Back To Big Brother

During the same week that the stylish movie Priscilla came out, bringing the story of the woman (ahem, one of the women) in Elvis Presley’s life to screens across America, another female-centered retelling of a familiar story, Sandra Newman’s novel ‘Julia‘, arrived in bookstores, presenting the dystopian world of George Orwell’s 1984 as seen through the eyes of Winston Smith’s secret lover.  

Sofia Coppola’s film feels, at moments, like a feminist version of the Elvis legend, showing us the nasty side of the pop hero’s interactions with the younger woman. In places, a similar subtext is evident in ‘Julia’, but Newman’s artistic aims, the thematic breadth and depth and breadth of her work, and the scope of her achievement are greater. Her work will linger in the reader’s mind for the troubling questions it poses about tyranny and our will and ability to resist it more than for any pat message about relations between the genders or between citizen and state.

Some will remember the character of Julia vividly from the pages of Orwell’s great novel, and maybe also from the screen adaptation released back in the year 1984 and starring Suzannah Hamilton as Julia, John Hurt as Winston, and Richard Burton as O’Brien, the thought police interrogator. 

In Orwell’s book, she is a refreshingly open, decent, sympathetic character who introduces Winston to pleasures and emotions he never found or believed possible in his furtive stumblings with prostitutes in dark alleys out of view of the near-ubiquitous telescreens that keep Oceania’s populace in check. When Winston asks what drew her to him, Julia says it was something in his eyes. A quality, we infer, of sensitivity, wary intelligence, or desperate hopefulness that appeals to Julia on a deep level and that she feels no need to explicate. 

In Newman’s novel, the protagonist crosses paths with Winston many times in and around the ministry where she works in the Fiction Department, helping to produce texts in line with Ingsoc rhetoric and Newspeak. Smith’s appearance and manner are so dour that she takes to thinking of him as “Old Misery.” Her initial face-to-face encounters with him are a perverse anti-meet-cute. 

Yet the Julia of this novel, a swinger who has had many lovers, and who uses her sexual prowess and wiles to get on the good side of party officials and clandestine enemies of the party alike, sees qualities in the man that shine through the relentless bleakness, ugliness, and cruelty of their world. Newman adds unsuspected dimensions to the origins and growth of the bond between Julia and Winston.

Following a secret protocol, Julia slips Winston a note in a manner undetectable to anyone watching them via the nearest telescreen. A tense moment comes as we watch Winston’s reaction through Julia’s eyes and she hopes he will not let the note flutter to the ground through clumsiness or in contemptuous rejection of her advance. Later they meet in a cafeteria and, speaking in voices contrived to project blasé insouciance and avoid attention, make plans to meet in a rural spot. 

Subsequent scenes will be familiar to anyone who has read Orwell and, again, to those who have seen the film, which beautifully captured the release that both characters feel in the brief intervals amid routine and oppression. But the narration of these scenes from Julia’s point of view, in Newman’s elegant and often poetic prose, adds many layers of sensual and emotional expressiveness. 

A Catalog of Atrocities

Winston’s dalliance with Julia, in those private moments they are able to steal, may be the strongest argument against suicide in a world so relentlessly ghastly. Newman further embellishes the dystopia served up in ‘1984′ with accounts of the ruling party’s terrorizing, abduction, torture, and elimination through “vaporizing” of real or imagined thought criminals and violators of its diktats. 

Some may feel strongly that writers of the present should leave classic works alone, or that any measuring of the scope of Newman’s achievement here must take into account that Orwell did much of her work for her. But nothing in ‘Julia’ feels extraneous or, given the urgency of its themes and the power of its prose, even really derivative. 

It is in rendering the extent and severity of oppression in a socialist society, and the myriad guides that intolerance wears in a supposedly enlightened age, that Newman beats Orwell at his own game. Her novel is not without disturbing parallels with our own time, ones that Orwell, who died in 1950, for all his undoubted prescience could not have conjured. 

Newman’s narrative is full of characters who signal their virtue and curry favor with the powers-that-be by snitching on others for real or perceived violations of etiquette, a dynamic that will seem familiar to anyone who dared flout the inconsistent rules that authorities established during the COVID pandemic. But the consequences in this novel are far more severe than the mild ostracism that anyone who dared go maskless suffered. Newman fleshes out the nature and use of the “memory holes” in which functionaries in Orwell’s grim world burn texts that have outlived their political usefulness, and they are terrifying.

In ‘Julia’, the upholders of Ingsoc and crusaders against wrongthink go further than casting dated works into the flames. They rewrite texts to eliminate words, ideas, themes, and subtexts that do not sit well with the totalitarian state. You could find no clearer parallel with the efforts of “Inclusion Ambassadors” who earlier this year, at the behest of the children’s imprint of Penguin Books in the United Kingdom, set about rewriting the works of Roald Dahl to excise mention of ugly, fat, and crazy characters, gender-specific references, and even the depiction of women working as cashiers or in some other non-executive role.

The James Bond tales of Ian Fleming have also come in for revision, and now Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is at the center of controversy in schools and libraries nationwide. The virtuous of today are not merely censors as most people understand the term, but take it upon themselves to put words in the mouth of writers and add long passages to make novels and stories more in line with their ideology. It’s not as extreme as the censorship you find in ‘Julia,’ but one could easily see how you might slip down that slope. 

Doomed Love

‘Julia’s’ parallels with our politically correct and intolerant age are stark. But Newman achieves her passages of maximum power and resonance in expanding on the story of Julia’s and Winston’s doomed love. This is partly a function of the author’s presenting, in Julia, a meticulously realized, deeply conflicted, utterly convincing human, whose psychology is an odd mélange of ideals, hopes, longings, fears, and self-preserving instinct. 

Think of ‘Julia’ and ‘1984′ as two novels engaged in a dialogue. By developing her protagonist’s backstory, Newman sets the stage for the climactic scenes of Orwell’s novel, where Winston and O’Brien talk at length and the latter subjects the former to unspeakable torture. In Newman’s narrative, Julia, who has had flings with members of the party and enjoyed the clout that her sexual allure confers, is startled to get an invitation from none other than O’Brien to come to his flat.

O’Brien pretends to reveal to her his identity as a member of the Goldstein-ite resistance that seeks to topple Big Brother and free the people of Oceania from their chains. Given that O’Brien enjoys the privilege of turning off his telescreen, if only for a short time, his date with Julia has the appearance of a clandestine meeting of minds bent on sedition. 

Whether through innocence or shortsightedness, or a bit of repressed malice, Julia ends up roping Winston into the secret dalliance with O’Brien. Believing that he really is speaking with someone who loathes the party as much as he does, Winston speaks all too freely. In one of many scenes where Newman’s narrative intertwines with Orwell’s and presents events we have seen before from Julia’s perspective, Winston affirms his willingness to do all the things that O’Brien, under a pretense of laying out revolutionary imperatives, says may be necessary to advance the cause, including acts that harm innocent people. 

It’s a bad move. Julia’s machinations have placed her lover in mortal danger and exposed him to terrors almost too awful to describe. Faced with a torture specifically tailored to evoke his deepest personal fears—a cage containing ravenous rats placed over his head—Winston (mild spoiler) comes apart mentally to the point where he, in turn, commits a base transgression against the person closest to him and urges O’Brien to take Julia’s life instead of his own. 

By including Julia in the most intimate interactions between O’Brien and Winston, and adding this twist, Newman has reworked Orwell in a way that recalls the scenario of Guy de Maupassant’s well-known 1882 story, “Deux Amis.” In that tale, a ruthless German officer in the Franco-Prussian war separates a pair of friends and makes each of them decide whether to give his own life or make a plea for survival by offering that of the other.

In Newman’s scene, Winston does not reach the same conclusion as either of the noble amis, and here is one of the most thought-provoking aspects of ‘Julia’. It is all well and good to profess to oppose tyranny and to swear on one’s willingness to die for an ideal, but when put to the test, all too many of us are rodents who will do anything to survive, including ratting on a friend, a neighbor, a colleague, a relative, a lover. Newman’s novel depicts how, when the unstoppable force of devotion to freedom meets the immovable object of self-preservation, one or the other will prove not quite as insuperable as we needed to believe. 

‘Julia’ goes quite a bit further in its reimagining and fleshing out of the world and events of ‘1984′, and not just in its delineation of the repressive state but in its portrayal of a resistance movement hinted at in places in Orwell’s classic. Those who hate Big Brother are real and organized and it may even be possible to get to a part of Britain where they hold sway, though some are certain to dislike a tendency to treat captives there in ways not so much at odds with Ingsoc’s methods. 

Moral ambiguity is everywhere in the dystopia that Newman has expanded and given fresh relevance. To say more would ruin the surprises of this powerful, thought-provoking, uncannily timely novel.