Review: 1984

1984 by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

1984 is a Classic, so there's not much to add. I will only say that in his most admired novel, George Orwell presents an extremely disturbing, terrifying, gloomy and bleak view of the future with absolutely no hope or redeeming qualities that could make it otherwise. He paints a dystopian world where an individual has been stripped of all free will and is merely a subject of the ruling regime. She has no rights, no power to decide; even her words are not her own but of those who shape her world and control her mind. A world where past only exists to be amended as and when it suits the ruling class, where even a single flawed or rebellious thought could lead to termination, where love, lust and passion are considered malignant, and humans are no more the masters of their destiny but puppets in hands of the mighty. This is a cold world, bereft of thought, feelings, emotions and perhaps most importantly, human touch and empathy. It’s a future where privacy and intimacy have no home, where men and women live under the prying and unrelenting gaze of the ‘Big Brother’, the charismatic symbolic representation of the regime and its philosophy.

Regimes change, philosophies change, systems change but the hunger for power and ultimate and complete control remains the same. This is what drives the world and George Orwell’s masterly work is an exaggeration of the consequences of such hunger.

1984 is a book that makes you think and while you are at it makes you wonder what if someone could read and scrutinize every little thought in my mind. What if someone somewhere is constantly looking at every little gesture I make, at every turn of expression on my face, and waiting to judge me and persecute me for it. What kind of a world will it be where not even a thought is your own, where not a word is your own, even your body and its movements are to be guarded every living second? Well…it would be a miserable world, but if ever you wish to visit a land like that, George Orwell’s 1984 will be your place to start.

An interesting, engrossing read that challenges your boundaries of imagination, that informs and at times educates but as is the case with most creations this one too is not without a blemish or two.


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