Book of the Week

The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey
Recommended by Miss McLaren

Our first book of the week this year is Dorian Lynskey's fascinating study of Orwell's dystopian classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

This feels peculiarly timely. In January 2017, when reports of low attendance at Trump's inaugural address were dismissed as 'alternative facts', and it became clear that fake news was now definitely a thing, Orwell's novel shot to the top of the book charts.

Now, as the Trump presidency implodes so spectacularly, and Twitter and Facebook finally pull the plug, Nineteen Eighty-Four has again become a touchstone - this time for Trump's defenders, not his detractors:

Irony clearly passed the Trump dynasty by.  

Lynskey's illuminating study of Orwell's masterpiece was first published in 2019, when Nineteen Eighty-Four slipped the shackles of copyright and launched itself into an unlicensed world. While copyright endured, the Orwell estate had been tireless in tracking down unauthorised use of the novel's imagery or even its title, with a vigilance that inevitably saw the estate itself compared to Orwell's all-seeing, all-hearing dictator Big Brother.  

But the novel and its ideas are such a familiar part of the 20th and 21st century cultural landscape that any sense of their copyright has long been left behind. When Boris Johnson launched his pro-rogation 'coup', the cartoon that accompanied the Independent's editorial reproduced one of the novel's most iconic moments -  

- a moment itself famously reproduced in Apple's ad for the first Macintosh computer - 

and vividly rendered in Michael Radford's cinematic adaption:

Nineteen Eighty-Four has clearly taken on a life of its own, which is what makes Lynskey's decision to write a biography of the book itself, rather than its author, such a clever approach. The Ministry of Truth looks at Nineteen Eighty-Four's roots in dystopian and utopian fiction from the 1880s to the 1920s, as well as its afterlife as part of the CIA's culture war against the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and its wider influence on music, art and cinema. The result is an entertaining and highly readable mash-up of literary analysis, history, and social and cultural criticism, fuelled by the author's engagingly open-minded enthusiasm. 

Orwell's critical reputation over the years has regularly risen and fallen.  Lynskey is clearly a fan, though far from starry-eyed, and his admiration and affectionate respect for Orwell are always evident. He acknowledges the writer's flaws, but remains sympathetic, arguing that 'even when [Orwell] was wrong, he was wrong in a sincere and interesting way.' Ultimately, he suggests, Orwell's weaknesses were also his strengths as a novelist and as a thinker: 'until the end of his life, Orwell acknowledged that microbes of everything he criticised existed in himself. In fact, it was this awareness of his own flaws that inoculated him against utopian delusions of human perfectibility'. 

Lynskey's fascination with the novel has apparently led him to read not just everything that Orwell wrote (20 volumes, c. 9,000 pages, and approximately 2 million words) but everything that Orwell read. He scours Orwell's journalism for clues, and works his way through the books, plays and films he reviewed that might have shaped the novel. This isn't the sort of book that digs up long forgotten writers in order to make fun of them: Lynskey is generous to the utopian novelists of the past, 'dreamers who lived in more hopeful times', without shying away from some of their more earnest, eccentric and occasionally terrifying ideas, and making it clear why Orwell felt so much utopian thinking was a dead end. He has a keen eye for cultural cross-references that help him bring these forgotten figures to life - explaining the ideas of utopian novelist Edward Bellamy by way of Talking Heads, for example. 

He also makes some intriguing rediscoveries - for instance, Winifred Holtby's presciently titled 1940 play, Take Back Your Freedom, about a Moseley-like fascist who takes control of England, introducing concentration camps and covering up his regime's violence by blaming it on enemy agents: when asked if these rumours are true, he replies 'It is necessary. Therefore it will be true.' Considering the novel's relationship with better known writers, Lynskey explores the fractious relationship between Orwell and H G Wells, whose science fiction both inspired and infuriated him ('read my early works, you s**t!' Wells fumed). There's an excellent chapter on the life and work of Soviet satirist Yevgeny Zemyatkin, which examines how Orwell's original story, 'The Last Man in Europe' (the genesis of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and its working title) was significantly re-shaped and developed by what he absorbed from Zemyatkin's We (reviewed for the blog by Faris Firoozye here).  

Lynskey is also keen to take the reader back to Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, arguing that nowadays, it is 'more known about than truly known'. In parallel with his exploration of its many sources, he offers a detailed critical analysis of the novel, full of insight, and provocative ideas (O'Brien the telepath anyone?) with a view to re-asserting its seriousness as a work of fiction rather than just a 'useful cache of memes'. 

The second half of The Ministry of Truth races through the novel's after-life, and is packed even fuller of interesting detail: the pace is brisk, but that's understandable as there's so much to get through. Lynskey's whistlestop tour of key cultural moments is impressively pithy, with deft analyses of Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Alan Moore, Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, The Hunger Games, Black Mirror, and Putin's Russia. When he gives himself a bit more space - as in the section on the 'breadcrumb trail' of Orwell references in David Bowie's music - he's even stronger, and you can't help wishing he'd been able to develop the second half of the book in as much detail as the first half. Inevitably, Trump, and the social media that did so much to enable him, are the focus of the final chapter - 'Oceania 2.0' as Lynskey calls it.

As Lynskey notes, Nineteen Eighty-Four was 'the first fully realised dystopian novel to be written in the knowledge that dystopia was real. In Germany and the Soviet bloc, men had built it, and forced other men and women to live and die within it'. While he advises contemporary readers of the novel to 'keep our present rulers in mind', the fact that it still speaks to us so clearly 70 years after its first publication is actually a terrible indictment of politicians and citizens alike, 'a reminder of all the painful lessons that the world appears to have unlearned since Orwell's lifetime.' The Ministry of Truth is a brilliant and interesting book about a brilliant and interesting book: reading both of them is highly recommended.