Book review: 1984 | Ed Peaches. | [Insiders] by TeamInsiders George Orwell’s novel 1984 is a vividly lucid imagination of a totalitarian dystopian ‘future’: it is set about 35 years after the creation of the novel and about 30 years before the present day, in London, Britain (which has been renamed Airstrip One, and is part of a superstate named Oceania). The main character is a man named Winston Smith, and the story follows his actions as he plots against the tyranny of the ruling Party in Oceania (Ingsoc); actions which ultimately lead to his utter annihilation. As I read 1984, I discovered that George Orwell used many fascinating ways of communicating complex and original ideas. Through these methods I was able to understand the total control of Ingsoc over Oceania, and how this fictional totalitarianism relates to reality. One method of doing this that I particularly found thought-provoking and which I found helped to communicate important themes to me was his use of symbolic motifs throughout the novel. One of these is the incorrect mathematical equation ‘2 + 2 = 5’.

This ‘equation’ is used several times throughout the book, linking events, showing the development of Winston, and showing the reader important ideas. Early on in the novel, Winston writes in his secret journal, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows,’ after musing about how the Party would eventually announce that two plus two equals five– foreshadowing the events at end of the novel. Orwell is communicating here to the reader through this symbol the theme that truth is freedom, and that the more truth is known, the more freedom there is. This idea reminded me of a famous quote from Chairman Mao, which translates as, ‘To read too many books is harmful.’ Mao would not have wanted ordinary people to know too much, as questions raised due to knowledge endangered his supreme power; a person in China reading too many books could be harmful, to his rule. I agree that gaining truth is an important safeguard to a person’s liberty; I believe this is an important reason for ensuring people get a good education, and the communication of this theme makes me think about how lucky I am, and how many other New Zealanders are, to be getting a relatively free and unbiased education.

Another symbolic motif used in 1984 I found interesting and revealing was the old nursery rhyme, ‘Oranges and Lemons’. Different lines of the first stanza of this old English rhyme about churches in London are told to Winston by different characters in the novel. I feel that this is also symbolic of the idea, ‘To know truth is to be free’. This poem is one of the only remaining memories of pre-regime Britain, and so represents the relatively immense freedom people used to enjoy. Winston thinks in the story, ‘…when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten… Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.’ Here, Orwell could be intending that ‘the sound of bells’ is as a metaphor for the lost freedom in London; Winston had never experienced true freedom in his ‘real life’, but the rhyme reminded him of what this lost freedom was. If this is a metaphor, it is also has a hopeful ring to it, as Winston thinks this freedom ‘still existed’.

This could be referring to the idea that the proles, as they are keeping old culture alive, could one day topple the corrupt system. A sentence which could be an earlier reference to this metaphor and which may back this up is when Winston once thinks a riot of the proles is starting (he was mistaken) but their cry ‘went humming on like the reverberation of a bell.’ As Winston learns each line through the book, he is slowly rebelling more and more against the unspoken rules of the Party ‘“Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop of your head,” At this point in the book, I found there to be a vaguely hopeful tone; at this point, Winston is coming to rebel against the Party more and more. However, towards the end of the book, where Winston has been caught and is being tortured by O’Brien, I found the tone to be one of despair and fairly depressing– the feel of a tragedy. As O’Brien tortures Winston, he slowly convinces Winston through means of pressure and pain that the four fingers he is holding up are actually five.

Through this, I think Orwell is communicating that, in a state which has complete control, a fact may be at once true and untrue; inversely to the above, the complete absence of truth (replaced by the ruling party’s ‘truth’) indicates the complete lack of freedom. Thanks to Orwell’s fascinating concept of ‘doublethink’, even the top members of the ruling party can believe both truth and Party lies simultaneously. This negates freedom even in the top ranks of the Party, guaranteeing the Party as a whole complete control over Oceania. In the end, Winston traces, ‘2 + 2 = 5’ in the dust on a table, symbolising his complete assimilation into the lies of the Party. Seeing Winston ultimately become enslaved in this part of the book caused me to find the mood as being rather downbeat. I thought that the way Winston was killed at the end of the book was very symbolic. He was shot in the head instead of hanged like the prisoners of war were earlier in the novel; I feel this may represent how, before his death, the lies of the Party entered and eventually destroyed his mind, just like a bullet. I believe that this ending that Orwell chose was a poignant way of ending the novel.

The ending of 1984 was depressing and somber to me, I felt sorry for Winston, who not only was murdered, but was mentally enslaved by the Party at the time of his death. I saw it as being deeply sorrowful and disturbing that Winston, who had just wanted freedom to live his life the way he wanted to, should have his life ended in such a way. It is horrifying to consider that in reality, people in many countries are incarcerated, tortured or executed due to their wish for freedom; .. I found the character of Mr. Charrington interesting: to me, he really stood out from the other characters of the novel as being unusual and quirky. Many aspects of Charrington are unique in the book because of way the way he doesn’t seem to be constrained by the rules of the dystopian society; he has been forgotten by the harsh rule of the Party. He is introduced to the reader as ‘a man of perhaps sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy and still black.

His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements and the fact that he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectually, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician. His voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of proles.’ This description gave me an impression of this man as a friendly, peaceful and reliable type; Orwell has achieved this impression by using adjectives such as ‘benevolent’, ‘mild’, ‘gentle’, ‘soft’ in describing Charrington. This calm demeanor is a highly unusual character trait in 1984: Winston is usually either despairing, panicking or being cautiously disobedient, Julia is usually resentful and vindictive or blasé, impassioned and rebellious, O’Brien is power-crazed and fanatical.

Charrington’s earlier actions, too, set him apart as being out of place; his devoted hoarding of pre-regime artifacts, his lack of a controlling telescreen, his lucid memories of the cultural heritage of London before the rule of Big Brother, and his obliging decision to let his spare room to Julia and Winston for carrying out their secret, clandestine romance. No other characters in the story have these aspects. This stark contrast of Charrington from other characters meant I found Charrington interesting; I enjoy it when characters in a novel really stand out from other characters in a novel, as it is more realistic than when the characters are not developed enough to be properly unique. I feel Orwell has done a good job of character development in 1984 through his character dialogue and his description of characters’ actions and appearances. My interest in Charrington made it all the more shocking when he is revealed as being a member of the dreaded Thought Police; he had been working undercover to discover ‘thought-criminals’ all along.

Share this: Point of Exquisite Suspension: Airstrip One (with #Brexit update) Point of Exquisite Suspension Thoughts & life experiences of a Chicago area graphic artist 22 August 2013 Airstrip One (with #Brexit update) Like many Americans, I have a deep fascination and fondness for everything British. The various accents of that culture enchant me. Some of my favorite authors are British: Gaiman, Murdoch, Moore, Lewis. In my imagination, the United Kingdom is full of rich history, nobility and a mystique of granduer, refinement and cultural excellence. So, in that context, one of the many brutal outrages that my mind sustained while reading George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, 1984 was that, in that bleak and hopeless world, Great Britain had been renamed "Airstrip One". It didn't even rate the dignity to be called a proper nation's name. It was just a servile plot of earth upon which a larger government had dehumanized in it's domination of all areas of that hapless society. I think of that novel a lot these days. The revelations about the U.S.

government's surveillance upon it's citizens and the disregard of our leaders to change things is reminiscent of that cautionary story that was once called a "self-defeating prophecy". I guess the power of 1984 to ward off government oppression in the West is wearing off. The news from 2013 about a journalist's partner being detained for 9 hours in the U.K. as he passed through Heathrow Airport was to me a true "Airstrip One" moment. Great Britain was not being very great. It was like a lap-dog serving the interests of the more powerful government that had a beef with the journalist that helped expose that government's spying on its own citizens. Very sad. 2016 Brexit UPDATE: After hearing and seeing news reports on TODAY'S vote to decide if the UK will leave the European Union, I get the sense that many citizens there feel like Great Britain has become a mere landing strip for a bloated, incompetent, mainland beauracracy (the E.U. -not the U.S.). Immigration over run, negative consequences of the Global Marketplace and phantom nostalgia (for a perceived golden past of more U.K. prominence and independence) are some factors.

It's a big step if they #Brexit. The world's financial markets are on "tinter hooks" of suspense they await the election results. Posted by Captain Airstrip-One (Marvel UK, Earth-744) Identity/Class: Extradimensional (Earth-744) presumptive human (possible Otherworld contribution to bloodline) Occupation: Protector of Earth-744 Group Membership: [Captain Britain] Corps Affiliations: Roma Allies: Roma, Thought Police operative O'Brien Known Relatives: None Base of Operations: Earth-744 First Appearance: Daredevils#7 (July, 1983), reprinted in X-Men Archives Featuring Captain Britain#4 (October, 1995) - mentioned only; The Mighty World of Marvel#13 (June, 1984), reprinted in X-Men Archives Featuring Captain Britain#7 (January, 1996) Powers/Abilities: Captain Airstrip-One possesses heightened strength proportionate to Brian Braddock, the Captain Britain of Earth-616. He also has the power of flight, as well as heightened senses.

History: (Mighty World of Marvel#13) - Following Merlin 's apparent death, Captain Airstrip-One (as well as the rest of the Corps) attended his funeral. He congratulated Captain Britain of Earth-616 for his role in the defeat of Mad Jim Jaspers , who posed a multiversal threat, bowing and greeting him with "CapBrit! Doubleplusgood usmeet!" (Excalibur I#43-47) - Captain Airstrip-One (along with other members of the Corps) acted as jury on the trail of Captain Britain, who had been perceived to be in violation of the Corps' morality code. (Mad Dog#10, published by Oddmags) - Captain Airstrip-One began what appeared to be a standard patrol for him, starting at 13 o'clock. He first punished a married couple who were slow to rise out of bed, then administered electrical aversion therapy to a teenage boy watching a salacious music video. He eventually witnessed a parade in London's Victory Square (to honor an increase in the video game ration), greeting Thought Police member O'Brien on his arrival.

O'Brien, in a philosophical mood, said to him, "The purpose of power is power! How could it be otherwise? Imagine a boot stamping into a human face forever!" Captain Airstrip-One interpreted this as a direct order, and commenced imagining a boot stamping into a human face ... forever. It is unknown whether this was effectively Captain Airstrip-One's final case. (Excalibur II#1 - BTS) - Presumably, Captain Airstrip-One was among the members of the Captain Britain Corps that were slaughtered by Mastermind and the Warpies . What would George Orwell have made of the world in 2013? | Books | The Guardian George Orwell What would George Orwell have made of the world in 2013? If he were alive today, would he be writing about call centres and Occupy? Or would he have become a rightwing food writer? It's not as crazy as it sounds George Orwell at his typewriter.

Photograph: Mondadori via Getty Images Thursday 24 January 2013 01.00 EST First published on Thursday 24 January 2013 01.00 EST Share on Messenger Close What if George Orwell hadn't died of tuberculosis in 1950? What if, instead of expiring aged 46 in University College hospital, he had climbed from his sick-bed, taken the fishing rod a friend had brought him for his convalescence and checked out? What if today he was alive and well (perhaps after a period in cryogenic storage – the details aren't important now)? What would he think of 2013? What, if anything, would he be writing about? In many respects Orwell is ubiquitous and more relevant than ever. His once-visionary keywords have grotesque afterlives: Big Brother is a TV franchise to make celebrities of nobodies and Room 101 a light-entertainment show on BBC2 currently hosted by Frank Skinner for celebrities to witter about stuff that gets their goat. Meanwhile, Orwellian is the second-most-overused literary-generated adjective (after Kafkaesque).

And now St Vince of Cable has been busted down from visionary analyst of recession to turncoat enabler of George Osborne's austerity measures. Orwell is the go-to thinker to account for our present woes – even though he is 63 years dead. Which, in the Newspeak of 1984, is doubleplusgood. As we celebrate the first Orwell Day this week, it's irresistible to play the game of "what if"? If Orwell was fighting in a war akin to the Spanish civil war in 2012, where would he be – Syria? Would he write Homage to Aleppo, perhaps? Or would he have written Homage to Zuccotti Park or Tottenham? If he was writing Down and Out in Paris and London today would it be very different – and, if so, how? If he took a journey to Wigan pier in 2013, what would he find that would resemble the original trip and what would be different? Would there still be a full chamber pot under his hosts' breakfast table? Let's hope not. Would he be working in a call centre rather than going down a mine? Would he feel as patriotic as he did in some of his essays?

Would the man born Eric Arthur Blair have spent much of the past decade tilting at the man born Anthony Charles Lynton Blair? The answers to the last three questions are, you'd hope: yes, probably not, and oh, please God, yes. "It's almost impossible to imagine," says Orwell's biographer, the novelist and critic DJ Taylor. "One of his closest friends, the novelist Anthony Powell, suggested in his journals that Orwell's politics would have drifted rightwards. He would have been anti-CND, in favour of the Falklands war, disapproved of the miners' strikes.

Powell was a high Tory right winger, but he was very close to Orwell and so those possibilities of what he would have been like had he lived on shouldn't be dismissed." Adam Stock, an Orwell scholar at Newcastle University who did his PhD on mid-20th-century dystopian fiction and political thought, says: "If he were alive today, then Orwell would surely be writing about many of the sorts of areas you identify, bringing to light inequalities, injustices and arguing for what he termed 'democratic socialism', and I would like to think – though this may be projection on my part – that at this moment he would be writing specifically in defence of the welfare state." You'd hope. But Stock reckons that in 2013 Orwell would also be writing about the politics of food. "Orwell's novels are marked by their rich detailing of taste, touch and especially smell. Tinned and processed food is a recurring image in his fiction, and it often represents a smoothing out of difference and individuality, a process which mirrors political attempts to make people conform to certain ideological visions of the world in the 1930s and 1940s," says Stock.

Indeed, during last week's horsemeat scandal , Stock says a passage from Orwell's 1939 novel Coming Up for Air came to mind. The character George Bowling bites into a frankfurter he has bought in an milk bar decorated in chrome and mirrors: "The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn't believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of." What's the present-day significance of that? "The point, I think, is that appearances mask quite different realities in the milk-bar modernity of mirrors in which the character is sitting, trapped between endless reflections," says Stock. "Orwell had an abiding interest in the countryside, rural life and growing his own food.

One thing I suspect he would be campaigning vociferously about in our time is issues surrounding big agribusiness and the provenance of our food, the biological commons, and particularly the patenting of GM crops." Cartoonist Ralph Steadman, too, reckons Orwell would be writing about food. "I was re-reading Down and Out in Paris and London recently," says Steadman who is responsible for a marvellously scabrous illustrated edition of Animal Farm . "I think if he were to be down and out today he could survive on the bins behind the superstores. He wouldn't have to go hungry because there's so much free stuff that they throw away – perfectly good food. If he was writing that book today, he'd probably express himself in gratitude for that." Sketches of George Orwell by Ralph Steadman. Later, Steadman emails over one of his illustrations of Orwell. Steadman has put the writer in his own Room 101, his own private hell: a cage full of rats is wrapped around his neck. Perhaps that's what all these "what ifs" amount to – a lot of savage bites on a dead man's posthumous reputation.

The problem in deciding what Orwell would write about in 2013 is that Orwell the man was incessantly, in 21st century newspeak, off-message. Orwell had a habit of changing his mind abruptly. "He was against going to war with Germany until the very last minute when he suddenly came out in favour of it as a result, he claimed, of a dream," says Dr Stock. Taylor also argues that Orwell was too unrealistic to work out a practical political programme. "He was always an idealistic dreamer. In 1945, when Attlee's Labour government was elected his immediate response was to write saying the House of Lords should be abolished and so should public schools. Reading that, you can't help but think that with the best will in the world it wasn't practical.

Whatever he approached politically, he came at from an odd angle." This chimes with the point Margaret Atwood made in her herogram to Orwell in the Guardian earlier this month: "People who run counter to the current popular wisdom, who point out the uncomfortably obvious, are likely to be strenuously baa-ed at by herds of angry sheep." If Orwell were around now, he would have been baa-ed at, perhaps, though by whom is less certain. We tend to think that were he alive now he would be excoriating those things we think of as Orwellian – CCTV, the communications data bill (AKA snooping bill) that would force email providers to keep records of who messages whom and when, all the choke-holds an overweening state puts on our collective throat. But perhaps he would not have done so. In fact, there is the grotesque possibility that Orwell, had he been living and writing now, would not have won the Orwell prize , the political writing award set up in his name. "His last writings, from 1949, were the sketch for a novel called The Smoking Room Story about a character called Curly Johnson who, like Orwell, was returning from Burma," says Taylor.

"It's set in the 1920s and reads like Somerset Maugham. Perhaps there weren't any more dystopian fictions to come and had he lived longer he would have drifted rightwards." Perhaps, then, instead of imagining what he would have written were he alive we would do better to go back to the books and see if what he wrote has anything to say to us now. Try this passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four where Orwell writes about of the 20th century as the period in which "human equality became technically possible" and in which, simultaneously "practices which had long been abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years – imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations – not only become common again, but were tolerated by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive". In our era of extraordinary rendition, Guantánamo, massive expenditure on foreign wars this doesn't seem so irrelevant. We don't have public executions, you might retort.

Yes, but given how much we like spectacle of others suffering, that might only be a matter of time – hangings downloadable to your funky new Google glasses . Or consider how Julia earns her living in Nineteen Eighty-Four. She works for Pornosec, nicknamed Muck House, "which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles". If Julia were alive today, she might well have been an editor on Fifty Shades of Grey or at least working on its multi-platform global branding; what was it Julia calls it? Oh yes, "ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit." True, today's muck houses have multiplied beyond Orwell's imaginings. Porn is ubiquitous. The sexual commodification of women's and girls' bodies is so commonplace as to pass scarcely noticed, and TV or internet porn are accessible at the push of a button. We don't yet have the " feelies ", Huxley's cinemas in Brave New World – where the cinema spectator is titillated by the images and by what sounds like a vibrating seat. But, as with public executions, only a fool would rule out the possibility.

Labour's shadow health minister Diane Abbott, for instance, this week worried that Britain was becoming " increasingly pornified ... It's hyper-sexualised British culture in which women are objectified, objectify one another, and are encouraged to objectify themselves," she said. What academic Richard Rorty took to be the most hideous thing about Orwell's vision of 1984 was that it was a world in which human solidarity was made impossible. When we objectify someone sexually – that is, when we treat someone as less than human – then human solidarity is surely impossible. Perhaps if Orwell were alive today, he might be writing about that. Not so much "I told you so", as "This is far worse than I imagined". That said, Orwell's writings aren't easily citable by those fighting the sexist exploitation of women and girls. Stock argues: "His views on women, hardly progressive even in his own day, would appear entirely regressive now." He cites the sequence in Nineteen Eighty-Four in which Winston Smith fantasises about raping and murdering Julia.

Later, when they are about to first make love, she becomes "utterly unresisting, he could do what he like with her", and her body becomes "as yielding as water". The treatment of Dorothy in The Clergyman's Daughter, adds Stock, "is similarly sexist, bordering on misogynistic". But if Orwell was hardly a proto-feminist, his vision of the capitalistic commodification of human experience surely captures something of our glum times. "There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama and entertainment generally," he wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four. "Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means." If Orwell's 1984 speaks to 2013 it is in such passages.

As Orwell's late biographer Bernard Crick put it: "He really did believe that capitalism controls the 'proles ', the common people, not by physical oppression, but by bread and circuses, as it were, by cultural debasement, 'dumbing down' as we now say." Or consider another passage in Nineteen Eighty-Four where Orwell describes a feature of life on Airstrip One (Britain). "The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention." Orwell would have recognised a lot of things from his dystopia in our world – not just the lottery, but the loss of privacy through intruding technology, the degradation of language, the waging of proxy wars by superpowers, the disappearance and sequestration of political dissidents. Indeed, there's a better game to play with Orwell than "What would he be writing about were he alive?". It's called "What did he get right?". To be sure, Orwell said that what he wrote in his dystopian novels were warnings rather than predictions, but let's forget about that for a moment.

Taylor says: "He got a lot of things right – deforestation, the national lottery, the loss of privacy at the hands of intruding technology, the suborning of the proletariat with porn." But surely the most important thing he got right is that gap between the fact that "human equality became technically possible" and the deepening human inequality that is our reality. Stock says he's looking forward to a new film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four , which was reported to be in the pipeline last year, especially if it topically deals with "the wealth gap and social inequality in the text between the lives of the impoverished 'proles', who comprise the vast majority of the population of Oceania, and the shadowy elite of privileged inner Party members, with their servants, luxurious apartments and black market gourmet foodstuffs." It's surely not just me who, reading this, thinks of the government telling us, in the brazen untruth akin to O'Brien convincing Winston Smith that two plus two equals five, that we're all in this together. Perhaps 2013 isn't so different from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Pirouettes on Airstrip One - Yorkshire Evening Post Pirouettes on Airstrip One Tobias Batley as Winston in Jonathan Watkins' production of 1984. 11:00 Sunday 30 August 2015 Have your say The first ever ballet adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 is about to get its world premiere in Leeds. Choreographer Jonathan Watkins talks to Sarah Freeman about realising his childhood dream. There were two books which made an impression on the teenage Jonathan Watkins. The first was Kestrel for a Knave; the other was George Orwell’s 1984. It’s probably no surprise that Barry Hines’ 1968 novel struck such a chord. The tale of a young working class boy who finds escape from his troubles both at home and school by training a kestrel was set in the mining communities of Barnsley where Watkins himself grew up. “That story is in my veins,” says the 31-year-old, who found his own escape through dance. “It’s in the veins of a lot of people who grew up where I did. It’s hard not to feel a connection to it.

It’s something you just can’t avoid.” Over the years Watkins, who won a prestigious choreography competition while he was still a student at the Royal Ballet School, regularly returned to the by now well-thumbed copies of both novels and each time he did the idea of adapting the books he loved so much for the stage grew. Last year, he got a chance to put the theory to the test. Having notched up an impressive CV, working with renowned British, Russian and New York companies, just five years after he made his main stage debut Watkins was settling into a seat at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre at the opening night of his dance version of Kes. The show premiered to rave reviews, with the dark and often gritty pages of Hines’s novel effortlessly transferring to the stage – as one reviewer put it, it was a production to “make your heart soar”. Less than 18 months on and clearly buoyed by the success of making his first childhood dream a reality, Watkins is back in Yorkshire. This time he’s moved a few miles up the M1 to Leeds where he is working with Northern Ballet to produce the first ever full-length ballet adaptation of 1984.

“I first read 1984 when I was 14 or 15 years old and, like Kes, it made a real impression on me. It’s about how we behave when we think we are being watched, it’s about conformity and it’s about how we can try to break out of the boxes other people want to put us in. “What makes it such an incredible work is that whenever you pick it up, it always feels like it’s relevant. As someone said to me only the other day, it doesn’t feel like it’s about 1984, it feels like it’s about now. Certainly there is a real resonance with how we live our lives in 2015. “The rise of technology means that whether we realise it or not we are all monitored more than we ever have been and what Orwell did was take the idea of surveillance to its logical and terrifying conclusion.” For anyone who hasn’t read 1984 – and there can’t be that many given its almost permanent presence on the school curriculum – the story is simple.

Written in 1949, Orwell envisioned a world 35 years into the future where every aspect of life in Britain, renamed Airstrip One, was controlled by the Party. Into this world comes Winston Smith. He works at the ironically named Ministry of Truth rewriting records of the past in accordance with the official, sanitised version of events. Like everyone else, his life is constantly monitored, but away from the gaze of the surveillance cameras, Winston has a secret diary and a secret love, Julia. However, it doesn’t take long for these small acts of defiance to come to the attention of the Thought Police and when Winston is sent to Room 101 to confront his worst fears, it seems that not even love can prevent the system from breaking him. The Penguin paperback runs to 360-odd pages and Watkins admits that the adaptation process was a laborious one. “Of course I knew the story, I’d read it so many times, but I needed to know every detail. So I sat down, read and re-read it until I was at the point where I could have probably recited it word for word. After that I began mapping out each of the scenes so I had my own storybook for the piece.

“There was a film version of the book starring John Hurt and Richard Burton and the play has been staged a thousand times, but I had a blank canvas – as far as we are aware no-one has ever tried to do it as a ballet.” There may be good reason for that. When anyone presents a new version of a classic novel, the somewhat inevitable response is that it doesn’t capture the spirit of the original. Watkins, however, was undeterred. It is, he says, the story, not the medium which is all important. He met the company of Northern Ballet for first rehearsals five weeks ago and with media interest in the production high, ever since he’s been juggling pulling the show together with a steady round of interviews. “I’m not going to complain, it’s fantastic that people seem so interested in what we are doing here, but it has been quite intense. I can just about see the light at the end of the tunnel, but there have been nights when we have all walked out of here on our knees. Bringing a story that people love so much does have its challenges. It was the same last year when we did Kes.

“Yes, hopefully it brings a different kind of audience to the theatre, one which might not otherwise book tickets for the ballet, but when you say: ‘Ok, we are going to turn Kes into a ballet’, people understandably don’t know what to expect and I guess they are a little dubious that you can pull it off. I remember the first night of Kes, as soon as we got to the pub scene you could visibly notice a change in the atmosphere, it was almost as though the audience collectively said: ‘Ah ok, now we get what you’re trying to do’.” Watkins will be hoping for a similar moment of enlightenment, come next week when the curtain goes up on 1984, and with Northern Ballet stalwarts Tobias Batley and Martha Leebolt dancing Winston and Julia, he says, he feels the production is in safe hands. “I worked with Toby on a piece for Northern Ballet’s recent 40th anniversary gala. Martha is a complete joy to be in the studio with and this really is an amazing group of dancers. By the time you get to first night, you shouldn’t be in the position where you are having to watch through your fingers.

I’m not saying that I will be entirely relaxed, of course there’ll be nerves, but there comes a point during rehearsals where you hand the work over to the company. It’s all about trust.” Behind the scenes the team has been working on the costumes, lighting and score, with Watkins trying to achieve a timeless quality to the production. “I didn’t want the audience to sit there and think: ‘Oh, this feels like it’s the 1980s’ or ‘This must be a contemporary setting’,” he says. “It’s the story, not the setting which is important, but yes, of course we want to create something which looks beautiful.” After its premiere at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1984 will go on tour, but Watkins is already thinking about other projects. “I’ll have realised a long-held dream by adapting both Kes and 1984 and I do feel very privileged, but there is always something new to work on. There are a couple of other books I’d really like to have a go at.

I’m not going to say which ones, though, that would spoil the surprise.” Northern Ballet’s 1984, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, September 5 to 12, then touring. 0113 213 7700, Sign in 1984 geography 1984 geography Welcome to the Literature Network Forums forums. You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community you will have access to post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), respond to polls, upload content and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community today ! If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact contact us or post in the registration help forum for unregistered users. If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Results 1 to 11 of 11 1,894 1984 geography I've just started re-reading 1984. I read about three-quarters of it about thirty years ago when I was fifteen or sixteen, but gave up when I realised Winston was not going to escape and join counter-revolution and maybe even lead it to victory. One thing I was never quite sure of was who was fighting who. There are three great powers: Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. Great Britain seems to have been renamed Airstrip One and is described as the third most populous province of Oceania. So which are the other provinces, America, western Europe? Is Eurasia the old Soviet block, and Eastasia, China? Quite a lot of Russia is in east Asia. According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.

Charles Dickens, by George Orwell Posts 1,894 In chapter 4, Winston says they were currently in alliance with Eastasia against Eurasia and that, as far as all the official records go, that had always been the case since the start of the war. However, he says he remembers that four years previously Oceanian had been in an alliance with Eurasia against Eastasia. That seems a little odd. On mainland America the population may not notice the difference, but on Airstrip One surely everyone would notice a change in the number of bombs landing. Also, Airstrip One is a very odd name to give to a country. According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens. Charles Dickens, by George Orwell Posts 1,894 Maybe they are or they aren't brainwashed. I don't supposed many would dare comment that the difference in the number of bomb attacks was consistent with a new enemy being just on their doorstep while the old enemy was the other side of the planet.

Maybe if people really bought the fact that they had always been at war with Eurasia and not Eastasia, they might comment on the disparity of bombs falling on them, that increased suddenly four years ago. I suppose it's all part of the double-think effect, by which everyone knows but everyone denies. It's just that the population of Airstrip One would have a bit more to deny. According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens. Charles Dickens, by George Orwell Posts 1,894 I don't suppose it is a very original observation that the territories of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia reflect what might have happened if World War II had gone another way. Eurasia could have been the territory that resulted from either Hitler having successfully invaded Russia, or D-Day having failed, giving Stalin the opportunity to occupy all of continental Europe. Eastasia might have been the result of Japan successfully having conquered most of south east Asia, or perhaps someone like Chairman Mao would have achieved that deed.

Oceania seems to be a conjuction of the USA and large parts of the British Commonwealth, or at least English speaking countries. Personally, I doubt Latin America was part of it. In 1948, Britain probably felt it had more in common with the Commonwealth and the US than with Europe. According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens. Charles Dickens, by George Orwell Posts 1,894 A lot happened in 1948 , when I gather the book was started. The Cold War was just getting under way. The Berlin blockade started in June, and tension was starting to ratchet up. Chairman Mao did not come to power in China until 1949 though. I don't really think there was any sign of totalitarianism in the US at the time. OTOH the first televised hearing of the House of Un-American Activities Committee took place, OTOH President Truman signed off the Marshall Plan. According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.

Charles Dickens, by George Orwell Posts 1,894 Julia reckons that Oceania is bombing itself, which does not seem so unlikely. I wonder if Airstrip One is actually part of Oceania. They never seem to see any Americans troops despite Eurasia being only across the channel. All the main fighting happens thousands of miles away. They do get to see Eurasian prisoners being marched through from time to time. However, they mainly look Mongolian, which would suggest they are Eastasian. Another hint is that the measurement system has gone metric. I think it is more likely that Airstrip One is part of Eurasia. According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens. Charles Dickens, by George Orwell

Question: In which novel has Britain been re-named Airstrip One?
Answer: 1984