Nineteen Eighty-Fourby George Orwell, Simon Prebble (Narrator)
Description:
Blackstone Audio presents a new recording of this dramatically popular book.
George Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world dominated by Big Brother and its vast network of agents, including the Thought Police - a world in which news is manufactured according to the authorities' will and people live tepid lives by rote.
Winston Smith, a hero with no heroic qualities, longs only for truth and decency. But living in a social system in which privacy does not exist and where those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death, he knows there is no hope for him.
The year 1984 has come and gone, yet George Orwell's nightmare vision of the world we were becoming in 1949 is still the great modern classic portrait of a negative Utopia.
My Review:
It took me quite some time to get around to reading (listening) to this book, and I must say I wasn’t disappointed.
It boggles the mind how pervasively fictional (in the context of the story) every known fact and history in the book is. The concept of double think, well, it’s amazing and seems like it wouldn’t be possible, but the way George Orwell explains it in the book, gives examples, and shows it happening to the characters makes it start feeling pretty real by the end of the story.
I found it particularly chilling how the government run media in the story proactively rewrote history, made all the more so by how easily the citizens of that future dystopia instantly adjusted their own perceptions of history to match.
Then, the romance. I had no idea that this story, with all its reputation of dystopia and Big Brother, was actually a tragic romance. Not only did it make the story hard to put down, but it perfectly illustrates just how well Orwell’s society controls every aspect of those who reside in it.
As for relevance? Well, it’s eerie and eye opening. Having read this, I find myself paying closer attention to trends in what stories the media shares, what they say, and how certain popular figures respond to it. While the story takes the ideas of social and thought control to the extreme, current events make it seem rather possible that the concepts in the book aren’t quite as fictional as one would hope.
Overall, an excellent and chilling story. Highly recommended. The audiobook performance by Simon Prebble was fantastic.
I borrowed this audiobook from the library.
*Note that the image I used is for a boxed set of this book along with Animal Farm. It was the closest match I could find to the one I read from the library.
No comments:
Post a Comment