Memories Are Made of This

Last night, Mrs Falaise and I settled down in front of the TV to watch the first episode of the CBS remake of Hawaii Five-O which is now being shown in the UK.  We are both old enough to remember the original version from our childhoods and so were curious to see how we would feel about the new version.  As the familiar drum roll sounded, we both relaxed before joining in with the theme tune which, sensibly, has not been mucked about with.

The tune brings back a very vivid memory from my childhood.  When I was six, we were living in Yorkshire.  My father had just got a new job which required us to move down to the Home Counties and he had started the job before finding a house for us to move into.  This meant that he had to stay down south during the week, making the long drive back up the M1 on a Friday evening to spend the weekend with us.  As I hadn’t seen him all week, I would be allowed to stay up late to wait for him to arrive and when he did finally get home, there would always be a box of Airfix plastic soldiers for me as a present.  Before he arrived, however, I had to have my bath and be ready for bed and, each week, as I was soaking away, the strident tones of the Hawaii Five-O theme tune would drift up the stairs from the TV downstairs where my mother would be waiting for Dad to arrive.

For some reason, that image has stuck with me for thirty-five years and still comes back clearly whenever I hear that music.  It’s the same with certain foods, pictures and songs.  Some of them, and not necessarily the ones I like best, have become inextricably bound up with personal memories and experiences.  And, it’s also the same with books.  There are some which conjure up times of my life whenever I read them or even references to them. They aren’t necessarily good books or books I would want to re-read but they are important to me and will probably become even more so as I continue to age and begin to lose my marbles.  I’d like to share these with you in a series of occasional posts.

The first of these special books is Animal Farm by George Orwell.  I suppose I must have been about nine or ten, maybe eleven but no older than that.  I was certainly still at an age where Christmas Eve was a trial specifically created to torment me.  A good sleeper as a rule, it was the one night where I was guaranteed to have insomnia, where the light on the landing outside my bedroom would shine more brightly and where my bedclothes would be less comfortable than usual.  Finally I drifted off to sleep.  Only a few hours later, I woke again.  I can still feel the odd sensation of the hot radiator next to my bed and the contrasting cold draught from the window.  I know I shouldn’t have but I couldn’t help looking at my stocking which lay at the foot of my bed and which had filled up with presents during the short time I had been asleep.  The house was dark and silent.

I couldn’t wait and started to open the presents inside.  Fortunately, one of the first things to come out of the stocking was a torch, followed by a couple of now-forgotten items before my hand fell on the unmistakeable shape of a book.  I ripped the wrapping paper off it.  On the black front cover was a photograph of a large, pink pig and the title – Animal Farm.

Putting the rest of the stocking to one side, I opened the book and started to read, thinking I would just “do a few pages”.  Several hours later, totally enthralled, I had finished the whole thing in one clandestine, under the covers reading.

Now, I don’t claim to have been some kind of politically aware prodigy.  I didn’t understand that it was a detailed allegory of the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist state.  I didn’t realise that Old Major, Snowball and Napoleon were modelled on Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin respectively or that Boxer represented the proletariat.  I had no idea of Orwell's disillusionment with Stalin and Soviet Russia.  My father would explain all that to me later.  To me, it was simply a gripping story.  But I was aware of the hypocrisy of the pigs and how they had manipulated and exploited the rest of the animals through lies and propaganda.  I was upset at the treatment of Boxer and felt a chill of horror at the final scenes in the farm house (please note – desperately trying to avoid spoilers here).

I kept that paperback with me all the way through boarding school and university, increasingly tatty and covered in ink stains.  It’s gone now, lost at some point.  I still love Animal Farm and will read it again, at which point I will review it fully here but I will never forget the first time I read it……….or the strange looks I got the next day from my parents and grandparents when I spent most of Christmas Day yawning and being distinctly uninterested in proceedings.

2,601:1,001 Book/Banned Book challenges - 1984 by George Orwell

Comparisons are often made between the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley and Orwell’s vision of the future in 1984.  Huxley created a world of softness, where emotions are muted and human passions, such as love and ambition, are smothered.  By a combination of conditioning and biophysical engineering (not genetic engineering, mind), the citizens of Huxley’s future are politically paralysed by material comfort and the encouragement of hedonistic pleasures.

Orwell’s world is much different.  The three mega-states of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia are in a perpetual state of war, with shifting alliances and geographical conflicts being the only signs of change.  Domestically, the Party, led by the possibly mythical Big Brother, crushes all opposition underfoot and is totalitarian in scope, seeking to control all aspects of life.  There is a telescreen in every room so that Big Brother’s thought police can spy on everyone at any time.

There are elements of 1984 that will be familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the Soviet and Nazi regimes of the 1930s and 1940s.  Like the KGB, the thought police come in the dead of night and their victims simply disappear.  There is cult-like worship of Big Brother, an institutionalised distaste for sex and a huge propaganda machine, attempting to control the very thoughts of the people.

In purely literary terms, 1984 is not a great novel.  Its plot is straightforward:  Winston Smith, a minor Party official, commits a thought crime by beginning to write a diary.  From the very beginning, he knows that it is only a matter of time before he is caught and killed.  He meets Julia, another Party worker and they begin an affair.  They meet a more senior official, O’Brien, one of the Inner Party.  He lends them a book by Big Brother’s arch enemy, Goldstein, and enrols them into a secret resistance movement but, almost inevitably, he turns out to be part of the thought police and arrests them.  Under torture, including the infamous Room 101, Julia and Winston betray each other.  At the end of the novel, they see each other once more and exchange looks of hate for each other.  The final image of Winston is as a “non-person”, alive but excluded from society.  And yet, he realises he loves Big Brother, whose victory is complete.

The characterisation is not much better:  almost all of the main characters are shallow, mere ciphers for the ideas Orwell wants to explore.  In pure literary terms, Orwell wrote much better books than 1984.  Try Animal Farm, Down and out in London and Paris, Homage to Catalonia or any of his volumes of essays.  The importance of 1984 lies in its description of the results of totalitarianism and its call for us to resist it.  And at the core of it is what I believe to be Orwell’s core belief – that our best defence and most central value is the truth.  Winston once finds evidence of Big Brother’s fakery of history and this is an epiphany for him.  At the heart of 1984 is the way in which Big Brother and the party manipulate the truth by propaganda, by imposing a new language, shorn of beauty and subtlety and by rewriting history to be consistent with the present.

Oceania has a huge bureaucracy devoted to rewriting newspapers to make the past reflect the present, to persuading the people that they have never been at war with Eurasia despite the fact that Winston clearly remembers that they were.  The Bible may tell us that the truth shall set us free and Big Brother would agree.  So he makes sure that he creates the truth and that the truth shall be flexible and made to fit his needs.

Whereas Brave New World gave us a vision of a soft new world in which people were stroked into compliance through their conditioning and the pleasures around them, 1984 offers a more brutal vision.  For me, one of the most chilling images of the book comes when O’Brien tells Winston, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”  Big Brother forces submission.  He batters beliefs into the heads of the people and demands absolute obedience.  The Two Minute Hate and the torments of Room 101 are just some examples of how Big Brother and the Party crush the human spirit until Winston has betrayed everyone and everything dear to him and, at the very end, when nothing else is left, Big Brother wins the ultimate victory sa Winston capitulates and betrays the last thing he possesses – himself:

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

1984 is memorable.  It has given us phrases that are now part of everyday language like Big Brother, Room 101, thought crime and Newspeak.  I first read it in 1983 and, although it has clearly not come true, the world Orwell describes had a massive impact upon my beliefs and my political beliefs.  I can completely understand why it would have been banned in the Soviet Union – they would have been crazy not to.  I can’t really see why it was banned in the USA, however.  It may have come about at the time of the McCarthy hearings and there may have been sensitivity about the authoritarian way that Americans were beginning to be harassed for having unorthodox political views.   I don’t know – just a thought.

There are very few books that are more “essential” than 1984, in my opinion.  I suspect you’ve read it too.  I would suggest reading it again, it really is worth it.