A Collection of Essays by George Orwell

Most people are familiar with George Orwell based on his two dystopian novels, Animal Farm and 1984. Both were very influential, and a case can be made that the future of 1984 didn’t come about in part because of 1984. The tropes of that novel had become so widespread – far beyond those who had read it or even those who had seen of the movie versions – that they became an effect countermeasure against some kinds of state totalitarianism. Even now, if the state tries to oversee too much of what we do, cries of “Big Brother” are used to fight and ridicule, making it very difficult for the state to impose such measures.

Yet, despite these two famous novels, Orwell’s best work was his non-fiction, including his many great essays. A Collection of Essays provides a wonderful selection of his essays, demonstrating both the depth and breadth of his writing. They range from autobiographical essays on his life to literary essays to essays on politics and history. There are even essays on what today we’d call “pop culture.”

What distinguishes Orwell as piercing intellect combined with unswerving ability to say what he felt. Whether expressing his opinion of the Western democracies and their reaction to fascism or Charles Dickens and his views of society, Orwell plainly and pointedly puts forth his views, in a fashion that’s both insightful and captivating. Even in those cases where you don’t agree with him on all points, his views, expressed from his unique angle, are thought-provoking and cause you to look at the subject in a different way, from a new angle of your own.

His views are rather dark and pessimistic at times, even by the standards of today. But that’s because, while we are living in what is a somewhat dark time, it’s really what in math would be called a “local minima.” Things seem bleaker today than they did in the 1990s. But things are far, far better than they were in the late forties and early fifties, where fascism, war, totalitarianism, and the thread of nuclear destruction hung over everyone. Combine this with the post-war depression and shortages England experienced and you’ll understand a bit more of Orwell’s pessimism.

However, as dark as his writing can sometimes be, it gives a clear, insightful look at the world of the 1930s and 1940s – especially of England and the Empire in that period. But beyond that, much of it transcend the period, and looks clearly and unflinchingly at things that, in many cases, still are true or still threaten us from the edges of things.

“Such, Such Were the Joys” is an autobiographical essay in which Orwell examines his own early education, and through it, the educational system of England and the way children were treated at the start of the twentieth century. The attitude toward children was very different then (and in fact Orwell notes that it had changed to some degree by the time he wrote the essay). In many ways, they were badly treated, and they certainly weren’t valued the way they are now. In poor families children were forced to work, while in middle and upper class families – even in lower-middle-class families, like Orwell’s, children were sent away to boarding school. There, they were subject to harsh treatment, while those in charge had what we would consider strange and rather cruel ideas of child rearing. We’ve all heard the stories of children beaten for not knowing the answers, but Orwell also cites the common attitude of the time that it was good for children to leave the table feeling as hungry as they did when they sat down. Much of the school system was run by people who just wanted to profit from each child, and who really didn’t care about education or the children themselves.

One can also see the attitude Snow described in the “two cultures.” Orwell notes that they were not taught science, and in fact there was a general contempt for science, to the degree that even children who liked going outside to look at nature were sneered at.
It was a system where snobbishness and class and money consciousness existed to a degree well beyond that that we see today. Oh, our schools certainly have some of this, but it permeated the schools Orwell went to, and much of a child’s standing and social circle was determined by who his parents were and how much money they had. It was also a system that fostered bullying to a degree we wouldn’t tolerate: some of the students were actually given permission by the teachers to discipline (that is, beat) the other students, and of course this type of position was a lure to those who liked beating the other students.

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell examines changing trends in the English language – in writing, especially. He notes the trend toward less precise writing, toward cobbling together pieces out of stock phrases, which he correctly sees as a sign of the writer not wanting to really think about better ways of saying things, of not really believing the words matter. He examines several categories of writing problems – dying metaphors, pretentious diction (including overuse of foreign words and the tendency to look for a word of a Latin or Greek origin when an Anglo Saxon word would work better), and meaningless words. To make his point on the latter, he translates a few lines of Ecclesiastes (the section on “the race is not to the swift, not the battle to the strong…”) into “modern English”:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that
success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be
commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the
unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

• He sums it all up with six rules that still work well:
• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Several of his essays focus on the pre-World War II period and the mistakes or the facets of English character that caused Britain to do things that hurt them in the lead-up to the war. For example, it should have been apparent to England (and to other Western nations) that a victory by the Fascists in Spain would hurt England and strengthen Germany. Yet England did next to nothing to stop it, and in fact there was a definite thread of pro-Facism in some parts of English society. However, Orwell is not simply some leftist complaining about the right (though he has a number of harsh comments about the ruling and moneyed classes). In “England Your England” he has this to say about the British left:

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a
dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these
papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at
all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the
irresponsible carping of people who have never been and who never expect to be
in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional
shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with
physical reality.

“England Your England” is, in fact, a pointed, at times blistering, yet at the same time loving look at England and the English. On one hand, he notes that “England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled by the old and silly.” He is especially harsh on politicians like Chamberlain who couldn’t understand the growing threat of Fascism. But at the same time, he says “..the English ruling classes are morally fairly sound.” He point out that for all the problems the ruling class might have, they weren’t treacherous or bribable, the would not simply give in to a conqueror because it they personally could profit from it (something he contrasts with the ruling class in France).

In his essay on Dickens, Orwell takes a view that’s different from many who have adopted Dickens to their causes. While others view Dickens as a revolutionary of sorts, Orwell points out that this is not the case. Dickens clearly points out the problems with the various social systems in the England of his time – whether these systems are the schools, the courts, etc. But, unlike a revolutionary, Dickens by and large doesn’t seem to want to change the system. He doesn’t for example advocate large changes in the educational system. Instead, the Dickensian view is close to saying that the current system would work just fine if only those people in it would behave better and do the right thing. Dickens clearly believed that people by and large were good, he liked all sorts of people, and felt that much of what was wrong could be fixed if those people who didn’t do what was best would simply do so. In some ways, this seems like a rather simplistic view, but on the other hand, it’s one of Dickens’s great strengths. One of the reasons that the best Dickens is so enjoyable to read is that he clearly does like people and had great fondness for his characters. Orwell sees both of these sides of Dickens, and as in all of his essays, here plainly lays out both strong and weak points.

Orwell’s style at times seems a bit rambling in that he starts out in one place, then goes off to make a different point. But this is usually effective. An essay on post-card art turns into a reflection on society. An essay about Miller’s Tropic of Cancer turns into a significant examination of literature and societies relationship to it (as well as what kinds of literature are read by what societies). On the other hand, “Shooting the Elephant,” while focused on a specific event – an incident in which Orwell, as an Indian official, had to kill an elephant that had escaped and killed someone – it is really a reflection on the ethics and problems of colonization.

This is a wonderful book of essays. You don’t always agree with Orwell. There are times when he may overstate a matter or overemphasize some aspects of the issue under examination, but you always come away looking at the subject differently. Orwell will affect the way you view the world he is examining.

Sharpe’s Escape by Bernard Cornwell

Some writers fall into a certain formula in their books. Despite this – or maybe in some ways because of this – in the hands of a good author the books can remain enjoyable and even compelling. Such is the case with Bernard Cornwell’s novels about Richard Sharpe, a soldier under the Duke of Wellington in the Napoleonic Wars. There is an underlying formula to many of the books, but they are great fun nevertheless.

The Sharpe series originally started with Sharpe’s Rifles and ended with Sharpe’s Waterloo. They followed Richard Sharpe and Patrick Harper – who Sharpe first meets, then makes his second in command in Sharpe’s Rifles – through the history of the Peninsular War – the war against Napoleon in Portugal and Spain, and the key reason (more important than the 1812 Russian campaign) to Napoleon’s downfall. After Waterloo, Cornwell took Sharpe and Harper to South America (interestingly, Patrick O’Brian also took Aubrey and Maturin to South America after Waterloo, so I’m sure there is some fan fiction about this out there somewhere). He then went back and wrote prequels, set in India and Denmark, among other places. (These were good, but less satisfying than the main series, since althoughI refer to the series as the Sharpe series, it really is the Sharpe/Harper series; the relationship between the two men is important to the dynamic of the series.) Now, Cornwell is filling in gaps between the books in the original series.

Sharpe’s Escape takes place in Portugal in 1810. The French are sending a huge army into Portugal to drive the British out and complete their conquest of the Iberian peninsula. Wellington, in secret, has been building up a huge series of fortifications – the Lines of Torres Vedras – around Lisbon. His plan is to destroy all supplies that the French can use and move his army behind the lines. The French can then starve during the Portuguese winter while he and his men wait them out behind the lines. Thus, after defeating the French once at Busaco, he retreats behind the Lines. The French rampage across the country, but the combination of attacks by the partisans and starvation and disease do major damage to the army, which is eventually forced to retreat back to Spain (from which Wellington, two years later, will eject them).

Sharpe, meanwhile, is engaged in what we normally expect: he is instrumental in several key battles. But he also has to put up with stupidity in his own army and treachery from some who are supposed to be on his side – in this case, a pair of Portuguese brothers who are trying to play both sides. Despite the fact that we’ve seen this sort of thing before in other Sharpe books, it’s still fun here. This isn’t the best of the Sharpe books and it doesn’t add much to an already solid series, but it’s still a good read, especially if you are a Sharpe fan.

Olympos by Dan Simmons

When I read (and reviewed) Charlie Stross’s Acelerando, I thought it the clear leader in the Hugo race. After all, it was a really great novel, one of the best in a couple of years. But Dan Simmons’s Olympos, the second half of a long novel that began with Illium, is another outstanding novel, and at this point I’m not sure which of the two will wind up first on my Hugo ballot.

Olympos, like Illium, is a novel of several intertwined threads. It’s better than it’s predecessor, though, in that all of its threads are interesting from the start; in Illium, one of the threads (the earth-based one) was less interesting than the other two for the first half of the book. Moreover, in Olympos, it’s now clearer how the threads relate to one another, and they are tied to one another throughout in often masterful fashion.

One thread follows Thomas Hockenberry, and classics scholar from roughly our time in history who has been resurrected to observe the events of the Trojan war (Homer’s war, with all the characters right out of Homer). His thread weaves in and out of several of the other key threads. One of those follows various events in Illium (not the Illium on our earth, but one on a parallel earth) where, due to events from the end of Illium¸ the Greeks and Troyans, led by Achilles and Hector, lead a war against the gods. Hockenberry’s story also intertwines with the story of the moravecs (intelligent robots), who have come to a future Mars (in our universe, but connected the alternate, Illium-Earth, via a brane hole), where the Olympian gods are living. The moravecs have come to investigate the quantum disturbances that are threatening the solar system.

Meanwhile, on our earth, in the far future, the last remaining humans are under attack by a combination of robots and Setebos, a brain-shaped monster that has arrived from another dimension. The humans, including an older Odysseus, are barely surviving.
Throw Propspero, Caliban, and Ariel into the mix, add references to Proust, Romeo and Juliet, Joyce, Blake, Keats, and other poets (Stross may be a computer geek, but Simmons is a literature Geek), speculations on physics and on the creative power of true geniuses, battle scenes worthy of Homer, the literal fall of Troy (and before you say anything, I do know what the word “literal” means), incredible views of the underworld, a marvelous cast of characters, and you have a glimpse at the marvelous complexity that is Olympos. It’s a great juggling act, keeping all these balls in the air, but Simmons manages it. It the disparate parts fit together in a wonderful whole.

And while Simmons loves literature, he clearly also likes SF. There is a great scene where the several of the moravecs (one of whom is a Shakespeare expert, the other a Proust scholar, but both also Star Trek fans) trick several of the very serious moravecs into revealing they are also Trek fans. (They then beam to say things to one another like “Aha! Another fan!”)

Oh, there are a few minor problems. There are a few problems with some of the science. (As I said, Simmons is a literature geek, not a math geek.) And he doesn’t quite tie up everything (where did Setebos come from and go? Who or what are the Titans and others living in Tartarus. Who is the one God that’s hinted is coming?) But given how many things he did right – and how many ends he did tie up – it remains a remarkable job.