegal sex and must then be killed.  But, Winston knows who the gruesome Big Brother is O’Brien.  And, even here in the midst of moral decay and perverse judgement, Winston’s unwavering sense of the real survives. 

If Eric Arthur Blair was as hateful towards the imperalism that devastated India, he was even more hateful towards the fascist, whose doublethink and moral superiority while indulging in the most dispicable acts against man were his hold on governments was harder. 

Can we find hope for London in the shadowy dawn of Winston?