My Thoughts on '1984'

 I picked up the Orwell book after I'd read Animal Farm (around 1975).  '1984' is not what I'd call an easy-to-translate-into-reality book.  

Orwell spends a lot of time describing this dysfunctional world that has evolved (he wrote it in 1948 and it was published in 1949).  Of the 320-odd pages....it's basically three sections.  Section one is the introduction and the tough part to get over.  

Section two is filler material....on how Winston Smith (chief character) fumbles around in this marginalized relationship with this Julia-character.  Orwell tries to convey some hot lusty torrid affair....which for a Brit guy usually means a unpleasant 'romp' with 'tart' gal who wears stockings, smokes unfiltered cigarettes', drinks her gin straight, and read 1960s erotic novels.  

I always felt section two could be skipped.

Section three.....Winston basically dumps Julia to the 'Thought Police' and he has some recovery phase....meeting Julia in some British cafe and regretting his hasty actions.  

Section three, you have to read over because it's the tail-end of the book.  There are no winners....it's just a smothering pile of crap left there and you feel sorry for Winston and Julia.  

If you measured it upon the story-line, it's a marginal two-star story.  However, the whole first section and description of big government and the way that society had fallen (from 1948 to 1984)....pushed the book to the five-star status.

I picked up the book again around a decade ago.  At that point, a lot of the book really did play out with modern society and the transition to social media (more so than the government itself).  But in that reading, that romantic bumbling around with the Julia-character was more apparent, and I would suggest that Orwell was a 1-star writer over romance stuff or torrid love affairs.

So '1984' stands there....one of the dozen books that I think ought to be mandated to kids in the final two years of high school (in fact, it's one of the only two fictional books...the other being 'Animal Farm', that I'd put on the list).

It's not on my list as a novel or for great reading....it's there as a piece for you to wrap up, and spend weeks or months thinking over the implications, and how things progress from point 'A' to point 'B'.

If I were writing '1984'?  That whole final seventy-odd pages?  It'd go into the garbage can and I'd give some type of positive spin that maybe Winston and Julia found some way out of the mess....they left for Panama on some freighter, and that the collapse of the perfect-state had started to occur with public rebellion.  It'd be something like how Casablanca ended, with Rick and Louis staying around while Ilsa got on the plane to leave.