Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #160 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-29
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Synopsis
Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

Customer Reviews

Is it relevant today?
I read this book having been unable to ignore the hype surrounding it. As with anything like this you usually stand to be dissapointed, but I was pleasantly surprised at how the book fitted my expectations very well.
The story is slightly sketchy in some places but this is the beauty of it - it keeps a good pace and concentrates on the authors suggestions of possible government structure in 1984 rather than centralising on the characters too much.

Where the characters are heavily detailed, this is to help create a tangible picture of the points the author is trying to make.

The words in our everyday use which originated from this book are taken for granted by us i.e. "Big Brother", "Room 101", And the author paints a powerful picture of their meaning.

Whilst writing this book in the 1940's, George Orwell obviously tried to predict the kind of technology we would be using by 1984 - and this must have seemed a world away for him. However, by 1984 the technology he had spoken of was easily possible and currently is far surpassed.

The overall setting of the story seems (at points) impossible to comprehend, but when you break down each part of Oceanic society and the circumstances that created it, it is generally easy to see "some" similarity with our own situation in the 21st century.

1984 - 1948 - 2008 - whenever
Was he writnig about a distant time or the time he lived in ? Orwellcould never know that he was only 20 years out with his CCTV and his national lottery, there is lots of this book that will hurt your head if you try to understand it too much. All i do understand is that perhaps i dont really understand this book at all, because it can mean many different thing to many diffent people. That is Orwell's master stroke he never knew his books would still have an impact after the fall of dictatorships but his books speak more to us now than perhaps they ever did

Gut wrenching
This is one of my all time favourite books. It has a wonderful air of tension which builds ratchet like throughout the book and makes even the most banal things seem creeping and evil. What is brilliant about this book is that it ricochets between the boredom of living in grinding poverty under a big brother fascistic state where everything is proscribed, and the absolute terror of the same. It is so accurate in its emotional descriptions it's chilling.

Winston, the hero is just an ordinary man whose gesture towards freedom starts as something so simple and ends as something so momentous and tragic you can't quite believe where it all started. The layers of meaning and symbolism in the book help to build up this crescendo type movement and you can read it and read it and still be profoundly affected and amazed by something new.
It has some of the best lines of any book and is gut wrenchingly horrible whilst being unspeakably brilliant all at the same time.