Last week I met an author who has written a biography of George Orwell sub-titled A Man of Our Time. It was a thrill to talk to him about the man who was my very first literary hero. When I first started reading seriously in my teens, a bit of a late-starter, I devoured Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in equal measure. They seemed to cover both sides of society's coin: the former exposed the dark underbelly of the latter's world of frivolous glitterati who wasted their time at Oxford and Cambridge, then partied through the 1930s while others marched and starved, before war gave them something responsible to do. Waugh made me laugh, which is very important, but Orwell showed me the true nature of our social world, which is arguably even more important.
Richard, the author in question, made a convincing case for Orwell as the greatest British writer of the 20th century. I suggested that Joseph Conrad was the greater novelist and superior writer of sheer beautiful English – an astonishing feat given that he was Polish by birth – but Orwell was bubbling under in the Top Three. There's no denying that Orwell wrote elegant, lucid prose, but novels like Keep The Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up For Air aren't really that good. It was his acute vision and comprehension that made him such a great writer and great man. Most people know by now, or should know, thanks to Animal Farm, that all men and women are created equal but some are more equal than other. And Nineteen Eighty-Four predicted the duplicitous orthodoxy of Newspeak long before its 21st century apogee.
But I always preferred Orwell's essays and books like The Road to Wigan Pier and Burmese Days, which quietly told things as they were. He spoke a truth that was the polar opposite of the Ministry of Truth's propaganda. Richard pointed out, for example, how Orwell effectively predicted both the European Union and the fact that the UK would be the first major player to leave it – because we find it so much harder to shake off the innate sense of imperial superiority that he exposed with such understated clarity in Burmese Days.
If Orwell actually was a Socialist, he never romanticised the working class. During his travels oop north, his raw material for Wigan Pier, he attended local meetings of the Communist party and of Oswald Mosley's black shirts. The fact that the latter was so much better attended I find perplexing and so very depressing – particularly at this time. What is this terrible tendency of people to shake the hand that smites them? With the American elections coming up in November, it's this tendency that could return to power an evil narcissist who has inherited a fortune founded on exploitation, while avoiding the taxes needed to create a fairer society.
Meanwhile in the Disunited Kingdom, it's the poorer people oop north, those who will suffer most from the fall-out of covidiocy and a unilateral Brexit, who gave another flaxen-haired oaf the parliamentary majority he is exploiting to trample any opposition in his big-footed wake. We listen, I suppose, to those who make the most noise. It's so much easier to put the blame on Mame boys – to find some convenient scapegoat to hang our troubles and woes from, rather than to look inside and assume the responsibility to do something positive about it.
I remember standing with The Good Wife by the water's edge at Port Askaig on Islay, waiting for the ferry to take us back to the Scottish mainland. It was maybe three decades ago, but I remember staring at the Paps of Jura on the bleak island just across the straits, thinking about George Orwell, who found a refuge there from London and the solitary quiet he needed to write Nineteen Eighty-Four. I wonder what he would have made of all that's happening now.
How would he have reacted to entire populations covered up in face masks? There's an obvious symbol there to employ. Just recently, I took the train from Brive to Orléans to meet up with the Dame on her journey down from Dieppe. She'd driven all over England in an effort to sort out her intransigent mother and to move our daughter out of her final student house, so the last thing she could face was an eight- or nine-hour drive back home. It's a three-hour train journey made suffocating by the SNCF's decree to wear a mask at all times, except when eating. After riding the tram to the city centre, I was so happy to take it off and stuff it in my pocket. With a few hours to kill, I visited the vast cathedral and a few other sights to see – including a brilliant little record shop I found down a back street. My visit coincided with a kind of metropolitan jumble sale, when all the shops of the main street put their end-of-sale wares out on the pavement to tempt passers-by. So the city centre was packed – and everyone, it seemed, was masked. I walked around, resolutely mask-less, and couldn't understand why I was getting so many looks. Disapproval? Surprise? It made me question who was mad here. We were outdoors, for God's sake. Surely there's no justification for wearing a mask in the open air. Or did they know something that I didn't?
Finally, as I was thinking about catching a tram back to the
mainline station where I was meeting my beloved traveller, I caught sight of a
municipal notice. It revealed a pitfall of avoiding the news. Masks were to be
worn at all times, inside and out. By order of the mayor. So I'd had a lucky
escape, not from the virus, but from an eager gendarme. I might have been fined
three or four times the price of the train ticket: the cost of an ill-informed
outsider's ignorance. That would have certainly soured the journey home in the
car.
Judging by his updated profile picture on Skype, my old dad seems to have a healthy attitude to masks. Oh-hoh YES! they're the great placebo. He's sporting one of the disposable models, which are already polluting the polluted planet, so I hope he's figured out that you can wash them if you put them in a pocket of some dirty jeans, say. We've been wearing the material kind, which – as a recent article I read pointed out – simply become a cocktail of germs if you neglect to wash them regularly.
In fact, it was a very reassuring and enlightening article. It came courtesy of Alternatif Bien Etre, to which we subscribe for a viewpoint uncontaminated by Big Pharma. It took the form of an interview with an epidemiologist, who contends that any epidemic is well and truly over. As director of some obscure research institute to promote data on health, he has studied the progression of the virus since its proliferation in March. He points out that roughly 30,000 have died, but figures have been distorted because it includes those who died with the virus as well as those who died of the virus. What's more, 10,000 died in old people's homes. He also underlines that an average of 73,000 people die each year with tobacco-related problems – yet we don't shut down an entire country because people still insist on smoking.
So who's responsible for all the panic, sensationalism and gross distortions? The media or the politicians? Or both? Chicken or egg? Take the so-called exponential rise in cases reported by the French media and public health site on the 28th August. Around 7,500 new cases, apparently. But these were positive tests – compared to around 175,000 negative results, which were not reported. Two days later, those exponentially rising figures had dropped to around 1200 cases.
George Orwell would have appreciated the individual rationality on one side of the equation and the collective insanity on the other. He would have seen how the Ministry of Truth would prefer to go along with the media rather than admit that they might have been wrong and that shutting down the country for two months was maybe a little drastic. Although the great man is probably most famous for Nineteen Eighty-Four, as far as novels go, it was arguably more of a handy vehicle for his political and philosophical ideas. But how remarkably prescient and perceptive those ideas were. Open the novel at almost any page and something pertinent jumps out at you. Take this for example: 'Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted.'
Think about that last sentence, in particular. Orwell was a man of our times, all right. The trouble is, he died in 1950. We could do with a few more of his kind right now.
