Orwell's Revenge Read Free Page A

Connolly—Orwell’s fellow Etonian and life-long friend. And Guy Burgess—Orwell’s colleague at the BBC, later exposed asa Soviet spy.
    As I wrote, I never suffered from writer’s block. Whenever I needed to picture Orwell’s life through Orwell’s eyes, I had his own record instantly at hand. When it suited my purposes, I lifted individual words, images, phrases, entire sentences, occasionally even paragraphs from his own writings. When I felt like it, I rearranged, added, pruned, inverted, reversed, or corrupted. I felt no sense of contrition. I was simply committing the quintessentially Orwellian crime—a crime of plagiarism, forgery, artistic vandalism, and historic revisionism, a crime committed on and by the computer itself. Or was it the other way around? Was the crime really his, and my part simply the punishment?
    It hardly matters. When at last I stopped, this book had emerged. Orwell’s story had been rewritten. His black had been turned into white. Best of all, it had been done by his own hand.
VI
    Or almost so. I said at the outset that Orwell begins with Victory Gin, but I lied. The Gin comes second. What Orwell begins with is the very opposite of gin. And it is in dealing with The Thing That Is Not Gin, the Thing that sharpens the senses instead of dulling them, that Orwell loses his mind.
    That thing is, of course . . .
----
    1 Down and Out in Paris and London (1933; 378,677 bytes); Burmese Days (1934, 557,002 bytes); A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935; 552,502 bytes); Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936; 493,220 bytes); The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; 402,951 bytes); Homage to Catalonia (1938; 514,313 bytes); Coming Up for Air (1939; 465,168 bytes); A Collection of Essays (1936-1937; 669,623 bytes); The Lion and the Unicorn (1941; 190,422 bytes); Animal Farm (1945; 178,574 bytes); selected additional essays from The Orwell Reader (254,657 bytes) and The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (482,987 bytes) and selected pages from the four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (877,328 bytes).

PART I: THE MACHINE

CHAPTER I
    The telescreen was still there. It had always been there, as long as Big Brother himself. Big Brother’s black-haired, black-mustachio’d visage still gazed outward from the screen, full of power and mysterious calm. Every minute of every day and night you always knew: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
    It was a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to bedismembered by the wind. The wind whipped through the leafless trees and flapped the torn posters against thegray walls of the buildings. As Blair pushed his way through the glass doors ofVictory Mansions, scraps of paper in the street seemed to scuttle along the walls of the alleys, like rats. The stairs loomed before him, their threadbare carpet a dull green in the light that filtered through the dirty window The lift wasn’t working. The electric power was always shut off for a month during the Nega-watt austerity program that led up to Love Week.
    Blair climbed the eight stories to his dingy apartment. The paint on the walls was blistered and peeling from the damp. He stopped on the landing to cough, and doubled up in an agonizing spasm. When he could breathe again, he fumbled in his tattered raincoat for the key,then stepped into the chill, stagnant air of his home. He saw his reflection in the mirror that faced the door. Eric Blair— E. A. Blair—Party Number 503-330-090. He was a pathetic figure: shabby and insubstantial, looking older than his thirty-five years. His otherwise gray skin was red and rough from too frequent applications of a razor blade that had lost its cutting edge weeks ago.
    The voice on the telescreen was babbling in his living room about theproduction of pig iron. It was always pig iron, or the