Once you start it, you won't be able to switch it off!
How does it compare to similar audio books?
Very good
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Very good
Advantages:
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Disadvantages:
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Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Books are great, really. If I could, I would read all day and all night and all day and night again, with a little bit left over for playing football in. Y’know, it would be great. Though I suspect a lot of the time would be spent reading some books over and over and over and over again. Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, loads of Agatha Christie books (the peculiar M. Hercule Poirot, more so than Miss Marple). Probably the Arthur books, and To Kill and Mockingbird, too. Then they’d be the children’s books – What-a-Mess, the stories about the Afghan Hound Puppy – Prince Amir of Kinjan. My naughty Little sister, as well. But the most read, probably, out of all the books, would have to be George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published in 1949 by Martin Secker and Warburg, and since then it has sold over two-million copies. This was written just after the war, and in the book, there’s a lot of influence, obviously from Nazi ideas.
Anyway, before I start babbling on, here’s the plot:
It’s the year 1984 (though it could be 1983) and Britain, in the book called Oceania, was ruled by Ingsoc. Ingsoc was ‘newspeak’ for the English Socialism party, and newspeak was the language that they were inventing – reducing the dictionary so that words were shorter, and were supposedly easier to understand. For example, the same one given in the book, good, would be ungood, and very good, would be plusgood, and anything stronger than very good, might be doubleplusgood. The idea was, that oldspeak, or standard English would not be in the dictionary, and everything of it would be destroyed, by 2050.
The story is based around a man named Winston Smith. Winston works in the Ministry of truth (Minitrue, in newspeak), one of the four ministries of the Ingsoc party – the others being the Ministry of Peace (Minipax), the Ministry of Love (Miniluv) and the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty). Winston worked in the Records department, changing history (‘Who controls the future, controls the past’) so that it was up to date, and that everything predicted by the Ingsoc party was correct.
As everyone and everything is controlled by Ingsoc (though there are proles, who are not supporters of Ingsoc), they watch over people using telescreens, described as ‘an oblong metal plate like a dulled mirror’, watching everything they do, as far as they are insight. Big Brother, is the one watching, posters and slogans everywhere: ‘BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU’ with a picture of a huge face, with a heavy black moustache.
At the beginning of the book, the reader is told about a black book, with no title, that Winston bought from a little shop. He uses the book as a diary, and finds himself writing things such as ‘Down with Big Brother’. Worried that he will get caught by the thoughtpolice (which is the scary, creepy part of the book) he does this in a corner of his flat where he cannot be seen by the telescreen.
Each day, Ingsoc have a two minutes hate, where the face of Emmanuel Goldstein appears on the telescreens (as well as being used to watch, they are also used to broadcast), with the Eurasian Army (who Oceania were at war with – though Winston was certain before that they were at war with Eastasia). The Two Minutes hate, was basically what it says – Two minutes of hating, hating what appeared on that telescreen. During those two minutes, his eyes met with O’Brien, a member of the inner party, and from that moment he was pretty sure O’Brien was on ‘his side’, in other words, against the party.
Throughout the book, Winston has memories of a childhood, before the revolution where Ingsoc came into power, and at one point in the book, he goes to the Proles area of London, where he searches out and tries to find, from the old men in Pubs, whether life was better before or after the party.
Winston, one day, is given a message by a girl (who works in the Novels department of Minitrue), saying, simply, ‘I Love you’. Together, as the story progresses, they go to see O’Brien, in the hope that he is in the ‘brotherhood’ lead by Goldstein, the man who Ingsoc hate. He is given a book, *the book* written by Goldstein, and is made to make various vows to join, saying that he will do whatever it takes to fight against Ingsoc.
And the story continues…
I’ve decided not to write any more about the plot, because I’ve already given quite a bit of detail away…
Anyway, there are certain things inside the story which do make you think. The worst part, in my view, is the way that the ‘thought police’ have been watching Winston, delving deep into his mind, watching him commit ‘thoughtcrime’. The idea that within the party, it is what you think, not necessarily what you do, that matters. The party want you to love them, to love Big Brother, and they will do all that is possible to make you think that.
There are ideas, as I said at the beginning, which do seem to be influenced by Nazi ideas – the anti-sex league, where the party didn’t encourage sex, only to have children. They didn’t permit divorce also, except of course when it encouraged it when there were no children in the family. There were other things too, such as the way that children could be used against the parents – to give them away to the party, for committing thoughtcrime. This is shown in one case – of the Parsons, where he sleep talks (the only time where you can’t prevent yourself from showing that you were committing thoughtcrime), saying ‘Down with Big Brother’, and his seven-year-old daughter gives him away. That happened in Nazi Germany, with the Gestapo. There are all sorts of junior leagues, too, which bears a resemblance to the ones in Germany at that time.
The book – overall, is excellent. It’s brilliant, and wonderful. I suppose, if I wanted to talk in Newspeak, I could say ‘doubleplusgood’. It’s full of some of the best descriptions of characters, one of the main good points of the story being that the characters are so strong, and each built on in such away, that perhaps, especially in the case of Winston, that you could be them, if that makes sense. All the ideas are great – Room 101, for example, the room in the Ministry of Love which is the worst thing in the world, depending on the individual. For Winston, it’s rats. Everything is explained excellently, so that you will understand – there’s a whole section in the back of the book, which explains the whole concept of Newspeak.
It’s probably one of the best books there are, and I’d recommend it to anyone, definitely.
Oh, and my favourite quotey thing (because there’s lots, I haven’t taken out a huge chunk, because I couldn’t chose just one): ‘Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat hand writing of the illiterate’.
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