“The World of Nineteen Eighty-Fourended in 1989,” historian Timothy Garton-Ash declared optimistically in 2001. Communism, fascism and European imperialism “were all either dead or mortally weakened. Forty years after his own painful and early death, Orwell had won.”
If only. Orwell’s portrait of a world in which the truth is irrelevant and the powerful rewrite the past is, regrettably, not at all out of date. “I hesitate to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four is more relevant than ever,” British journalist Dorian Lynskey writes in his alarming exegesis of the novel’s significance and enduring impact, “but it’s a damn sight more relevant than it should be.” Indeed, the most powerful pages of “The Ministry of Truth” quote Orwell in the 1940s describing a state of public affairs all too familiar today.
