An Even Cheerier End to 1984.

I felt I should respond to a barrage (three people) of criticism that my cheerier last chapter of 1984 wasn’t that cheerful. As I said to one complainant:

“I couldn't make 1984 completely cheerful, I wanted to but it just wouldn't fit. I was trying to make it into a sort of Trumanesque game show where he won at the end and everyone came back to life and they had a massive party, but I couldn't get around the fact that they'd starved him, beaten him to a pulp and pulled his teeth out. They wouldn't even do that on Japanese TV, so I went for authenticity instead and gave Winston a bit of a break. I did hint that it might be all right with Julia. Do you know there's no such word as "alright"? I was quite shocked.”

On reflection and re-reading, I have to admit my version isn’t as fun-filled as it seemed when I was writing it. Remember I had just read the book which is pretty stark and you have to admit my ending is a bit less dour than Orwell’s, (although I’d still have to give him the edge on style and skill. Yes, yes and grammar).

Anyway, you’re right. I should have taken advantage of the fact that instead of dying from tuberculosis on a remote Scottish island, I’m at home in Brighton, in rude, cheerful health, drinking coffee while listening to Madeleine Peyroux and waiting for Goldfinger to come on.

What I’m trying to say, in my roundabout way is “stick this up your trumpet”:

Part Four

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1

“Winston dear, is there time for another woo woo before your broadcast?”

Winston shielded his eyes against the evening sun that dappled through the trees and shone a halo around Julia.

“There’s always time for woo woo,” he said, “let’s have it Georgia peach style.”

Julia turned to the house and raised her voice:

“O’Brien! Another pitcher of woo woo. Is there any rum left?”

“Yes madam,” O’Brien appeared in the doorway, “a quarter of a bottle or so.”

“Then we’ll have it Georgia peach style. You haven’t started tea yet have you?”

“No madam, the children won’t be back until around seven.”

“Oh yes, I forgot, said Winston, “They said they’d be watching it round at the Parsons’ tonight, Tom will drop them back here.”

Winston reached up and pulled Julia down onto his lap. There was a dangerous creak of wicker as the chair flexed and she slapped him playfully. She leaned against him and gazed at the sun through the trees. Winston gazed at her. God he loved her. Her dark hair was a little greyer now (Winston wished she’d colour it but since he was now bald as a billiard ball, he had an inadequate power base for negotiation), but she was, in fact, more beautiful than in her youth. There was something in her strength of character, her basic decency that had allowed her to grow into her years, in some indefinable way. He looked down at her t-shirt and smiled. His face was on there, back when he’d had at least some hair left. His eyes glared sternly out and beneath was the slogan “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING…”

O’Brien arrived with the drinks. “It’s almost time for your broadcast sir,” he said, “shall I turn on the telescreen?”

“No, don’t worry old man,” Winston stretched as Julia disengaged and stood up, “We’ll sort it out. We’ll give you a call if we need you.”

“Very good, sir” O’Brien withdrew.

“Good man, O’Brien,” said Winston as they made their way inside, “Very loyal, considering.”

Julia turned on the telescreen and they settled onto the sofa, woo woo within reach. Winston’s face appeared, filling most of the screen, stern and forbidding; the omniscient eyes glared out. The slogan appeared, slamming into the space under the face with a leaden sound effect. An iron voice read the words: “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING…” The sentence was completed by a ragged, shouting choir of child voices: “DINOSAURS!!!”

The face was replaced with the brightly coloured interior of a television studio. Seated among an audience of plainly excited children was Winston, his shirt loud and patterned, his lined face creased into smiles.

“That’s right!” He momentarily lost the camera as the shot changed, which the children found hilarious. “That’s right,” he repeated, “tonight we’re going to be talking dinosaurs! In the studio we’ve got not one, not two but THREE professors from the Ministry of Evidence Based History, and not only that we’re going GLOBAL! Later on we’ll be linking live to digs in Eurasia AND Eastasia…”

Winston poured the cocktails and lounged back on the sofa. He never really watched his broadcasts, after the first minute he was lost in memories. The prerogative of age he called it when his children caught him out. Julia merely held him closer.

His reflections gave him a great deal of pleasure. After his reorganisation of the ministries (not popular in all quarters, but the ruthless iron boot of absolute power had seen him get his way), he had dismantled the Party and its mechanisms of power and brought back popular elections. Both ex-Party members and Prole leaders had petitioned him to stand for leader but as Winston pointed out: “No one should have the intention of grabbing power who hasn’t got much better things to do once they’ve achieved what they want with it. Life’s too bloody short.”

He’d spent his political retirement reforming the telescreen system into something much more useful and had ended up producing and hosting the most popular children’s programme in the world. After the end of the war it began broadcasting with subtitles in Eastasia and Eurasia.

His attention wandered back to the screen where his beshirted self was stamping around in a custard tar pit, tyrannosaur hands held in front of him. He roared with laughter.

“You idiot!” He megaphoned his hands around his mouth “Where’s your self respect?”

Julia pinched his arm:

“There haven’t been microphones in those things for fifteen years. You’re the one who banned them!”

“Quite right too,” Winston reached for his woo woo, “but it makes no difference because when we were filming, I knew I’d be shouting that.”

As he spoke, his screen self mock-saluted the camera with an almost unnoticeable flick of the eyebrows.

“O’Brien will be settled by now,” he said, “let’s ring him.”

“Why, what do you want?”

“Oh, nothing, really.”

“You’re a devil. Let me do it!”

They both rang together giggling mischievously.

Winston was having the time of his life.

The End

A Cheerier End to George Orwell's 1984

I recently re-read Orwell's 1984. I can't remember when I first read it, but I was quite young and I don't think I'd had a job at the time. It feels like the sort of book I'd have read as a student so I could talk loudly about it while drunk and trying to sound clever. God knows what I thought I'd gained from it at the time because I realise now that it was a largely pointless enterprise trying to understand it without a few years of daily grind under my belt, ideally seasoned with the kind of political cynicism one can only truly build up after watching several governments of differing stripes lying their way into and out of power, taking credit for those serendipitous vicissitudes of the world over which they have no control and slithering away from the consequences of those disasters over which they do. Sorry.

Anyway, I feel I appreciated it a lot more from the perspective of someone who has worked in a large organisation for many years and came away with the feeling that no matter how annoyed I sometimes feel at aspects of my day to day work it is as nothing to the bottomless rage and dark cynicism that was Eric Blair's apparent reaction to his time working at the BBC. Neither I nor, to the best of my knowledge any of my colleagues have been provoked into writing an Olympic standard dystopian novel.

My one gripe, and it's just a personal one, I realise that it is necessarily a dour book, is the ending. Excellently written, don't get me wrong, and a satisfying conclusion, but - and I don't think I'm giving too much away if you haven't read it - it's a little bleak. I realise George Orwell was isolated on Jura with tuberculosis but he could have thrown me a bone at the end, a little silver lining to send me off from the last paragraph with a bit of optimism about the world.

Well, I'm told it's bad form to complain about something and not be prepared to do something about it so I've re-written the last chapter in an effort to "cheer it up a bit" if you will. Not as much as I'd hoped, it has to be said, what I really wanted to do was have everyone all friends at a massive party but it just didn't seem to run naturally on from the rats (you know what I mean if you've read the book, and if you haven't I suggest you do, it really is excellent).

So here it is. I hope you like it (I got quite into it and had to stop myself banging out a sequel).. If you do happen to be reading the book at the moment you're in for a treat. This replaces Part 3, Chapter 6 (just after the rats):

6

When Winston awoke, he was In bed. Not in a cell and not his own bed, this one was soft, clean. He opened his eyes a little, against the impossibly bright light that had awakened him. He could still hear a shrill, animal noise but more distant and as he pulled himself into wakefulness the noise resolved into birdsong. He realised the light was sunlight. 

   Winston could not remember the last time he had seen natural light. He had ceased to think of it as a reality, it was merely a lie, a false memory to turn away from, a foetal non-thought to crush in the womb and deny before the birth of its existence. Yet here it was. As his eyes became accustomed, Winston saw that he was in a sizeable bedroom, the largest personal living space he had ever seen, larger even than O’Brien's. The sunlight was streaming in through a window which took up a full third of one wall. The floor was carpeted and clean, the furniture unworn, new even. The telescreen was different, it had a control panel below the viewing area and was turned off. He got out of bed and walked to the window. He was dressed in pyjamas, clean, of some soft, smooth material. The window opened onto a garden, well-tended with lawns and flower beds. A tall hedge, presumably the perimeter, surrounded. There was a wardrobe in the corner of the room. Winston opened it and examined the clothes within. All of them were new and all of them bore a tailor's label and a name. His name. Winston Smith. Not "6079 Smith W", his actual name. 
This discovery shocked him. He moved to the telescreen and turned it on, moving the volume slider down to zero. The familiar caption BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU occupied the bottom of the screen but the black moustache was gone. The whole visage had changed. Big Brother had a new face! What’s more, where the old one had been rugged and paternal, this one was haughty, imperial. Lines of age and wisdom creased the flesh, the thin mouth turned with the hint of a sneer, but the eyes! The eyes no longer followed you, they didn’t need to, they bored straight through you. There was a cold, grey of hate and command in them that seemed to see everything; your thoughts, your very soul laid out bare and naked.  A terror of uncertainty crept over Winston and he returned to the bed, where he lay still for a long time. Winston remembered the click of the cage door and with that memory he understood that the worst was over. What else could they do? What else could they possibly need to do? He hated but he no longer feared. Whatever future was heralded by that cruel, stern face on the telescreen, it made no difference. Winston knew it would already be looking down from the innumerable posters and billboards just as he was sure not a soul would remember Big Brother ever having had a moustache. Had he always had a moustache? It made no difference. Two and two were five. With a new strength he got up again and went to the wardrobe. The clothes fit him perfectly. There was a mirror on the inside of the door and he moved it to check his appearance. As he did so, he let out an involuntary shout and stepped back. What he saw shocked him more than the broken, dissolving version of himself O’brien had shown him. His scalp was nearly bald and his face lined and worn with pouches under the eyes, but the dentures had filled out the jaw and the eyes that looked back had an intimidating directness. His habitual stoop had gone; his shoulders were straight and his chest full. Big Brother stared back at him. Now the turning point has come.

There was a discrete knock at the door and O’brien entered, followed by two of the beetle-like Party men.

“You are confused, Winston, it is quite natural. We are here to guide you”

But Winston wasn’t confused. Now the turning point has come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.

Throughout his imprisonment, Winston had been without hope. His only real thought of release had been the eventual bullet in the back of the head, or worse. He recalled the rats. He remembered his final betrayal of Julia, but attached little emotion to any of it. They had known all along the moment would come and had accepted it, embraced it even, in the room above Charrington’s shop. He knew Julia would have done the same just as he knew O’brien had been lying when he said her betrayal of him had come easily. The Party thought they knew about love and fear. They probably did in a clinical, medical way, but this was something different, something new, an intense, desperate need to feel human and to express humanity that had been created by them. Their methods centred on the elimination of hope, but for Winston there had never been hope. The weeks, months, however long it had been in that timeless place, of pain and humiliation hadn’t destroyed what he felt, it had confirmed it, sealed it. What was more, in that little place in his mind which O’brien could never touch, was something he and his kind would never even be able to comprehend, let alone search for. It was the knowledge, never detected by those watching because it had never been spoken, that Julia felt exactly the same. It was trust.

Winston looked back at himself in the mirror. “I want to see the Party leaders. I want to meet Big Brother.”

O’brien approached him, the Party men stayed by the door. “You are the Party. You are Big Brother.”

“What happened to the Big Brother before me?”

“You have always been Big Brother,”

Winston knew O’Brien believed this wholeheartedly. For him there had never been another truth. He wondered where Julia was, if she was still alive. She must still be alive. “I’m rather good at staying alive,” she’d said, “Don’t be downhearted.”  He turned and stood face to face with O’brien, noting with surprise that he was actually taller than him. He looked down, straight and unflinchingly into the man’s eyes. Through the man’s eyes. He stared until he saw fear grow. Winston had been taught to hate. He ran his tongue around the dentures inside his mouth.

“There are going to be some changes,” he said.

                                                                  The End