1985
First edition, 1978
1985 (1978) by Anthony Burgess is a hybrid work in two parts, the first a critical engagement with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the second a dystopian novella set in a Britain that Burgess extrapolated from the industrial unrest of the 1970s. Written during the Winter of Discontent, when strikes by grave diggers, refuse collectors, and lorry drivers had brought the country close to paralysis, the book barely needed to invent its future: Burgess simply extended the trajectory he saw around him.
The critical section takes the form of essays, dialogues, and interviews that examine Orwell's novel from multiple angles, treating Newspeak as a genuine linguistic phenomenon, reading the politics of Oceania against the backdrop of postwar Britain and Stalinist Russia, and drawing pointed comparisons between Orwell's world and Burgess's own present. It is less a tribute than a sustained argument with a book Burgess admired and felt compelled to answer.
The novella follows Bev Jones, a teacher in a Britain now effectively governed by the trade unions, the country renamed Tucland. The police and fire brigade are on strike; gang violence fills the vacuum; Bev's wife dies in a hospital fire that goes unanswered. Where Orwell's dystopia operates through the mechanisms of a totalitarian state, Burgess's operates through institutional collapse, a society in which organized labor has become the instrument of its own kind of tyranny.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. London: Hutchinson, 1978. #10688.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
The critical section takes the form of essays, dialogues, and interviews that examine Orwell's novel from multiple angles, treating Newspeak as a genuine linguistic phenomenon, reading the politics of Oceania against the backdrop of postwar Britain and Stalinist Russia, and drawing pointed comparisons between Orwell's world and Burgess's own present. It is less a tribute than a sustained argument with a book Burgess admired and felt compelled to answer.
The novella follows Bev Jones, a teacher in a Britain now effectively governed by the trade unions, the country renamed Tucland. The police and fire brigade are on strike; gang violence fills the vacuum; Bev's wife dies in a hospital fire that goes unanswered. Where Orwell's dystopia operates through the mechanisms of a totalitarian state, Burgess's operates through institutional collapse, a society in which organized labor has become the instrument of its own kind of tyranny.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. London: Hutchinson, 1978. #10688.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
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