Subhadra’s Reviews > Nineteen Eighty-Four > Status Update

Two words come to mind. It's pertinent! 1984, like any classic literature, has made its mark in the sands of Time by being and remaining pertinent and relevant even today! Only the names have changed. The mechanisms of 'governing' the masses and the power struggles; which one would argue, are actually not struggles but just pretensions of struggles; have remained unchanged.

Winston's 18-hour day where he returns to his desk, "sticky-eyed and aching" and "gelatinous with fatigue" is the best description I have ever come across of being completely overcome with tiredness. It is also strangely reminiscent of days before deadlines in college and in office, in later life. So, aren't we all living in Orwellian (I've been dying to use that adjective) 1984?

Something excruciatingly exciting with an impending sense of doom and inevitable death like a susurrating of voices in dark corridors is stirring beneath. The Big Brother always searching, seeking, listening in, and Winston and Julia navigating their way through the dark "dripping alleyways" of a familiar and strangely unfamiliar London literally and metaphorically is giving me goosebumps and sleepless nights.

So, there are three parts to this story. It might sound strange that I am stating this fact but the story has taken a grip over me after I read past Part I. Julia has entered the scene like a breath of fresh air not only in Winston's life, but also in my mind. Such phrases as "pale-coloured pleasure" and "dripping alleyways" are the stuff that I had hoped to encounter, and now I have entered reading heaven.

There are some thoughts about 'rebellion' here. Its not something totally new but the words used to describe it very succinctly. He talks about how rebellion can be felt in the skin and in your stomach, a feeling of being cheated of something you have a right to. That speaks to the feminist movement in a big way, although I daresay, Orwell was no feminist by even the farthest stretches of imagination.

It is hard to imagine a dystopian world such as imagined by Orwell and yet, what is scary is that there could be a possibility of such a world existing. Orwell's description of the 'thought police' and of the politics of memory does not seem very far-fetched in a world where that is constantly monitored and re-written. One is inclined to wonder if at a very sub-textual level, we don't live in such a world today?