The second half of Lynskey’s book looks at how other artists used Nineteen Eighty-Four and its imaginative landscape. David Bowie, coming out of a period of ‘paranoid, cocaine-maddened, sleep-deprived’ confusion was neurotically unable to fly. So, on the way back from his 1973 Japanese tour, he got the Trans-Siberian railway from Khabarovsk to Moscow. What began as a bit of fun changed Bowie, as he watched the Soviet military parade in Moscow. He tried to write a musical based on Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell’s second wife, Sonia Brownell, refused it permission). Lynskey shows how Bowie’s song ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ — a brilliant, sinister merging of celebrity, advertising and demagoguery — was a direct response to Orwell. Bowie was putting himself into Big Brother’s brain. Margaret Atwood began writing The Handmaid’s Tale in Berlin in 1984, consciously re-engineering what she took from Orwell with a sophisticated feminist reading of a future.
Lynskey’s biography of the book is personal, and all the better for it — measuring our present against the future set out by Orwell. Dystopias are, he argues, prophylactic. If this future can be described in detail, perhaps it won’t happen. He quotes Orwell saying that ‘liberal values are not indestructible and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort’. In other words, the future might be dreadful, it might be ‘swindle, racket and humbug’, unless you do something about it.
How does today’s world compare with Orwell’s nightmare vision? https://t.co/0AaAxMDePK
— Allen Mendenhall (@allenmendenhall) June 21, 2019