Jura is a small island off the coast of Scotland, famous for two things: It's home to a renowned distillery, and it's where George Orwell wrote “1984.”
Orwell arrived at Jura in May 1946, hoping the fresh air would help a chronic lung condition, and moved into a remote farmhouse. He soon set up a garden and was able to hunt and fish for additional food — telling friends, in what appeared to be all seriousness, these skills might come in handy if there were another nuclear war. (Jura was so far from any major cities — Glasgow was approximately 100 miles east — that Orwell seemed to believe he'd be safe if the bombs ever fell.)
Neighbors, who knew him by his birth name, thought he was a friendly sort, and many were shocked when they finally read “1984.”
“I couldn't think that it was the same man that was doing this writing was the Eric Blair that I knew,” said one resident. “I just couldn't place them together at all.”
From Big Brother down to Room 101, the language and concepts of “1984” are so ingrained in our consciousness that when totalitarianism manifests itself in the real world, we call it “Orwellian.” The novel's unrelenting depiction of a man broken in spirit by a police state is often presented to new readers as “a protracted wail of despair issuing from a lonely, dying man who couldn't face the future,” in the words of British journalist Dorian Lynskey.
But the truth, as Lynskey reveals in a new book, “The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's ‘1984' ” (Doubleday), out now, is more complicated — and more interesting.
Some of the inspiration for the novel's Thought Police, for example, goes back to the Spanish Civil War. Orwell came to Spain in late 1936 and joined a militia affiliated with POUM, a local Communist organization. But the group ran afoul of a pro-Soviet faction, which flooded Barcelona with propaganda smearing POUM (and Orwell) as fascist collaborators. Orwell managed to evade arrest and escape to England and though he remained committed to left-wing politics, his mistrust of the Communists, particularly Joseph Stalin, never faded.
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