The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984
Dorian Lynskey
Doubleday, New York, 2019, pp 355
ISBN 978-0385544054

Totalitarianism. Autocracy. Oppression. These words express some of the bedrock points of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and while unquestionably substantial, such concepts are perhaps not meant to elicit responses of joy or even amusement from the novel’s intended audience. However, Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth succeeds in presenting the “life” of Orwell’s infamously aggrieving text in a fashion that captivates and gratifies. The first book-length project on Orwell for Lynskey, the acclaimed journalist pens The Ministry of Truth in an accessible yet catchy, musical writing style that is remarkably suited for a book that biographies the grim, somber Nineteen Eighty-Four. This book guides readers through the literary, cultural, and political events that shaped Orwell while showing that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a lifetime in the making rather than an embodiment of the existential, cynical despair of a man who all but reached the end of his life. In short, Lynskey provides a simultaneously fun and informative read that extends beyond Orwell’s famous text and directly confronts the inauspicious ethos of our contemporary climate.

A standout feature of The Ministry of Truth is Lynskey’s choice of genre: namely, biography. It is not a stretch to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four has a life of its own, an existence that transcends time, place, and even author. Lynskey seems to recognize this and he cleverly uses Orwell’s biography as a mode for demonstrating the steady accumulation of events that ultimately converge in a novel known for its direct confrontation of totalitarianism and truth-twisting. The breadth of Lynskey’s research is expansive and he takes a rather methodical approach to delivering his information. Divided into two parts, The Ministry of Truth dives into both Orwell’s vast influences and the cultural climate in which he conceived of and wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Part One, Lynskey provides a detailed account of the texts and thinkers that Orwell encountered, paying close attention to the works of H. G. Wells, Yevgeney Zamyatin’s We, and utopian/dystopian genre fiction. These influences are no doubt familiar to Orwell scholars, but Lynskey’s deployment of the biographical genre packages the material in a way that builds specifically toward Orwell’s visualizing and ultimate writing and publishing of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Lynskey also shows where Orwell disagrees with his influences. For instance, he highlights Orwell’s rejection of “the loss of freedom is the price that people pay for happiness,” a notion that appears in We and The Brothers Karamazov (108). In Orwell’s text, contrarily, the subjugated inhabitants of Oceania lack the ability to exists freely and happily. By providing this balance, Lynskey draws attention to Orwell as an individual thinker who actively nuances ideas instead of simply recapitulating them.
Part Two, the slimmer of the two halves, narrates the political, social, and cultural environment from Orwell’s death to the present day, including the election and presidency of Donald Trump. Here, Lynskey shows that the life of Nineteen Eighty-Four extends well beyond Orwell’s death. Indeed, the connections he makes between the message of the book and various historical points since its publication are a mixture of encouraging and harrowing. He cites the Soviet ban on books like Nineteen Eighty-Four and We, which came months before the United Soviet Socialist Republics officially collapsed, and gently implies that perhaps we can thank Orwell’s novel for the USSR’s inhabitants recognizing and rebelling against the ills of their society, at least in part. On the other hand, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s persistent germaneness to the past five years exists for much more sinister reasons. In late January 2017, during Trump’s first full week occupying the Oval Office, the book, along with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, appeared on bestseller’s lists following statements by Sean Spicer, the first in a litany of White House Press Secretaries, who defended Trump’s exaggerated statements concerning the size of his inaugural crowd. Kellyanne Conway’s references to “alternative facts” only fueled the post-inauguration Orwellian ethos, a term that Lynskey uses to specifically describe “real world developments that threaten” Orwell’s modus operandi and principles (xii).
The book’s final chapter mixes light innocuousness with weighty menace in a way that contemporary audiences, whether in the academy or beyond, can most tangibly consume. In “Oceania 2.0,” Lynskey makes several alarming but accurate connections between phrases that Trump and his cronies have uttered and some of the more distressing lines from Nineteen Eighty-Four. He highlights a July 2018 speech in which Trump declared, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” at which instance, Lynskey states “another line from Nineteen Eighty-Four went viral… ‘The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command’,” (265). As a journalist, it is not a stretch to say that Lynskey acutely perceives the Trump Administration’s persistent denunciation of facts and the media, an idea that he most plainly expresses in the following statement: “Nineteen Eighty-Four is about many things…Today, it is most of all a defense of the truth” (265).. The perpetual usage of doublespeak and methodical creation of a false reality by a government’s executive branch seems to endanger the very idea that Orwell wished to protect.
Recently, a five-year sustainment of truth-denial and inflammatory rhetoric culminated a storming of the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. Rioters who forebodingly screamed “Where’s Nancy” and “Hang Mike Pence” participated in their own misguided Two Minutes Hate, but rather than a comparatively brief moment in time, theirs lasted for several hours. Rather than only unleashing their existential anger and angst at images of Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers, they destroyed property, extinguished lives, and threatened immediate harm to hundreds of lawmakers. In a tweet from January 7, 2021, just one day after this horde of Trump-apologists performed their riotous insurrection on Capitol Hill, Lynskey expressed, “I wrote the afterword [to The Ministry of Truth’s paperback edition] just after the election in November, not anticipating that the day before it came out a pro-Trump mob would storm the Capitol. Like Orwell said, predicting the future is hard” (@ Dorianlynskey). Both Orwell and Lynskey are correct here, but what seems equally true is that past ills are alarmingly difficult to avoid. The Ministry of Truth ends with a haunting, harrowing statement that Orwell uttered, weak from tuberculosis, in the final months of his life: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don’t let it happen again. It depends on you” (269). As Lynskey astutely points out, Orwell wrote Nineteen-Eighty-Four to fortify our wills, not to diminish them, and thus perhaps this statement bears repeating. Don’t let it happen again. It depends on you.
Elysia Balavage
The University of North Carolina, Greensboro