Is there a literary cliché more dull than saying of some old yellowing book that it is ‘as relevant today as it was when it was written'? This month marks the 70th anniversary of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Journalists on both sides of the Atlantic – to whom Orwell is a holy patron saint – have clacked out lengthy tributes (and entire whole books) to St Orwell's most famous work.
What, they ask, does Nineteen Eighty-Four mean today? Well my answer, for whatever that's worth, is: nothing. Nineteen Eighty-Four has nothing new to say to us and we have almost nothing new to say about Nineteen Eighty-Four. Realistically, we have very little left to say about George Orwell too. This is not to debunk him, dethrone him or, God help us, decolonize him.
Orwell the monument will likely be with us for as long as Shakespeare or Milton. The authoritative voice, especially in the essays, is as timeless and quotable as ever. It instantly evokes that composed, largely benevolent, somewhat aggrieved Englishman. Here making tea, there calculating the cost of his books and cigarettes; daydreaming about his ideal pub. Orwell is superbly and straightforwardly sane. Such is the immense influence of his voice that it sometimes seems as if the entire intellectual life of England between 1939 and 1949 was conducted in the brain of this one man.
But the relevance of this monument to the present day? Well, as Robert Musil writes somewhere, there is nothing as invisible as a monument.
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