Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Ignorance is strength.

1984 is one of the most influential and well known books written in the 20th century written by George Orwell. It was conceived in a time of intense social and political unrest, which remains relevant to this day. The novel follows Winston Smith, a low level member of the nation of Oceania’s ruling party.

The setting of this book is what is most important. Everywhere Winston goes, he is observed through telescreens and microphones. Even his criminal thoughts (referred to as thoughtcrimes), can be interpreted and used against him. This overseeing body is referred to as Big Brother, and anyone that steps out of line, is caught and thrown into a rehabilitation system.

Winston’s job is to change all documents and media to match Big Brother’s agenda. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous he rewrites history, as everyone is brainwashed to believe that Big Brother is correct. His colleague has an even crazier task - to reconstruct the language that the people speak into Newspeak - by creating a new official dictionary that renders it impossible to think illegal thoughts.

I never thought I would like a dystopian novel, but I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. I really only had two complaints with this book. First off, the characters are pretty dry. The characters lack depth, and often felt a bit hard to connect with. Additionally, it certainly felt like the rhetoric was quite didactic.

While I thought this book was way too grim and unrealistic at first, after reading around 100 pages, I began to see some parallels to our world. Our governments can track everything that we do, we all own smartphones that contain unique hashes and IP addresses that trace everywhere we are. Advertisers know us better than we know ourselves, and we are brainwashed by deep learning algorithms meant to keep us in a constant loop of engagement. Are we really that far off from the basic premise of Big Brother?

This book is a social commentary, a cautionary tale to the readers, to think twice about giving any entity too much power over our lives. I left this book with a lot more reflecting thoughts and questions. I am genuinely curious - how did Orwell predict more than half a century of his future?

Overall Rating: 8/10