1984
Author: George Orwell 1949 326 pp
My rating: 3*
Started August 15 2008, Finished August 22 2008.

“a complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism” (57)

I found 1984, as I had found A Tale of Two Cities, to be a big name book that does not hold its own as a novel. And while I read it before I started blogging and did not record my impressions while they were still fresh and detailed, the book 1984 seems most comparable to is Brave New World, a similar thought experiment depicting a dystopic future whose author was unable to enrich his ideas with a fully believable human context. After my recent reading of much of Orwell’s oeuvre, I believe that Orwell’s strengths as a writer stem from his courageous willingness to get his hands dirty by becoming a participant in his subject (cf Down and Out …, … Wigan Pier, and Homage …) and then simply report on what he has seen and experienced, but that his ability to invent three dimensional people and envision their inner lives -- the sine qua non of a novelist -- is at best limited. The totalitarian world that Orwell envisions in 1984, while its control structures and extreme regimentation are a not implausible extrapolation of the some of the most diabolical aspects of Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, overall struck as unbelievably lifeless and its inhabitants as not recognizably human-- the inner and outer party members may as well have been robots, while the distracted, downtrodden “proles” who were intended to much more resemble pre-Big Brother humans were indifferently rendered and come across as two (and even one) dimensional clichés. Plot details don’t ring true either: Julia’s infatuation with Smith seems weakly grounded and Smith and Julia’s arrest with the associated revelation that Charrington is part of the thought police struck me as absurdly melodramatic and allows even the very long arms of the Though Police’s law a bit too much reach.

If I were rating this book on its first two thirds, the section before Smith’s arrest, I might give it one or no stars. However, it is mostly salvaged by its cultural import -- perhaps more than anything else it has brought home to the free world the tone of existence in a totalitarian state -- and its last third in which it which it alternately abandons its novelistic affectations during the long excerpt from Goldstein’s manifesto on “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivsim”, a cogent exegesis on the motivations and intellectual underpinnings of totalitarianism and then, during Smith’s torture/reeducation, narrows its focus so drastically -- to just the bound and blinded Smith and his reactions to Obrien’s tortures -- that Orwell’s inability to depict a believable world are no longer a factor. The interrogation/torture/reeducation section is the strongest in the book, and while it still didn’t fully connect with me as Orwell was unable to impart a visceral sense of what Smith was experiencing , it is nonetheless quite powerful, particularly in its depiction of a world completely beholden to an evil ideology -- Obrien’s utterances during these scenes evoked hazy memories of The Grand Inquisitor and Smith’s gradual capitulation, his renunciation of his essential self, brought to mind (the far subtler and more persuasive) Darkness at Noon.

Shortly after finishing 1984, I read a New Yorker article by George Packer on life in Burma under a military oligarchy whose determination to maintain a hold on power with no consideration for the well being of the people under its control brought to mind the Big Brother and Ingsoc of 1984 with the difference that Packer’s reporting rife with real life detail seemed vastly more convincing than Orwell’s imagined world.

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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them (223)

All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed. (266)

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. (276)

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever. (280)

To die hating them, that was freedom. (294)

Shooting an Elephant

Shooting an Elephant
Author: George Orwell 1945-50 200 pp
My rating: 3*
Started August 8 2008, Finished August 11 2008.

This book of essays is for the aficionado. The essays cover a diverse range of topics, not all of which are remotely relevant to the modern reader: a couple of reminiscences from his Burmese days, including the essential Shooting an Elephant, a denunciation of Tolstoy’s denunciation of Shakespeare, thoughts about writing and reviewing, a critique of the writings of the otherwise lost to history James Burnham and some shorter pieces apparently written for a newspaper towards the end of his life, my favorite of which was a rare upbeat piece about the wonders of spring.
As ever, even when expressing another unsubstantiated, almost crackpot denunciation of capitalism, Orwell‘s prose commands the reader‘s attention: “… the civilization of nineteenth-century America was capitalist civilization at is bets. Soon after the Civil War the inevitable deterioration started.” (200) The book’s primary interest for me was the insight Orwell’s writing about writing provided into why I am finding him so compelling:

Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone;
Dare to have a purpose firm,
Dare to make it known. (106 - from a “Revivalist hymn)

To write in plain, vigorous language, one has to think fearlessly (114)

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With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in Saecula Saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. (4)

They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. (6)

… suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the [now calm and harmless] elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. (8)

… I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old. (25)


Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. (48)
“what is the relationship between agreement with a writer’s opinions, and enjoyment of his work?” (72)

The durability of Gulliver’s Travels goes to show that, if the force of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art. (76)

“no modern writer of the kind I am discussing … would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way.” (84)

Rules for effective prose:
“(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (DG note: the quote above about the British Raj violates this rule.)
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (91-2)

One may feel … a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi … [or] feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind! (103)

“Napoleon remarked once that if only a cannon ball had happened to hit him when he was riding into Moscow, he would have gone down to history as the greatest man who ever lived.” (132)

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples … that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles. (152)

All he knows, at least if he’s a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick or even your finger, w\he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. (162)

Echoes of patients etherized upon tables: “As for spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters.” (163)

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, steeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it. (165)

Variations of the following sentiment from the essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” have occasionally crossed my mind during the book-a-week campaign:, “Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”(174)

Bottlemania
Author: Elizabeth Royte 2008 229 pp
My rating: 2.5*
Started August 5 2008, Finished August 8 2008

“The outrageous success of bottled water, in a country where more than 89 percent of tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations, regularly wins in blind taste test against name-brand waters, and costs 240 to 10,,000 times less than bottled water, is an unparalleled social phenomenon, one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” (40-1)
“Bottled water does have its place – it’s useful in emergencies and essential for people whose health can’t tolerate even filtered water. But it’s often no better than tap water, its environmental and social price is high, and it lets our public guardians off the hook for protecting watersheds, stopping polluters, upgrading treatment and distribution infrastructure, and strengthening treatment standards.” (225)

Royte summarizes my interest in her subject, bottled water, in the above two passages. Nonetheless, the book failed to engage me. It felt both somewhat slight and fairly padded -- it would probably have been better as a magazine article and I did not come away from it feeling that my knowledge of the subject was greatly enhanced. Royte seems to feel that there is something inherently wrong forcing people to pay for as basic a commodity as water; my reaction is why not -- we pay for everything else. Too much of the book is devoted to an inconclusive history the water wars of Fryeburg Maine whence comes Poland Springs bottled water. Also, Royte and her editors lose credibility with the following statement that “In 2006, Nestlé’s 32 percent share of the US bottled-water market … brought profits of $7.46 billion” (86) which makes the elementary error of confusing sales with profits.

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Over 700 domestic and 75 imported brands of bottled water are sold in the US (17)
“In 2006, Americans consumed an average of 686 single-serve beverages per person per year; in 2007 we collectively drank fifty billion single-serve bottles of water alone.” (42)
[In NYC] “During the Dutch period, freshwater was used for livestock and cooking; the preferred beverage was beer, which everyone, including children, drank warm.” (95)
“Federal law requires the EPA to prove that the cost of removing a contaminant doesn’t exceed its benefits (deaths averted, that is, with a human life valued at $6.1million). (106)
“In Fiji, as in Fryeburg, nothing’s simple.” (154)
“In Lagos, Nigeria, the poor pay four to ten times more for a liter of water than do people hooked up to water mains; in Lima, they pay seventeen times more; in Karachi, twenty-eight to eighty-three times more; in Jakarta, up to sixty times more; and in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, up to one hundred times more.” (206)
“… according to the EPA, letting a faucet run for five minutes consumes about as much energy as burning a sixty-watt incandescent lightbulb for fourteen hours.” (218)

Blood And Thunder

• Blood and Thunder
  Author: Hampton Sides 2006 404 pp
  My rating: 3.5*
  Started July 17 2008, Finished Aug 5 2008
  
  This book is consistently engrossing and informative, but suffers slightly from lack of a clearly defined theme. It’s partly the story of the demise of the Navajo people, partly the story of the occupation and annexation of the New Mexico territory by the United States and partly a biography of Kit Carson, mountain man, pathfinder and tracker extraordinaire. The books strengths are substantiating the legend of Carson, a man born for his times, and elucidating the plight of the Navajo (a symbol for all the tribes wiped out by white man’s occupation of the continent) whose historical way of life and general view of the world was simply incompatible with that of the encroaching Anglos. Though neither the Navajo, nor any of the other southwest tribes detailed in the book, whose existences were to a considerable degree perpetuated by rustling and slave-raiding of nearby peoples, come off as completely admirable by today’s standards, the reader cannot help but feel for them, once they have seen their field and flocks destroyed and been starved into accepting confinement outside of their historical territory on an agricultural reservation where the water is bad, the crops would not take and the entire tribe of formerly proud people either dies of disease or sinks into a an engulfing trough of despond.
  
  Observations:
  
• The book could have used more and more detailed maps.
• Major (later Colonel) John Chivington , a Methodist preacher of Old Testament judgment, could well have been the inspiration for the character of The Judge in Blood Meridian a book whose vision of southwest US in the middle of the 19th century, a near apocalyptic world of non-stop violence, this history often mirrors.
  
  
  Carson’s second daughter died as a “toddler was scalded to death when she fell into a boiling vat of soap tallow.” (34)
  
  “What was paper? Most of the Navajos had never seen it, nor ink pens, nor written words. They had no concept of individual land ownership or constitutions or the rule of law or the delegation of political authority. Their traditions were so radically different that they had no idea what the Americans were really talking about.” (239)
  
  Of a Confederate troop marauding through New Mexico territory early in the Civil War: “Most of the Rebels were armed with little more than fowling pieces, squirrel guns, pistols, and other frontier weapons – one quixotic unit was composed entirely of lancers.” (278) The opposing Union units were commanded by US Army officers though the enlisted ranks were comprised primarily of untrained “New Mexican paisanos” who “spoke almost no English”.
  
  Iraq parallel in the Indian Wars: “Before Carleton’s arrival, the vocabulary of the the Navajo wars was centered almost entirely on the principle of punishment – punishment in a raw Old Testament sense. The army was there to “chastise” and “overawe” them, to make them “fell the power and the sting of the government.” But now a certain noblesse oblige had crept into the dialogue, a sense of white man’s burden.”
  
  “Carson believed that most of the Indian trouble in the West were caused, as he once flatly put it, ‘by aggression on the part of whites.’ Most of the raids, by Utes and other tribes, were visited upon the settlements only out of desperation – ‘committed,’ he argued, ‘from absolute necessity when in a starving condition … their game is becoming scarce, much of it having be3en killed by the settlers, and a great deal of it driven from the country …” (334)
  
  “ … the Navajos could not understand the Judeo-Christian universe – its male monotheism was forbidding to a tribe with so many female gods, its stories of a chosen people half a world away had no relevance, and rituals like communion and confession seemed beyond strange.” (368)