1985
by Anthony Burgess
Some books age well, some don’t. Some books make prophesies of the future and they are wrong. Sometimes even when they are wrong they are still considered correct and are their jargon enter into the general lexicon as in 1984. Other books miss the mark of being correct about the future but they disappear from the world, as in the case of 1985.
I came across a reference to this book while thumbing through a biography on Anthony Burgess about five years ago. Since then I have kept my eyes opened looking in used book stores and those kinds of places for a copy of the book. I could have probably found the book to buy online, but I rarely ever do that kind of thing for myself. Last week though in a semi-ironic act I actually went to a library and saw that they had the book, so I took it out and finally got the read it.
The structure of the book is a little weird. The first hundred pages are a collection of essays and a faux-interview with the author on George Orwell’s much misused utopian novel. The gist of the first hundred pages is that Orwell’s book was grossly misunderstood by many and that it’s really a bleak picture of London in 1948 and also at heart a comic novel. It’s also according to Burgess the culmination and defeat of a lifetime of a conflicting belief in the working class by Orwell. After getting through this part of the book is a novella by Burgess where he presents his own possible future for England, one which he sees I’m sure as equally comical but also also a little less naive to the state of the world (why Orwell’s naivety is difficult to explain here). Basically Burgess’ version of a horrible future is taken from the idea that the bombs never did end up falling that everyone thought would in the post-war era, and instead of bombs there were even greater horrors to the killing of humanity present.
Burgess wrote his book in the late 1970’s. The book came out in 1978, a time when England was in a lot of trouble. Wide-spread unemployment, striking unions, inflation and general civil-unrest were present. This is the stage that would bring Thatcher and Reagen to prominence, and their own anti-labor acts would put a stop the basic premise of Burgess book, but that was still in the future.
Burgess saw a world destroyed by the power of unions, where strikes were a common thing and they were always held for more money-something that was quickly losing it’s value. In Burgess world everyone went on strike, firemen, the army, chocolate makers, train-operators, anyone you can think of. And if a building burned down, it was the fault of someone who didn’t give into the strike. It’s kind of a conservative horror show here, but there is still something subversive underlaying Burgess story. More than just the awfulness of syndicalism, Burgess also saw a general dumbing down of the culture taken beyond being just the norm but to the regulated norm. Language decided upon the majority usage, if most people misuse words then the misuse must be correct etc., (he called this Workers English, and he saw it as something even worse than Newspeak, or Doublespeak). He also saw a bleak pragmatic future where culture was left behind because it had no market value. As a result only the hooligans, or maybe droogs and the old resistors to the new world knew things like Latin or Greek, or the works of Plato and Shakespeare, or cared about history.
The book has something reactionary about it, and it is certainly an elitists nightmare of a possible future but it’s also a warning cry against the leveling a dumbed down consumerist culture could possibly create. Some of the premises of the book have essentially been destroyed by the actions of Thatcher and Regan in the early 80’s but there is still something to be read in this forgotten book.
