Beginning with "This is a True Story" and we journey quicker and quicker down the rabbit hole of "Military Intelligence". In specific, the divisions that covertly employ psy and paranormal ops. Highly amusing, and (frighteningly enough) not even slightly implausible. Which it should be, given the absurd events and histories it narrates, but it's not. I've heard most of these things before, parroted as fact...While the miracles are uncertain, the witnesses are legion. Especially amusing is the narrator's (Ronson's) dry tone as he interviews his subjects.
A throwaway read, but worthwhile nonetheless. I'd give it 30 goats and 3 hamsters. All live.
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I like Orwell. He's bleak, bleak as all out, but live in Britain any length of time and you'll know where he's coming from.
In this he takes the character of George Bowling, an overweight self-satisfied insurance agent who recalls the Britain of his youth and comes up with some occasionally sage observations on the turnings of modern society. There are forshadowings of themes that he expounds upon in "1984". Not essential Orwell, but good. Also worth noting are the feelings of displacement, the world of Bowling's childhood being swiftly destroyed by "progress" and the War. Themes still current, more current even, today...
But I've had enough, they're good reads but a trifle depressing. I've had it in my head (where did it come from, I wonder?) to read "Madame Bovary" by Flaubert, thought I had it on my shelves, searched for it and couldn't find it, but then by happy circumstance I stumbled upon an Everyman edition (red Moroccan Leather, although I'm suspicious of the translation...) at a thrift shop down the street.
Which will be the next review....
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An uncomfortable recognition of the resemblences between young Gordon Comstock and myself; unfortunately I haven't gone searching for poverty (but it's done a fine job of finding me....). As always, Orwell has a fine eye for the minutae and details of the hypocrisies and manners of English society. And the bit about advertising is as relevent now as always...but still, that damnable resemblance....
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Somehow I picked it up and began rereading it. I had read it once, long ago, some 20 years past when I read everything by Orwell, or almost everything, and so I picked up believing that I would just skim it, refresh my memory, revisit the central themes and characters.
It wasn't as I remembered it. I remembered it, true, most of it, but the details, the nuances, raw brutality, the intimacies of violence were all forgotten.
Possibly I read it during high school, some dumbed-down bowlderized version, which would account for it.
It's a great book. Prescient, insightful, and bleak as all out.
He got it wrong in the details, of course, or some of the details. That the population would by and large be poor and live in squalor, subjegated by a lack of education, a failure to percieve options, wrong, they would be instead fattened like pigs on soda pop and fast food, they would be dumbed by the news and doublespeak, true, but there is no once telescreen channel with a monopoly rather there are thousands of channels, each with its own view, the dumbing down would come about as a result of the constant assault of conflicting or complimentary points of view. But we have undoubtedly been dumbed down, not from lack of choice (there are abundant choices), but from laziness on our own part, our readiness to accept the situation, any situation, without revolt so long as we are kept plump and lightly distracted....
The telescreens nowadays don't watch us, they don't have to. We have the internet, credit cards, banks, traffic and street cameras, we bare all willingly before the corporations, our validition a function of our credit rating and institutional approval. Some bare more intimate, personal details, but these are not (yet) what the corporations want, they are the perverse misunderstandings who have taken this absence of privacy to the next level.....
The news has become entertainment. AN inane parody without self recognition of all things that might somehow be important. 15 or 30 minute breaks amuse us and feed the smug feelings that we are well informed.
The tortures he describes, that are visited upon Winston, the insistence upon conformity, they are still happening, slowly in the works, there are none (here, in Canada) so dire as he describes (and how accurately he portrays it!), rather people are hung in the vacuum of shopping malls and lifestyles, a torture of the spirit as opposed to the flesh. Far less painful, but no less damaging.
It's a great book. Revisit it if you have the chance...
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