The Ministry of Truth

As my fellow English teachers and I selected our texts for comparative study a year ago, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed an interesting pick.  Its richness and depth would be perfect for examining themes, ‘cultural context’ and ‘general vision and viewpoint,’ Moreover, it was then much in the books pages of the media due to the publication of the first ‘biography’ not of the author but of the book itself.

Fast forward a year, and now in class my pupils and I find ourselves peering at each other in little electronic boxes on screens from scattered locations, thinking about the nature of ‘dystopia’ and considering the unrelenting darkness of a book which gives little succour to its readers. Maybe not such a smart pick: or maybe there’s comfort in saying, ‘Well, at least I’m not Winston Smith.’

In this situation, every teacher has had a similar experience: how difficult it is to cover anything the same amount of content as in a physical classroom, and how the rich conversations that environment allows have been severely curtailed. So I have had little chance to discuss with my class Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth: a biography of George Orwell’s 1984. But it a superb introduction to the novel, and a vital read for English teachers.

As Lynskey writes:

One reason it took Orwell so long to write Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it synthesised ideas that he had been developing for most of his writing life. The book was the consummation of years of thinking, writing and reading about utopias, super-states, dictators, prisoners, propaganda, technology, power, language, culture, class, sex, the countryside, rats and more.

This is quite a broth, and Lynskey skilfully describes how the ingredients of the recipe came to the boil over decades, especially from its emotional and intellectual origins in the Spanish Civil War. The power of the book comes from the fact that

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.

You can see the bleakness of Nineteen Eighty-Four coming a long way out, from the early books onwards:

All of his plots have this baleful circularity… his characters are not only defeated but broken and alienated … All of Orwell’s first four novels despite their significant differences, share a pungent sense of claustrophobia, corruption and living death. Above all, there is the ozone smell of fear.

As Lynskey moves towards Nineteen Eighty-Four itself he picks his way through the literary influences, including H.G. Wells, Zamyatin and Koestler. Animal Farm is covered in Chapter 7 (‘Orwell never enjoyed writing a book as much’) and the composition of Nineteen Eighty-Four in Chapter 8, ‘Every Book is a Failure’. As Lynskey points out, it was the sixth of his books to open with the time of day (that very famous first line). Indeed, the title itself positions the book at a particular time. It is not the least of the ironies of the book that it has become almost timeless, a text referred to in so many different situations well past the year itself and, clearly, far from a failure. Part Two of The Ministry of Truth explores its afterlife in popular culture (Chapter 12 is ‘Orwellmania’), its most distinctive trace being the adjective ‘Orwellian’. 

Time and again the enduring relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four has resurfaced in recent years. It is, in Lynskey’s words 

A durable compendium of everything he ever learned about human nature as it relates to politics - every cognitive bias, unexamined prejudice, moral compromise, trick of language and mechanism of power that enables injustice to gain the upper hand - and remains an unbeatable guide to what to watch out for.