It took me until my fortieth year, for reasons I can’t quite explain, to finally sit down and read 1984. By chance, I did so at the very age of Winston, the novel’s protagonist. Not that I needed further encouragement to notice the uncomfortable parallels between Orwell’s bleak dystopia and our present reality—an age saturated with fake news manipulated by the social media algorithms of a self-serving broligarchy.
What struck me most was how the novel refuses to be reduced to mere political tract. It is wholly political, yes, but never cheaply so. Its artistry lifts it above the level of a novelist’s sermon, making it a work of literature as much as a warning. And a warning it remains—eerily prophetic, as resonant today as ever. It speaks as much against the censorious impulses of the liberal left as it does against the populist vitriol of the anti-immigration and climate-change-denying right, a mirror held up to the follies of both extremes and to the masses all too ready to march in step.
