Kindle. An Australian author's fictional account of what brought George Orwell to write 1984. The conceit is similar to David Malouf's in Ransom, and Francis Spufford's in Red Plenty; like the latter Glover presents specific episodes in the sympathetic third person and tips his hand in a concluding author's note. The prose has a dry wit reminiscent of the master, especially as the book becomes a totalitarian freedom-sucking monster that robs Orwell of his life. At times Glover overexerts himself in sourcing the tropes and motifs of 1984. Conversely he doesn't try to include everything his research dug up, overly occlude his source material, or cleave too slavishly to or deviate so far from Orwell's own style.
It's a lot of fun if you're a fan, but perhaps not if you're too much of a fan. Now to re-read Animal Farm.
I missed this last year because it wasn't reviewed by my usual suspects. It received broad coverage in the local media. Glover himself on discovering that 2 + 2 may not equal 5. Stacy Schiff reviews a biography of "the girl from the fiction department" Sonia Orwell.
At 6pm on a super-hot day the rocks on the northern side of Gordons Bay were still packed. Dogs, beer, people; the scuba ramp was crowded. I went for a directionless snorkel. The water was choppier than yesterday but still quite flat, with similar quite-good visibility, cold near the shore and quite warm out in the middle of the bay. I saw the usual cast: the big blue groper and some smaller females, some large wrasse, loads loads of stingarees (I lost count at 20) of all sizes, and mostly notably a green wobbegong sitting amongst the rocks on the northern site, about midway between the beach and scuba ramp. I sat on a rock next to that afterwards. It cooled off a lot while I was there, and the wind picked up. The gathering clouds where not serious. The ride to the Clovelly carpark and back was quite pleasant.
Last seen an age ago. The version I had used the original title: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Richard Burton is clearly in ill-health here, just like George Orwell was when he wrote it. I enjoyed John Hurt's performance. I have to wonder how much sense it makes to someone unfamiliar with the book; some of the dream sequences were difficult to parse, both temporally and thematically. The aesthetic falls far short of contemporaneous dystopian epics, such as Bladerunner, by evoking Doctor Who and Blake's 7 with a side of creepy exploitation. The story, strong as ever, struggles and chafes.