2+2=4, Really

George Orwell’s 1984 is one of those books that you probably can’t get through life without reading. Dystopian societies are fashionable: just look at Lois Lowry’s work on the Giver trilogy, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Max Barry’s Jennifer Government, even Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. It’s a well of plots that seems unlikely to ever dry up, a different spin on the engine of all fiction: with dystopias, the peeling wallpaper, scuffed carpet, and rusting fixtures are on the outside.

I’m actually unsure what I think of this book. It’s difficult to say whether or not I even “liked” it. Obviously I didn’t care so much for the ending—which I generously won’t spoil for other ignorant folk like myself just two days ago—but the rest of the book provoked a certain amount of confused ambivalence. I haven’t yet decided if I disliked the book—which is the way I’m leaning—because I didn’t like what happened, or I didn’t like the book. Heh. Isn’t it interesting that I italicized that?

I also, as you’ve probably noticed, have a horrible tendency to overanalyze everything I read. Thus I wonder about the entire book, wonder after the big reveal near the end about everything that happened at the beginning. I came away from the novel unsure what really happened, which, in context, was probably just fine. It seemed slightly odd to me, though, because I’m used to always knowing what happens in novels—or feeling like I do. Because that’s the beauty of books: each reader comes away with something a little different. Even the author, I maintain, only thinks he (or she) knows what really happened.

When I told my dad that I was reading the book, he said that it was a satire. I’m going to have to disagree. Really disagree. I suppose one could see it that way: a satire of the state of the world and everything that was happening at the time. I have to argue that it was presented with far too straight a face to be outright satire. It wasn’t funny in the least, and I don’t really see how it could be construed as such.

As seriously as it was presented, though, in the guise if nothing else of a cautionary tale, I think one of my biggest problems with the book lay in its subject matter. That sounds like an easy way out—don’t all problems with books lie in their subject matter, or almost all anyway?—but I think it’s true. Orwell wanted to produce a threatening, dystopian view of the future, and that’s certainly what he did. He did it in such a way, however, that half the time it simply came off as absurd. My line on “suspension of disbelief” when reading fantasy and science fiction is that I don’t want there to be any disbelief to suspend in the first place. Oceania, the conglomerate of England, the U.S., and several other (former) countries in which 1984 is set, was too ludicrous to even try to suspend the mountains of disbelief that amassed as the book progressed. And maybe I’m too optimistic, but I don’t think that ending is at all within the realm of possibility, even within the context of Oceania.

Maybe that’s why some people think it’s a satire.

I think I’ve finally figured it out: the thing that bothered me about 1984 was the fact that it begged to be taken seriously, and then begged to be let off the hook on simple matters of logic and human nature, both of which it callously disbands—in order to make another point. The “points” in the book supersede believability. It’s a cautionary parable if anything.

I can’t leave the discussion without pointing out something that’s incongruously—and hilariously—1940’s. In 2006, would a twentysomething girl carry on a passionate affair with an older man—and call him “dear” every other sentence?

I didn’t think so.