Its themes (the threat of the totalitarian state, censorship and the manipulation of language) continue to reverberate, with prophetic menace, like distant gunfire, into the present.Īfter the third world war, Britain is now Airstrip One in the American superstate of Oceania, permanently in conflict with Eurasia and Eastasia. Orwell’s dystopian vision was deeply rooted both in its author’s political morality, and in its time, the postwar years of western Europe. Nineteen Eighty-Four, arguably the most famous English novel of the 20th century, is a zeitgeist book. Finally, at the end of his short life, he fulfilled his dream. Even as a child, he had been fascinated by the futuristic imagination of HG Wells (and later, Aldous Huxley). “I t was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Time is out of joint, and everyday life has no comfort any more: from Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) to Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell had been incubating a profound inner dissonance with his society.
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