CANR
WORK TITLE: Everything Must Go
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.dorianlynskey.com/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CA 320
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and media host. Cohost of the podcasts Oh God, What Now? and Origin Story. Member of editorial board, George Orwell Studies; judge, 2024 Orwell Prizes.
AWARDS:Orwell Prize and Baillie Gifford Prize longlists, both for The Ministry of Truth.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Guardian, Observer, i, BBC Culture, GQ, Q, MOJO, Empire, Billboard, Air Mail, Pitchfork, New Statesman, Spectator, Literary Review, Los Angeles Times, UnHerd, Big Issue, Village Voice, Mixmag, Select, Blender, Spin, and Word.
SIDELIGHTS
Jounalist Dorian Lynskey developed his talents as a music writer for the London Guardian and went on to contribute to an array of periodicals, including the New Statesman, Spectator, Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, and Spin. His first book, The Guardian Book of Playlists: The Best of the Guardian’s Readers Recommend, was published in 2008.
Lynskey’s second book, 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day, was published in 2011. As the title suggests, this book is a study of protest songs, beginning with Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (1939), a ballad about a lynching in the American South. Over 800 pages in length, the book contains thirty-three chapters, each of which addresses a different protest song. Lynskey argues that protest songs have had the biggest impact when rooted in an important social cause such as the Civil Rights Movement. He contends that the protest songs of today pale in comparison to those of the 1960s. In an interview about the book with Christian Science Monitor contributor Randy Dotinga, Lynskey explained: “As I was researching the book, I realized how much songs could tell you about the world at a particular point in time. Protest songs often get called simplistic or obvious, but most of them are more complex and revealing than they often get credit for. A lot of them have a certain quality and emotional intensity, an urgency or atmosphere which I really find gripping.”
Booklist contributor Vanessa Bush described the book as “comprehensive and beautifully written.” Writing for Library Journal, Barry Zaslow praised “Lynskey’s flowing prose and well-turned phrases.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor characterized the work as “an ambitious, astute summary of political songs, from the 1940s to the present.” Los Angeles Times contributor Carolyn Kellogg highlighted the volume’s degree of detail: “A music critic, Lynskey presents up-close details to ballast the book’s larger historical sweep. We learn, for example, that when the young Holiday sang at New York’s Cafe Society Club about lynching, the manager instructed the waiters not to provide any service during the song so people wouldn’t be distracted.” Quietus contributor Jim Keoghan commented: “This reader probably enjoyed the sections on the singers and acts he cannot abide more than the rest. The author’s trick is to convincingly win back important musical figures … from jabbering talking-head, TV filler shows and their songs from the defanged and whimsical soundtracks in which they have been used as signifiers for years. His knowledgeable, hard-boiled prose is slashed through occasionally with fine razor cuts of vivid description which jolt you out of any reverie you may have slipped into: it’s a good read but it’s not an easy read.”
Other reviewers expressed stronger reservations about 33 Revolutions per Minute. A New Yorker contributor deemed the book “impressive in scope, if thin on critical insight.” Helen Brown, a contributor to the Sixties website, was dismayed that Lynskey did not devote more space to feminist music: “While strong on the way the American Civil Rights Movement harnessed music to its advantage, Lynskey gives less space to the ways in which feminists have used music. They may not have been part of an organised movement, but female singer- songwriters have had a powerful impact on gender politics.” New Statesmen contributor Yo Zushi challenged Lynskey’s premise that protest music is largely dead. “It is too soon to write a eulogy for a mode of songwriting that clearly has not died out,” Zushi asserted, “especially at a time when protest movements around the world are shaking dictators from power and filling the streets with demonstrators. … Protest music may not rule the radio playlists as it once did. To those who are listening, however, it remains a source of strength.” New York Times Book Review contributor Sean Wilentz observed: “Quirky sections …, along with the book’s comprehensive scope and the author’s crisp prose, are the major attractions of 33 Revolutions per Minute. That said, it is too bad Lynskey didn’t find a way to examine how protest music (and rock ‘n’ roll generally) helped to undermine the Soviet empire, by far the most effective case of musical subversion since the 1960s.”
On the whole, most reviewers were impressed with the scope of 33 Revolutions per Minute. Spectator reviewer Andrew Petrie found that the book “grips tightest when there’s something more at stake than showbiz cool.” John Self, a contributor to Asylum, wrote: “This big red book is so physically daunting—heavyweight, important-looking, 864 pages top to tail—that when it arrived my prior enthusiasm for it was suddenly dwarfed by a sense of intimidation. … 33 Revolutions per Minute is … a history of protest songs. But it is a wider, deeper and more ambitious undertaking than that implies. … Moreover, there is a risk that this book could be treated as one to dip into, as a reference work, which would rob it of its overall narrative force and lead the reader to miss the recurring themes and figures which populate its pages.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer reviewer William Kist drew attention to the book’s political thrust: “Nobody writes a book like this without an interest in politics—and [this book] hits a relentlessly leftist groove.” Kist also related that reading 33 Revolutions per Minute affected him to the point that he had a dream in which he reexperienced what it had felt like to be a child growing up in the turbulent 1960s. Kist then compared the music of that decade with that of today: “As Sasha Jones pointed out in a recent critique of Bruno Mars in the New Yorker, most current pop stars seem oblivious to the times in which they live. This sense only increases in the wake of Lynskey’s provocative, absorbing book. Sometimes the worthwhile stuff does provoke a nightmare.”
[open new]The surfacing of “alternative facts” in the first Trump administration helped spur sales of George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 and also helped inspire Lynskey to write his next work of nonfiction, The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s “1984.” Named for the history-perverting agency where beleaguered aspiring freethinker Winston Smith works in the totalitarian state of Oceania in 1984, Lynskey’s book was published in concert with the novel’s 70th anniversary. In addition to interviewing screen and stage adapters of Orwell’s novel, Lynskey combed through the 9,000 pages and 2 million words in the British author’s complete works, including journal entries and nonfiction articles, in search of references to 1984 and clues to its conception and creation. He told the Baillie Gifford Prize, for which his volume was longlisted, that “retracing Orwell’s intellectual steps … was an exhilarating process.” Regarding Orwell’s novel he remarked: “Ultimately, the book endures because it contains hard truths about human nature. However much the world seems to change, the abuses of power and pernicious cognitive biases … never go away. He gave us a myth and a vocabulary with which to understand the most dangerous phenomena of his time, and ours.”
In the first part of The Ministry of Truth, Lynskey recounts Orwell’s life and era, with a focus on aspects that directed him toward a disdain for the mendaciousness and viciousness of totalitarian states like Hitler’s Third Reich. Born in 1903 in British India, Orwell felt suppressed in boarding school in England, fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, barely saved a manuscript from bombing during Hitler’s Blitz on London, and wrote wartime propaganda for the BBC through the Broadcasting House. Destined to suffer an early death from tuberculosis, Orwell published Animal Farm in 1945 and used the proceeds to devote himself to refining 1984, which was published in 1949; Orwell died less than a year later. Having examined key literary predecessors, counterparts, and foils including Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Lynskey proceeds to register Orwell’s influence on a range of later novels such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Moreover he investigates how totalitarian, fascist, and dictatorial political activities in the real world have continuously fed readers’ and scholars’ interest in the foundational role played by Orwell’s novel—origin of doublethink, thoughtcrime, Big Brother—in dystopian theorizing and conceptualization.
In the Times Literary Supplement, Margaret Drabble remarked that The Ministry of Truth “amounts to a comprehensive survey of the history of utopia and dystopia, centring on Orwell’s immensely influential novel, and it is full of connections that make the reader’s mind spin off in all directions and search the bookshelves and the internet.” Society contributor Gorman Beauchamp praised Lynskey as “capable of clear, crisp, colloquial writing, with real panache.” In Booklist, Donna Seaman found he work “engrossing,” as with “agile, syncopated prose, Lynskey briskly elucidates Orwell’s life” and “how Nineteen Eighty-Four expresses Orwell’s deepest concerns about humanity and civilization.” Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Lev Mendes observed that “Lynskey is surely right … to note that the meaning of Orwell’s novel has shifted over the decades along with the preoccupations of its readers; and that in our low, dishonest moment, it is ‘most of all a defense of truth.’” A Kirkus Reviews writer hailed The Ministry of Truth as a “vibrant, spirited story of a man and his book” and a “fascinating literary history.”
Lynskey pivots from dystopia to apocalypse with Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World. Speaking to modern-day readers who have perhaps been led by the panics and upheavals of the twenty-first century, from the Y2K bug to waves of terrorism and war to climate change to the pandemic, to wonder if the end really is nigh, Lynskey assures readers that humanity has been foreseeing the end-times inaccurately for ages. Uncertainty was stirred thousands of years ago by comets, eclipses, and the spectacular events of the biblical book of Revelation. The Middle Ages brought plagues, while the modern era is still confronting the repercussions of nuclear weapons, global warming, and artificial intelligence, often through imaginative science fiction novels and films. The Doomsday Clock was invented precisely to help the world recognize the risk that humankind’s activities could bring about the end of humanity. Whether following religious prognistications, patterns in history, or problems with science, “doomers” seek to claim a level of moral authority and gravity in asserting that humanity is headed for disaster, but ironically, the propagation of fears of apocalypse tends to breed pessimism and inaction. The more predestined the end of the world, the less that can be done about it.
“Weirdly, the book isn’t depressing,” suggested Ben Yagoda in the Washington Post, “partly, I suppose, because these disasters haven’t completely wiped us out (yet). The clever and insightful writing of Lynskey, a British cultural historian and podcaster, also helps.” In the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai appreciated Lynskey’s message that “when it comes to make-believe disasters, our appetite is endless; yet we’re loath to anticipate real-world disasters until it is too late.” She observed that the author “has the kind of omnivorous sensibility essential for a project like this” and “also happens to be a terrifically entertaining writer, with a requisite sense of gallows humor. The extremity of his subject provides plenty of absurdity to work with.”
“With rich analysis and a remarkable level of research,” declared Laura Chanoux in Booklist, Everything Must Go evokes in the reader a “connection with generations past” and “offers a new lens” for viewing the present moment. In “exploring a host of apocalypse fantasies with dry wit,” as a Kirkus Reviews writer noted, Lynskey suggests that “the point … is to find a place between empty despair and mindless optimism.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
ArtsBeat: The Culture at Large, April 27, 2011, “Is the Protest Song Dead?”
Booklist, March 1, 2011, Vanessa Bush, review of 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day, p. 10; June 1, 2019, Donna Seaman, “1984 Turns 70: As 1984 Turns 70, a Biography of George Orwell’s Dystopian Novel Tracks Its Influence and Relevancy,” p. 18; November, 2024, Laura Chanoux, review of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World, p. 3.
Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 2011, Randy Dotinga, “Whatever Happened to the Protest Song,” interview with author.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2010, review of 33 Revolutions per Minute; April 15, 2019, review of The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s “1984”; December 1, 2024, review of Everything Must Go.
Library Journal, November 15, 2010, Barry Zaslow, review of 33 Revolutions per Minute, p. 70.
Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2011, Carolyn Kellogg, “Giving the Revolution Songs to Rally Around,” review of 33 Revolutions per Minute.
New Humanist, March- April, 2011, Andrew Mueller, review of 33 Revolutions per Minute.
New Statesman, March 28, 2011, Yo Zushi, “Street Fighting Men”; review of 33 Revolutions per Minute, p. 54.
New Yorker, May 30, 2011, review of 33 Revolutions per Minute, p. 83.
New York Times, April 29, 2011, Dwight Garner, “Sing It Loud: Changing the World with a Stirring Cri De Coeur,” p. C34.
New York Times Book Review, May 1, 2011, Sean Wilentz, “Get Up, Stand Up,” review of 33 Revolutions per Minute, p. 14; July 21, 2019, Lev Mendes, review of The Ministry of Truth, p. 21; February 9, 2025, Jennifer Szalai, review of Everything Must Go.
Publishers Weekly, January 31, 2011, review of 33 Revolutions per Minute, p. 39.
Society, June, 2020, Gorman Beauchamp, review of The Ministry of Truth, p. 362.
Spectator, March 19, 2011, Andrew Petrie, “A Chorus of Disapproval,” p. 46.
Times Literary Supplement, May 6, 2011, Paul Genders, “Left Turns,” review of 33 Revolutions per Minute, p. 11; June 7, 2019, Margaret Drabble, review of The Ministry of Truth, p. 26.
Washington Post, January 24, 2025, Ben Yagoda, review of Everything Must Go.
ONLINE
Asylum, http://theasylum.wordpress.com/ (March 7, 2011), John Self, review of 33 Revolutions per Minute.
Baillie Gifford Prize website, https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/ (October 17, 2019), “Dorian Lynskey Longlist Author Interview.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer, http://www.cleveland.com/ (April 4, 2011), William Kist, review of 33 Revolutions per Minute.
Dorian Lynskey website, https://www.dorianlynskey.com (May 20, 2025).
Faber & Faber website, http://www.faber.co.uk/ (August 9, 2011), author profile.
Guardian, http: //www.guardian.co.uk/ (August 9, 2011), author profile.
Pacific Standard, https://psmag.com/ (June 4, 2019), Alexander Bisley, “‘Any Attempt to Claim Orwell for the Right Is Dishonest’: An Interview with Dorian Lynskey.”
Quietus, http://thequietus.com/ (March 1, 2011), Jim Keoghan, review of 33 Revolutions per Minute.
Sixties, http://sixties-l.blogspot.com/ (March 19, 2011), Helen Brown, review of 33 Revolutions per Minute.
33 Revolutions per Minute, http://33revolutionsperminute.wordpress.com (August 9, 2011).
Dorian Lynskey
AUTHOR, JOURNALIST & PODCASTER
Dorian Lynskey has been writing about music, politics, film and books for over 20 years for publications including The Guardian, The Observer, i, BBC Culture, GQ, Q, MOJO, Empire, Billboard, Air Mail, Pitchfork, The New Statesman, The Spectator, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Times, UnHerd, The Big Issue, The Village Voice, Mixmag, Select, Blender and Spin. He is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011) and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019), which was longlisted for both the Orwell Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize. His next book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, is out on 11 April 2024 (UK) and January 2025 (US). He co-hosts the podcasts Origin Story (with Ian Dunt) and Oh God, What Now?. He is on the editorial board of George Orwell Studies and a judge for the 2024 Orwell Prizes.
Dorian Lynskey longlist author interview
17 October 2019
2019
Author interviews
Dorian Lynskey talks about the enduring influence of Orwell's work in his longlisted book, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984.
What does it feel like to be longlisted?
Wonderful. For me the prize has always been the gold standard for non-fiction and it’s an honour to be a part of such a strong longlist.
What inspired you to write this book?
For me book ideas accrue over time from a confluence of interests. In 2016 I began thinking about tracing the evolution of the dystopian novel and Nineteen Eighty-Four felt like the obvious focus. I find that when a work of art becomes ubiquitous it is both taken for granted and misunderstood, and one way of making it feel fresh again is to examine it from the ground up. Then, while researching the proposal, I was struck time and time again by the ways in which Orwell’s observations chimed with the current political situation, particularly his interest in power’s assault on objective truth. When the Trump administration’s coinage “alternative facts” caused sales of the novel to spike, I realised that my book could help to shed light on where we are now. It wasn’t just history.
How did you research?
My bible was Orwell’s Complete Works, which runs to approximately 9000 pages and two million words. I was trying to get as deep inside Orwell’s head as possible and follow up on anything — a cornerstone essay, a line in a forgotten film review, a diary entry, a letter to a friend — that related to Nineteen Eighty-Four in any way. Although I interviewed people who had adapted the novel for stage and screen, the bulk of my research took place in the British Library and the Orwell Archive, retracing Orwell’s intellectual steps and reading a vast number of books and articles ranging from the nineteenth century to the present day. It was an exhilarating process.
We see frequent comparisons to Orwell’s world of 1984 in headlines around the world in 2019. What is it about this story that has ensured it maintains its place in our culture 70 years on from its initial publication?
The book contains so many ideas about power structures, language, war, technology, surveillance and psychology that, no matter the political situation, it always has something vital to tell us. What’s more, Orwell expressed those ideas in unforgettable language that I’ve seen used at least once, in print or online, every single day since I began the project. Unlike almost every other writer of utopias and anti-utopias before him, Orwell also took pains to fold his insights into a gripping narrative which is at once a satire, a love story, a spy thriller and a postmodern mystery. It’s the only political thesis that can thrill and horrify a 13-year-old. Ultimately, the book endures because it contains hard truths about human nature. However much the world seems to change, the abuses of power and pernicious cognitive biases that Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four never go away. He gave us a myth and a vocabulary with which to understand the most dangerous phenomena of his time, and ours.
What is your favourite non-fiction book and why?
I don’t have an all-time favourite anything but two relatively recent books that I find inspiring are The Unwinding by George Packer and The Future Is History by Masha Gessen. They’re both commandingly stylish writers who weave together empathetic case studies of uncelebrated lives with vivid sketches of major careers. In this way they’re able to tell the story of an era from both the top down and the bottom up, explaining the decisions of the powerful and also their unforeseen consequences on the ground. Each book is as narratively addictive and as emotionally devastating as a great novel.
What are you working on next?
I’m looking for another idea that brings together art, politics, biography, history and the predicaments of the present day. Unfortunately, there’s only one Nineteen Eighty-Four.
‘Any Attempt to Claim Orwell for the Right Is Dishonest’: An Interview With Dorian Lynskey
Alexander Bisley
June 4, 2019
The author of “The Ministry of Truth” discusses Orwell’s fight for democratic socialism—and the unfortunate misconceptions that can still dog his memory.
George Orwell, ca. 1940.
George Orwell’s voice is one of the most enduring in 20th-century political literature. In The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, Londoner Dorian Lynskey explains vividly why Orwell still matters.
The Ministry of Truth goes in-depth on the influences that shaped Orwell and his view of the world. It explores his visceral hatred of inequality and his disgust at totalitarians and their enablers. Fighting and writing in the Spanish Civil War strengthened Orwell’s commitment to the political left, but also sharpened his criticisms of ways that elements of the left were going astray.
The Ministry of Truth is informed by extensive research into both history and pop culture, ranging from the traumas of the 19th and 20th centuries to our present troubled moment, which Orwell’s writings continue to explain and clarify. The book incisively covers Karl Rove’s critique of the “reality-based community,” Rudy Giuliani’s avowal that “Truth isn’t truth,” the battle over Russian disinformation, and censorship in China. Lynskey, a Guardian contributor and the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute, a book about protest songs, writes engagingly, and makes a persuasive case for Orwell’s contemporary relevance.
Lynskey spoke with Pacific Standard to discuss Orwell’s enduring sense of humor, the prospects for democratic socialism in the 21st century, and the single most galling misconception about Orwell.
“Socialism is such elementary common sense,” George Orwell wrote, “that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already.” Yet Orwell also suspected that many voters are “driven away” from such ideas by the sort of socialists they tend to meet. “Bearded,” “vegetarian,” “teetotal,” “middle-class,” and “a pacifist,” as Orwell describes the typical socialist. Is that also a fair description of British Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn?
Those lines have certainly been quoted by British journalists with reference to Corbyn. I’m sure Orwell would have sympathized with many of the goals of Corbyn’s Labor Party but would have been surprised that the British left had pinned its hopes on the kind of man he found so unappetizing. It’s worth nothing, though, that this was Orwell at his pettiest, taking many cheap shots at people he found annoying, and he grew out of this after Spain, where he realized that there were characters on the left much more troubling than bearded vegetarians.
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984.
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984.
(Photo: Doubleday)
Orwell was an ardent writer and fighter on behalf of democratic socialism and “human brotherhood.” Is democratic socialism a realistic hope in 2019?
I hope so. It is certainly a more likely prospect than it has been in decades. But I do find it dismaying that parts of the left continue to make the same old mistakes: a failure to understand the range of fears and desires that motivate ordinary people, a refusal to confront their own flaws, a weakness for authoritarians abroad, and so on. The British Labor Party under Jeremy Corbyn is guilty of this. I’m more hopeful about the United States, where people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have so far avoided most of these traps and focused on bold domestic policy ideas.
Orwell has always been popular with the right because he saw so clearly what was wrong with the left, but he did so because he wanted the left to be better and to fulfill its potential, without tripping itself up or betraying its principles.
What light can Orwell’s work shine on contemporary British politics, and Brexit especially?
He wrote well about the English (as opposed to British) character, and how distinct it was from the rest of Europe, but following the [Second World] War, he strongly believed that a socialist United States of Europe would be an essential counterweight to the United States and the U.S.S.R. He disliked xenophobia and welcomed immigrants, especially refugees. People often quote his most flattering lines about the English, but he could be stingingly critical as well: “Millions of English people willingly accept as their national emblem the bulldog, an animal noted for its obstinacy, ugliness, and impenetrable stupidity.” What a fantastic line! So I don’t believe that he would have found much to respect in the Brexit mentality, nor would he have been surprised by it.
What did you find that was surprising as you researched the book?
One of my favorite discoveries was that when Orwell’s U.S. publisher approached J. Edgar Hoover for a blurb, not only did Hoover decline but he immediately opened a file on Orwell. Later, 1984 became a favorite of both Lee Harvey Oswald and the Black Panthers. It has been popping up in surprising ways for the last 70 years, in a way that no other book has.
What got you hooked on Orwell in the first place?
It was reading Essays—Penguin Classics—in my twenties, [and] that really revealed Orwell’s mind to me. I loved his clarity, curiosity, wit, and ability to be formidably intelligent yet approachable, respecting the reader as an equal. He had a way of laying out his thinking on the page so that it felt as if he was coming to a conclusion at the same time as the reader, which is a rare and charming sleight of hand. It’s impossible to write quite like Orwell, but it’s well worth trying to think like him.
Revisiting those essays this time, I was amazed how relevant they still were. “Notes on Nationalism” is brilliant on the psychology of prejudice and various cognitive biases. “Looking Back on the Spanish War” explains the principles of misinformation and why people willingly believe flagrant lies. “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” remains one of the sharpest takes on the tension between the quality of art and the morality of the artist. These are all things that we’re still debating now, and Orwell’s ideas hold up.
Dorian Lynskey.
Dorian Lynskey.
(Photo: Alexandra Dao)
Orwell wrote in his essay “Freedom of the Park”: “The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.” Prescient for the present era, isn’t it?
Absolutely. Oceania [the fictional setting of 1984] has the Thought Police and the telescreens, but in many ways the citizens pacify themselves. Orwell’s generation had just seen millions of people slide into totalitarianism, often with great enthusiasm, and he was determined to make people aware of the rights they could lose if they weren’t paying attention. Demagogues and tyrants only thrive if huge numbers of people let them, whether through active support or just apathy. Today, he would be more interested in Trump supporters than in Trump himself.
What do you hope readers will take away from The Ministry of Truth?
I would like to transmit what I’ve learned from immersing myself in Orwell. Like him, I dislike theory, jargon, and bullshit; I enjoy clarity, humor, and getting my facts straight. Think harder. Scrutinize yourself. Take nothing for granted. Never be afraid to admit when you’re wrong. Live up to your avowed principles even when they’re inconvenient. Remember that most of the problems that plague us now have been with us for decades, and they are soluble—or at least survivable—if you make the moral effort to see things clearly and act honestly. I also hope the jokes land. Orwell liked jokes.
Is there a widespread misconception about Orwell that you find especially galling?
Any attempt to claim Orwell for the right is dishonest—he never stopped being a democratic socialist and made no secret of that—but what particularly bugs me right now is the suggestion that he was a free-speech absolutist. He believed in freedom from state censorship, but he also believed that actions had consequences. When someone gets into trouble for saying or tweeting something obnoxious and then complains about “the Thought Police,” I think of Orwell’s thoughts on Ezra Pound: “Anti-Semitism … is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person. People who go in for that kind of thing must take the consequences.” He would not have rushed to the defense of every loose-lipped bigot who thinks free speech means freedom from criticism.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Author(s): Gorman Beauchamp 1
Author Affiliations:
(1) grid.214458.e, 0000000086837370, English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, , 435 S. State St. 4210 Angell Hall, 48109, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Some scholarly works are read with interest, a few even with excitement, but not many with delight, which was my response to Dorian Lenskey's The Ministry of Truth . Counterintuitive as it may sound to make such a claim about George Orwell and his agonizingly grim dystopia, it is entirely justified. In his "Acknowledgements," Lynskey quotes Orwell: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness." "At the risk of disappointing him," he continues, "I have to say that writing this book was one of the most rewarding and enjoyable experiences of my life." It shows. Although the book is the result of extensive research and extensive knowledge of its subjects, it has none of the unleavened ponderousness of so many academic works or the mystifying gabble of lit. crit. "discourse": this presumably because Lenskey is a journalist, capable of clear, crisp, colloquial writing, with real panache. I was reaching this conclusion early in the book before I took occasion to look at the blurbs on the jacket, one of which opined: "Above all, it's just flat out fun to read." I second that opinion hardily.
We hear a unique voice, a real person speaking, funny, ironic, someone you would enjoy talking with about Orwell or a range of related subjects. His picture on the inside dust cover confirms this, if I can engage in a little amateur phrenology. Some examples. The BBC has erected a statue of Orwell outside its Broadcasting House, commemorating his war time service there. Of this experience he wrote: "its atmosphere is something half way between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or worse than useless." Lynskey's next sentence reads, "Put that on a statue." Of Darkness at Noon , "The novel was set in a prison, and Koestler certainly knew his way around a cell." "There are those critics who insist that Ayn Rand could have written her 1938 novella without ever having read [Zamyatin's] We, and good luck to them." Of the charge that Orwell had lifted from We for Nineteen Eighty-Four , "Orwell made repeated efforts to get Zamyatin's novel republished in England and encouraged his readers more than once to 'look out for this book'-surely not the kind of thing plagiarists usually do." Of Sonia Brownell, who would become the second Mrs. Orwell, "She was spending time in Paris in the intoxicating, maddening company of the existentialists Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus and the enormously charming, enormously married Maurice Merleau-Ponty," with whom she had an affair anyway. But I must stop myself: either you get my point or you don't.
Lenskey is not only witty in himself, but-to adapt Falstaff-discovers the wit in other men. He seems always to find the perfect pungent quotation to reveal their personality. Zamyatin on his czarist persecution: "If I have any place in Russian literature, I owe it entirely to the Saint Petersburg Department of Secret Police." H. G. Wells proposing his own epitaph in 1941: "I told you so. You damned fools." Michael Radford, telling the author that his film version of the novel was expected to flop because only the old would care to see it when actually it was a huge success with 15-20 years old, laughed when he explained why. "Because it was so completely about despair. Young people love despair." Lynskey adduces some of Orwell's own wittier, if less familiar lines. Arguing with James Burnham: "We could all be true prophets if we were allowed to alter our prophecies after the event." Or this apercu about the kind of writers who always toe shifting party lines: "Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word." Even the admission he made in a private letter that he was finding tuberculosis a very expensive habit is grimly funny. What I have wanted to offer here are just a few of the many bubbles that effervesce in this lively book. While I wouldn't want to leave the impression that the elan, the style itself of The Ministry of Truth constitutes the most important reason for recommending it, it is one.
Books on Orwell just keep coming. This is not surprising, given that Nineteen Eighty-Four remains probably the most widely read twentieth century work of fiction, soaring to the top of the best seller list again not only in 1984, but, understandably, in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump's election. [A clarification: Orwell preferred that the title of his book be spelled out, not rendered as numerals. I observe that preference, as does Lynskey in his book-except for some reason in its title. Blame for that substandard usage must be attributed to Doubleday, most likely its marketing department.] At one time, as the unprecedented hoopla of the year that the novel had made infamous began to exhaust itself, I thought, mistakenly, that Orwell's relevance might diminish. By the end of that decade, Fukuyama was declaring "the end of history" and George Bush was celebrating "a new world order," neoliberalism triumphant. The kind of totalitarianism depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed on the wane, most of the world moving in other, happier directions. Our attention might better turn to the dangers exhibited in Brave New World . But history didn't stop, the new world order failed to arrive, and Orwell's dystopia, perhaps unfortunately, retained its relevance, probably, in one way, increased it, as I'll discuss below.
Orwell is not highly regarded as an author (of fiction, anyway) by the literati and his books are rarely taught in college literature courses. But a valid case can be made-and in various ways Lynskey makes it-that Nineteen Eighty-Four ranks as the most important work of fiction of the twentieth century, not aesthetically-shades of Proust and Joyce rest easy-but politically. Its nineteenth century analogues are not Middlemarch and War and Peace but Uncle Tom's Cabin (Orwell's prototypical "good bad book") and Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? (called "The most politically dangerous book you've never heard of"). Nugatory as literature-the latter, in fact, is execrable-both had enormous socio-political influence, Stowe's great enough to generate the story that Lincoln greeted her as "the little woman who caused this great war." While her influence was largely confined to America, Chernyshevsky provided the vade mecum for several generations of European radicals and would-be revolutionaries: Marx is said to have learned Russian to read it; Lenin treasured his martyred brother's copy like a bible. Both books caused things to happen, and Orwell's dystopia, exerting similar influence on both continents, and beyond, did also-but in a very different way. It caused things (we assume) not to happen.
Nineteen Eighty-Four , that is, is not a prophecy, but a prophylactic; it sought not to predict a future, but to prevent one. This constitutes the most fundamental fact in understanding the book-and was mistook by countless commentators, in and around 1984 particularly, who sought to judge how accurately Orwell had divined the future, usually not very well. Such verdicts were about as dumb as buying a cow and complaining that it didn't lay eggs, and there were many. To judge the effectiveness of Nineteen Eighty-Four we have, rather, to try to prove a negative-supposedly impossible-to argue the things that did not happen because the book was written: what it prevented . Therein lies the book's greatness and accounts, no doubt, for the steady stream of analyses of it and its author.
Perhaps the stature of Orwell could not be more clearly evidenced than by the title (and, of course, the contents) of Thomas E. Rick's recent book, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom , where he treats the two men as coevals, the acknowledged greatest British political leader of the last century and a man who wrote books. (Churchill read Nineteen Eighty-Four twice and pronounced it "remarkable.") Left-handed evidence of this stature appeared just today, as I was writing this, in an article in the Business section of The New York Times detailing the business of counterfeiting and adulterating Orwell's texts, mostly in India, creating cheap editions for the mass market, texts that are often garbled, error-ridden or "edited" (and thus subjecting even his own writings to "alternative realities"). Orwell has received the kind of treatment accorded only the greatest authors in the publication of his letters-George Orwell: A Life in Letters (2010)-and his Diaries (2012), both edited by Peter Davison, and in a host of critical studies in just the last decade: in addition to Rick's, Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: Life and Art (2010) John Rodden, The Unexamined Orwell (2011), Robert Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel (2013), Philip Bounds Orwell and Marxism (2016), Alex Woloch, Or Orwell: Writings and Democratic Socialism (2017), David Dwan, Liberty, Equality, & Humbug: Orwell's Political Ideals (2018), and another from the indefatigable John Rodden, Becoming George Orwell: Life and Letters, Legand and Legacy (2020), as well as, probably, others that I know not of, not to mention the periodical literature. Now comes The Ministry of Truth.
A New Yorker cartoon showed a man sitting smugly in his library, with the caption: "The man who knew enough." That was me about Orwell: I felt no need of another book. Lynskey's changed all that. Even in the first of the two parts of The Ministry where he covers much tilled, familiar ground, he still manages to discover interesting information and offer novel insights; and in Part Two, he surveys the influences and offshoots of the dystopia in the years after Orwell's death, many of those, particularly in the pop culture, terra incognito to an oldster like me. Part One of the book essays two things: one, to establish the intellectual milieu in which Orwell developed the ideas that would eventuate in his last book; and second, to demonstrate how his life experiences and personality formulated those ideas.
The writers and thinkers who constituted this milieu are familiar to any student of Orwell: Zamyatin, H. G. Wells, James Burnham, for each of whom Lynskey devotes a chapter, as well as other influences like Arthur Koestler, Aldous Huxley and Franz Borkenau. The one figure who gets short shrift is Bertrand Russell, some of whose writing Orwell read and praised and whose ideas often jibed with his. Less familiar to Orwellites, probably, is the nineteenth century outpouring of Utopias, particularly, in America and particularly the enormously influential Looking Backward of Edward Bellamy, after Thomas More's the most widely read fictional ideation ever. Orwell had no special interest in these-I don't think he ever mention's Bellamy-but they do indicate something of the intellectual climate of the times and are, of course, crucial for understanding the anti-utopian impulse, the dystopia. His chapter here is typically well informed and informative. And even about those much more often discussed figures he seems to find something new and interesting to say-and says it often with that eye for the unexpected detail. When Zamyatin finally left Russia, "he hoped to move to the US to write movies for Cecil B. DeMille, but he never made it." "Residents of downtown Los Angeles can still see for themselves the life changing power of Looking Backward . Architect George Wyman based the Bradley Building, later the location for the final act of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, on Bellamy's description of the department store of the future." That's not the sort of factoid you find in most scholarly tomes.
(A petty personal pique: I had thought that, some years ago, I had rescued the delightfully funny parody of Jerome K. Jerome, "A Modern Utopia," from Edwardian obscurity. Lynskey writes about it as if it were common knowledge. Well, back then, maybe..)
The other purpose in this part involves using Orwell's biography to establish that the ideas crystalized in Nineteen Eight-Four had been accruing throughout his life. Such a claim might seem obvious, but Lenskey seeks to counter the impression that the horror of the book was the result of the despair of a dying man, a sort of last will and testament. Orwell, in fact, did not know he was dying as he wrote his dystopia; while he was aware that his illness would likely prove fatal, he thought he had 5 or 10 years to live: he had plans for at least five more books that he planned to write. "Orwell never gave any indication that he thought he wouldn't recover." Jura, where he retreated to write Nineteen Eighty-Four, was not some grim, godforsaken place where he was, in effect, self-banished, but a pleasant place where he farmed, even raised a pig, and hung out with the natives. In that terrible winter of 1947, "London was actually colder and more fuel-deprived than Jura." In V. S. Pritchett's famous and lavish encomium, he termed Orwell, "the wintry conscience of his generation"; but that wintry suggests the probably too common image of Orwell as a dour, austere man. Lynskey will have none of it: his Orwell is gregarious, charming, a fascinating conversationalist and companion. "One lunch companion, Michal Meyers, called him 'the best informed and most illuminating talker about politics whom I have ever met. His conversation was like his writing, unaffected, lucid, witty and humane.' Another writer, Christopher Sykes, remembered that whenever they met, 'we talked of melancholy subjects-and he made my day.'" A few minutes with him could often defuse the ire that someone he had disparaged in print felt. Lynskey includes even this endearing anecdote. He particularly liked the chocolate cake of his housekeeper, but one once, she said, "went sad in the middle, but he liked them sad you see. He liked things that went wrong a little." Here you have displayed concretely the anti-utopian mentality, reminiscent, in its way, of Flory's admonition in the very early Burmese Days , "Be as degenerate as you can. It all postpones Utopia."
Orwell's experience in Spain, in the civil war, recounted in Homage to Catalonia , exposed him early on to totalitarianism and what it was like to be one of its victims; this made him one of the very few English writers, maybe the only one, who grasped the nature of this emerging phenomenon. People living in such polities, behind the Iron Curtain say, often expressed surprise and even gratitude that Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed so vividly what their lives were like. Some English writers, particularly on the Left, wanted, by contrast, to disparage Orwell's analyses and dramatizations. One sees this clearly in the claims of Anthony West and Isaac Deutscher that in his excoriating memoir of his school days at St. Cyprians, "Such, Such Were the Joys," Orwell had projected his hostility at his treatment there onto the larger world, understood totalitarianism only as a bad boys' school metastasized. The simplemindedness of this view-"appalling armchair psychology," Lynskey calls it-tells much more about Orwell's critics than Orwell. If anything, he reads totalitarianism back into his school days, as I've argued, not his school experiences forward into totalitarianism: Big Brother is not Bingo (the headmaster's sadistic wife) writ large, but she is Big Brother miniaturized. But his candor in assessing the Left, rather enjoying noting the warts, has led, of course, to a sustained chorus of criticism from that quarter: Orwell was not, is not universally beloved. But perhaps the last word might be left to Frederick Warburg, his publisher. Orwell wrote him asking for one change in Animal Farm : he wanted the text to reflect that Napoleon, the Stalin pig, was not a coward (as Stalin had not fled Moscow at the German advance) "I just thought the alteration would be fair to J. S.," he wrote. J. S. may have been a murderous tyrant, but that was no reason to call him a coward. "To me this single sentence throws as much light on Orwell's character as anything I know," said Warburg.
If the Part One of The Ministry funneled a great mass of disparate information to its specific concentration in one book, Part Two moves in an opposite direction, from that specific book to the endless ramifications of its influence. There is, of course, no limit to this-it is on-going-except for the author's vision and patience (and his publishers). Lenskey chooses to proceed pretty much decade by decade to demonstrate the ways, some surprising, in which Nineteen Eighty-Four came to figure as a major socio-political force: how Big Brother became ubiquitous and "Orwellian" an all too familiar adjective. He begins, in his first chapter, with an account of how in December 1954 a BBC adaptation stunned a record audience and made the book an overnight best seller. Discussion of it, as we now say, went viral and the controversies surrounding it have never ceased. All the information in just that one chapter proves far too complex even to try to summarize here, but in the ensuing Orwell Wars-which side could claim the body, Right or Left?-the question became: What would Orwell think? Mary McCarthy foregrounded this question when she suggested, in a piece in The New York Review of Books, that Orwell, so definitely anti-Communist, would probably have sided with the United States in the Vietnam war. A different kind of war ensued, of words, although Lynskey makes little of this specific flash point: for a definitive treatment of the vitriolic early days of the Orwell Wars the place to go is still John Rodden's The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of 'St. George' Orwell . In a more recent book, Why Orwell Matters, Christopher Hitchens wants to settle the matter of Orwell's Left v. Right loyalty by imagining him standing arm in arm between William Buckley and Henry Kissinger. Grotesque, right? But now imagine him similarly situated between Trump and Mitch McConnell. Lynskey quotes in this regard a journalist who, in reference to a different McCarthy-Joe-wrote, "I am a great admirer of Orwell, but we have to accept the idea that he did take a McCarthyite position toward the end of his life." And responds, "McCarthyite ? No, we don't have to accept that at all." So many people of such different stripe have suggested that Orwell, alive again, would have agreed with them that it's probably best to believe only someone who claims they totally disagree .
Chapter 11 proves, for me, the oddest and least interesting in the book, beginning with the various ways various rock groups have appropriated and modified motifs from Nineteen Eighty-Four -I know little and care less about any rock group other than the Beatles, who aren't mentioned-and concluding with the cockamamie connivance of a sordid John Birch-like group of reactionaries planning a coup against the Labour government, presumably Orwell inspired, demonstrating that British politics has its own paranoid strain. It did pique my interest that Oswald Mosely reappeared to speak on their behalf, confirming the adage that the bad die old.
"Orwellmania," the title of the next chapter, announces that we have reached the 80s, that decade that came to seem almost hysterical in its focus on Nineteen Eighty-Four. It included Michael Radford's successful film version, with Richard Burton coming out of retirement to play O'Brien and admitting, quotes Lynskey, "This is really frightening, because I'm seriously beginning to believe that what I'm saying is correct": fascinating testimony to the power of that inquisition scene. Core of that chapter, however, concerns the many fundamental misreadings of this most famous of dystopias: probably no book has ever had more wrong things said about it, except, possibly, the Bible. Lynskey briefly dispatches the argument about Nineteen Eighty-Four as prophecy, particularly technological prophecy, by noting that, unlike We or Brave New World , the telescreens excepted, there's almost nothing about technology in the book, and, in any case, what's there is not prediction but warning-or, to use Margaret Atwood's good word "antiprediction." He also notes a certain kind of commentary, beginning in Russia, but soon finding it radical-left Anglo-Saxon adherents, that argued that Orwell's critique really applied to Western capitalism not Soviet totalitarianism. "Izveztiya said that history had turned Oceania into 'a fully realistic picture of contemporary Capitalism-Imperialism.'" This criticism is, for the most part, shallow and fatuous, and Lynskey counters it neatly. "By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ."
He does not dwell on the outpouring of bilge about the book in and around 1984, so I really should pass on, but I assembled a weighty sottisier of such comment at the time and can't forebear sharing one of the dumbest, a letter from the Fleet Street Corporation reprinted in The New Yorker : "Dear Reader: Remember George Orwell's jolting novel 1984 ? His vision of every home wired into a distant central computer with its large information banks seemed a science fiction fantasy? Well, look up. Orwell's future is almost here, and we'll all be better for it." What became depressingly clear is that there was no felt need to have read the book before invoking or opining on it.
The last chapter of The Ministry of Truth brings us up to the, more or less, present, although, if the epic begins in medias res, a book like this has to end there: the story is not over. And Lynskey tries to cover so much here-movies, tv shows and ads, plays, songs, other dystopias, technological inventions, all derived from, related to, or reacting against Nineteen-Eighty-Four -that the style becomes shotgun and the effect dizzying. But he comes by the end to the matter that concerned Orwell most, that figures most crucially in the book, and does turn it, unfortunately from preventive to prophesy-the fate of truth. At least since his experience in the Spanish civil war in 1936, Orwell had begun to suspect that the very idea of objective truth was becoming imperiled, replaced by a corrosive ideological relativism. As he noted in 1942, "the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world." Or in 1944: Intelligent people "seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, of disregarding plain facts.. or swallowing baseless rumours and looking on indifferently while history is falsified." This abandonment, at least in practice, of the belief in fact-based and knowable truth, obsessed him, and he raised it to a theoretical level in Nineteen Eighty-Four as a weapon with which to crush Winston Smith. O'Brien, in brief: there is no external reality; reality exists only in the human mind; the Party controls the human mind. "Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth."
When Kellyanne Conway, Trump's Minimus (Minimus is the propaganda spouting pig in Animal FarmI ) early in his accession adduced "alternative facts" to counter what we had assumed to be the real ones, alert and Orwell-savvy readers realized that O'Brien had come to Washington. Not that lies, heaven knows, were anything new in Washington, but the new modus operandi held that there was no truth to lie about: ours, in fact, was the post factual world. To allude for a moment to postmodern critical theory, one of its proponents declared that there could be no such thing as an unreliable narrator in fiction (a modernist staple) because there could never be a reliable narrator. Or another literary analog: the difference between the evil of two of Shakespeare's villains, Macbeth and King Lear 's Edmund: Macbeth knows what he is doing is evil, but does it anyway; Edmund dismisses the very idea of good and evil. Hamlet's postmodern-O'Brien gloss signifies here: "Naught there is that's good or bad but thinking makes it so."
This is an epistemology perfect for tyrants, autocrats, roboscammers, and Trumpublicans-a truth that seems to have eluded the legions of postmodern theorists who believe that reality is a social construct. As Orwell wrote in 1942: "If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened'-well, it never happened. If he says two and two are five-well, two and two are five." In this grim, minatory way Orwell may prove to be a prophet after all, malgre lui. Lynskey says less about this epistemological crisis than I wished he had, particularly in a book the title of which plays ironically on the idea of truth. David Dwan's long chapter on truth, in his contemporaneous book on Orwell, is much more probing and nuanced (although its dense, convoluted style reminds me of why I switched my major from philosophy as an undergraduate). But not to end on a negative note, about a book I like so much, I'll echo Lynskey's conclusion, quoting Orwell's own words on the purpose of Nineteen Eighty-Four : "The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don't let it happen. It depends on you ."
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Beauchamp, Gorman. "Dorian Lynskey: The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984." Society, vol. 57, no. 3, June 2020, pp. 362+. Gale General OneFile, dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12115-020-00493-4. Accessed 29 Apr. 2025.
Dorian Lynskey
THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH
A biography of George Orwell's '1984'
347pp. Picador. 16.99[pounds sterling].
978 1 5098 9073 6
Rose Macaulay
WHAT NOT
A prophetic comedy
197pp. Handheld. Paperback, 12.99[pounds sterling].
978 1 912766 03 1
When we think of visions of the future, we still think first of Brave New World (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). These are the books which, as Dorian Lynskey suggests in The Ministry of Truth: A biography of George Orwell's "1984", we are likely to have read when young, and, in his words, they have often been regarded as "mutually exclusive dystopias". The accuracy and plausibility of Huxley and Orwell's predictions, or warnings, are still warmly disputed, as are their degrees of pessimism. Were either to come to pass, in which would we prefer to live: in a scientifically controlled, rigidly stratified and apparently hedonistic world, where sex has been pleasurably freed from the pains and uncertainties of reproduction, where soma cures all ailments and anxieties? Or in a totalitarian state of fear, cruelty, perpetual warfare, need and want, where children betray their own parents, and we can't even get hold of a razor blade or a piece of chocolate? As Lynskey succinctly puts it, "Pleasure or punishment? Sex or death? A hit of soma or a boot in the face?" The answer would seem to be obvious, but of course it isn't. And the dystopian visions are not as contradictory as they appear at first reading. We have inherited elements of both.
Huxley was fascinated by the promises of science and technology, Orwell less so. Huxley saw the dangers of progress but his satirical take on the future, although written during the Great Depression, looked ahead to the possibility of a world of instant gratification and immense affluence, and has a kind of irreverent chirpiness nicely caught by the nursery rhymes of the future, which I found very funny when I was a teenager:
Streptocock Gee to Banbury-T
To see a fine bathroom and W. C.
Rose Macaulay's novel What Not: A prophetic comedy, first published in 1918 and now republished by Handheld Press, has none of Huxley's high-spirited inventiveness. It is a more sombre work, with a sense of end-of-war fatigue that has more in common with the mood of Orwell. Sarah Lonsdale, in her interesting introduction, makes claims for it as a precursor of and probable influence on Brave New World, and it does indeed foreshadow some of Huxley's speculations. Macaulay and Huxley knew each other and frequented the same London salon, so it is certainly possible that they exchanged thoughts on eugenics, a subject that had been in the air for decades, ever since the term was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton. There was much discussion at that time of the possibility that a second world war might be avoided by genetic engineering, the first having been caused by the catastrophic stupidity of "unteachable dullards"--that's a phrase from H. G. Wells, but could well have come from Macaulay. In her novel, which she says is set "After the Great War (but I do not say how long after)", a Ministry of Brains has been set up to improve mental capacity through a Mental Progress Act and a Mind Training Act, and marriages are regulated by law and controlled by financial incentives and penalties, including, in extreme cases, imprisonment.
Everyone held a Ministry of Brains form, showing
his or her mental category ... If you were
classified A, your brains were certified to be of
the highest order, and you were recommended to
take a B2 or B3 partner . To ally yourself with
another A or B1 was regarded as wasteful ... If
you were classed C1, C2 or C3 your babies
would receive no encouragement . if you were
below C3 (i.e. uncertificated) they [your babies]
were fined still more heavily.
In practice, of course, this leads to babies abandoned in ditches and on the doorsteps of vicars.
Moreover, you were uncertified for marriage if, though registered A, "you had actual deficiency in your near family". On this last point the slender plot turns, for the gifted and charismatic Minister, Nicholas Chester, although A in intellect, is uncertified for breeding because he has a "mentally deficient" twin sister, harmless and capable of crochet work, but "devoid of thought". He falls in love with and illicitly marries a vivacious and independent civil servant called Kitty Grammont, and the story ends in "the debris of ruined careers, ruined principles, ruined Ministries, ruined ideals."
As fiction, What Not is disappointing, for the characters are sketchily drawn, and Macaulay's satiric intentions and ethical positions are unclear: the same is true of her next novel, Potterism: A tragi-farcical tract (1921), which broadly takes on the power of propaganda and the Northcliffe/Beaverbrook press. But both are full of interesting sociological and historical observations, about the status of women newly enrolled in government employment by the war machine (Macaulay herself had worked in the Ministry of Information, as had Wells and Arnold Bennett) and about minor points of etiquette, such as whether "you can suitably go to church with a dog in your muff".
The realistically portrayed old world of villages and gentry and churchgoing to which Macaulay's family had belonged collides uncomfortably with the new world of genetics. And genetic engineering is the dark side of Brave New World, where motherhood has become a dirty word. Both Bernard Shaw and Wells knew their Darwin and their Galton, and both created many evolutionary fantasies: in 1903, albeit in the words of the incurably talkative revolutionary John Tanner, Shaw in Man and Superman had stated that "The only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man: in other terms, of human evolution. We must eliminate the Yahoo or his vote will wreck the commonwealth". As he points out, selective breeding had long been practised by royal dynasties: witness the striking and not wholly desirable results in the families of the Romanovs and the Habsburgs. Bertrand Russell in Marriage and Morals (1929) supported sterilization of the mentally unfit (although he was firmly opposed to any form of "racial eugenics"): "Feeble-minded women, as everyone knows, are apt to have enormous numbers of illegitimate children, all, as a rule, wholly worthless to the community". That "as a rule" is a bit rich, coming from a philosopher. Russell is also said to have suggested that the state issue colour-coded "procreation tickets".
This area remains an ethical minefield, where hypocrisy and good intentions and scientific ambition are at war. Reproductive technology will continue to create such dilemmas. Cloning, screening for terminal diseases, the termination of physically viable babies, "saviour siblings", three-parent-babies, cyronics and xenotransplantation are but the beginning. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) goes effortlessly to the heart of the dilemma of mortality, exploring the shadowland of what it is to be human, in a world beyond the world of body parts. So what if the more brutal yet simpler landscape of Nineteen Eighty-four, with its stubbornly surviving proles and songbirds, would be better after all?
Dorian Lynskey's book amounts to a comprehensive survey of the history of utopia and dystopia, centring on Orwell's immensely influential novel, and it is full of connections that make the reader's mind spin off in all directions and search the bookshelves and the internet for Wells, Huxley, Arthur Koestler, Ray Bradbury, James Hilton, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Ayn Rand, Margaret Atwood, and, to me surprisingly, David Bowie. The question of who influenced whom becomes a subject in itself, with Orwell alleging, in 1946, that Huxley must have read Zamyatin's novel We (1920-21), which was long banned in the Soviet Union but much read in the West, although "Huxley consistently denied having read it and Zamyatin believed him, saying that the resemblance 'proves that these ideas are in the stormy air we breathe'". Rand also insisted that she had not read We, although her novella Anthem (1938) contains some startling similarities, including the gleaming uniform city and the compulsory happiness and the tension between the individual "I" and the collective "We". She in turn suggested, Lynskey tells us, that "while declining to acknowledge We ... Orwell had plagiarised her, downplaying the horrors of the collectivist state in a 1953 reprint lest she 'give readers the impression that Anthem is merely another sordid story of the order of Orwell's 1984 (which, incidentally, was written many years after Anthem had been published in England)'". Lynskey plausibly suggests that dystopian ideas are not the work of individual geniuses, but are more like "folk songs, forever mutating as they pass between individuals, and between political contexts".
Be that as it may, there is no denying the central importance of Orwell's version of this "folk song", the context of which Lynskey discusses in detail, weighing up evidence from witnesses who believed (usually for personal reasons) that its horrors were most directly inspired by Orwell's unhappy school days, by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, by the hardships of the Second World War, by the time he spent at Broadcasting House (the Ministry of Truth) writing propaganda for the BBC, or by his own deteriorating health. All these factors contributed, but the final product transcends them all, and the account of Orwell's physical struggles to finish the work before his death is moving. We do not know how much those efforts precipitated his death: ironically, he proved allergic to the new anti-TB wonder drug, streptomycin, which might have saved him.
There are several biographies of Orwell, and innumerable commentaries on his work, as well as the magnificent twenty-volume Complete Works, edited by Peter Davison, to which Lynskey pays handsome tribute, but there is always something new to think or say about him. And in the age of Trump, some Orwellian concepts have taken on a new meaning. The ugliness and duplicity of Newspeak has triumphed. We live in a "post-truth" age of fake news and alternative facts, undreamed of by the propaganda machine of Beaverbrook and Potterism: a world of groupthink and filter bubbles and confirmation bias, of the "weaponization" of ideas, of gaslighting, and of the Two Minutes Hate of the anti-Clinton chant, "Lock Her Up". Nineteen Eighty-four mutates to explain our changing condition.
Lynskey and others have argued that Orwell, unlike Huxley and Wells, was not really interested in technological forecasts, but there is one aspect of prediction in which he now appears to have had more foresight than we allowed him. For all his scientific training, Wells's time machine is a hilariously quaint old-fashioned object, a plot device making no pretence of plausibility, made of ivory and "some transparent crystalline substance". Orwell's two-way telescreens, in contrast--a late addition to the text, we are told--used to be criticized as being technologically improbable, not to say impossible. When he was writing, television was in its infancy, and there were very few primitive sets in the country--in 1948 there were only 50,000 TV licences in a country of 50 million--but come the twenty-first century, the nightmare of surveillance (surreptitious rather than overt) in one's own home has become a reality. Edward Snowden revealed that smart TV sets could spy on us, and so, we are told, can our refrigerators and our electricity meters. Beware of gadgets, for we know not what they know. We have entered the world of AI and the algorithm, where the compulsive capitalist consumerism of Brave New World unites in a sinister embrace with the potential of the global totalitarian state. Every time we switch on our smartphones or our computers, we are exposing ourselves to Big Brother. He may want only to sell us more and more motorcars and fizzy drinks and chocolate and dietary products (soma for every taste) but he is watching our every move. It's a new version of totalitarianism, inducing a new variant of paranoia.
Lynskey traces the evolution of Orwell's political thought as manifested in his journalism, particularly in his many articles for Tribune, points to his blind spots (on feminism and homophobia), and describes his habit of "unpacking the sinister implications of any new development". Orwell worried that the new, much-needed housing estates would cause an erosion of privacy, and described "holiday camps such as Butlin's as if they were police states, offering the kind of enforced recreation and regimented exercises that plague Winston in Airstrip One". Orwell, unhappy child of the prep school and public school system, valued privacy, and Winston values the right to think his own thoughts inside his own head, beyond the reach of the Thought Police. What makes Nineteen Eighty-four a great novel (in Lynskey's words, "a sophisticated work of fiction") rather than a tract or a satire, is its sense of Winston Smith and Julia as real and rounded human beings, suffering and struggling in a real and recognizable world. We care about what happens to them far more than we care about Bernard Marx and the Savage in Brave New World. We care more about them than we care about the prototypes of Candide and Lemuel Gulliver. We can see ourselves in them, can ask ourselves how long we would be able to resist torture and temptation. They timelessly address the human condition, in all its ambiguity and uncertainty.
Nevertheless, we can't help treating Orwell as some kind of prophet, and wondering what he would have had to say about Brexit or the rise of religious fundamentalism. A third world war and the Cold War were real threats in his time, however, and the American political theorist and ex-Marxist James Burnham was already declaring that America should make a pre-emptive strike before the Russians could develop their own atom bomb. Orwell thought Burnham's vision of "a huge secret army of fanatical warriors" was a hyperbolic fantasy (New Leader, March 9, 1947), and his answer to virulent anti-communism was to propose a third way, a socialist United States of Europe: "If one could somewhere present the spectacle of economic security without concentration camps, the pretext for the Russian dictatorship would disappear and Communism would lose much of its appeal". He had worried that the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, echoing the Nuremberg rallies, would appeal to our baser love of cruel spectacle, a theme which he was to develop in Nineteen Eighty-four. And he had warned us on January 12, 1945 in Tribune, that "if war criminals were herded into Wembley Stadium to be eaten by lions or trampled by elephants ... there would be a packed house". (This is a vision similar to that projected by Angus Wilson in his dystopian The Old Men at the Zoo, published in 1961, but set in 1970-73, where the uni-European party strangely foreshadows the recent excesses of the populist right.) Orwell also feared that the partition of Germany would make the healing of Europe more difficult, and make the path to his third way of a united Europe less viable. These issues--the future of Europe, the relationship between the United States and Russia, between capitalism and Marxism are with us still.
Extremely well informed, hard-working and literally battle-scarred, Orwell was uniquely placed by history to speak for us, and he still has much to say. He was writing for the future, for us. As Lynskey concludes, Orwell was writing for his own time, but also, like Winston, "for the future, for the unborn". One of his last messages to his publisher, Fredric Warburg, was "Don't let it happen, it depends on you". This thought-provoking book explores the many possibilities of what he may have meant by "it".
Caption: 1984 at the Playhouse Theatre, London, directed by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan
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Drabble, Margaret. "Ministry of brains: Dystopian prophets of the twentieth century." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6062, 7 June 2019, pp. 26+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A631894831/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4b5a3ffa. Accessed 29 Apr. 2025.
Lynskey, Dorian THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 6, 4 ISBN: 978-0-385-54405-4
The life and afterlife of the celebrated--and seemingly evergreen--novel.
Music, film, and politics writer Lynskey (33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day, 2011) reminds us that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has been the book "we turn to when truth is mutilated, language is distorted, power is abused, and we want to know how bad things can get." The "fact that the novel speaks to us so loudly and clearly in 2019," he writes, is a "terrible indictment of politicians and citizens alike." The author tells his vibrant, spirited story of a man and his book in two parts. He first recounts how Orwell came to write the novel and describes in detail the world he inhabited. In the second section, he follows the "political and cultural life" of Nineteen Eighty-Four, originally titled The Last Man in Europe, from "Orwell's death to the present day." Lynskey does a superb job analyzing the young Orwell's political beliefs, his hatred for fascism, and his "vision of common-sense radicalism." He had a special admiration for Charles Dickens, whom he described as "generouslyangry." Lynskey traces Orwell's early influences, from H.G. Wells, who "loomed over Orwell's childhood like a planet," to Jack London and Yevgeny Zamyatin's "anti-utopian novel We." Arthur Koestler's "masterpiece," Darkness at Noon, provided Orwell with Nineteen Eighty-Four's "mental landscape." Though never a wealthy man, Orwell found success with Animal Farm, which provided him with the funds to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he edited continuously for three years while he was quite ill. It published in June 1949; Orwell died 227 days later. Lynskey next traces the novel's impact, from the Cold War era to today, on politics and other writers; film and play versions; contemporary music and TV shows; and the "most celebrated television commercial" of the 1980s, Apple's Macintosh computer launch.
As Lynskey somberly concludes in this fascinating literary history, Nineteen Eighty-Four's 70th anniversary "falls at a dark time for liberal democracy."
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"Lynskey, Dorian: THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A582144041/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f956eab9. Accessed 29 Apr. 2025.
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has been embraced by both the right and the left, viewed as a condemnation of totalitarianism and capitalism, and described as bleakly hopeless and implicitly hopeful. This powerful, infinitely provoking dystopian tale was first published on June 8, 1949, after being completed in a frenzy by the gravely ill author. Critic Lynskey (33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, 2011), marks the 70th anniversary of this indelible work with an engrossing, many-branched biography of the book and its valiant creator.
In agile, syncopated prose, Lynskey briskly elucidates Orwell's life, from his birth as Eric Arthur Blair in British India in 1903 to his childhood in England, stint in the police force in British-ruled Burma, combat in the Spanish Civil War, and adventures as a daring and controversial journalist and columnist. Lynskey emphasizes the experiences that seeded Orwell's mission to protest tyranny, "organized lying," and hypocrisy; his equating of truth with freedom; and his commitment to exposing the horrors of totalitarianism. During the London Blitz, Orwell rescued the manuscript for Animal Farm (1945) from the rubble of his bombed flat and worked for the BBC, while his wife, Eileen, reported to the Ministry of Information's censorship department, a job that inspired that of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Smith serves in the forbidding Ministry of Truth, methodically revising history so that it conforms to the government's latest lies by carefully rewriting published newspaper articles and pitching the originals into "memory holes" for incineration.
Running parallel to his vivid account of Orwell's struggles as a writer of conscience is Lynskey's illuminating history of Utopian and dystopian literature, with analysis of works that inspired Orwell, particularly books by H. G. Wells and We (1921) by the courageous dissident Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. Lynskey also parses the intriguing symbiosis between the "awkward literary twins" Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). But his primary focus is on elucidating how Nineteen Eighty-Four expresses Orwell's deepest concerns about humanity and civilization, his belief in "accuracy as a moral virtue," and his growing concern over how dictators--and he witnessed the worst of them--revise and spin history to both rile up and oppress the public.
Orwell astutely dramatizes how the orchestrated, amplified, and intrusive lies of totalitarian regimes endanger "the very concept of objective truth" and "a consensus reality," and he shares his alarm over "the erosion and corruption of memory." Today's perpetual bombardment of lies from the Trump White House, the daily struggle over "fake news," and the constant surge of toxic disinformation throughout social media are all intrinsically Orwellian.
Lynskey maps the vast influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four in discussions of its stage and screen adaptations, its language, from doublethink to Newspeak, thoughtcrime, unperson, and Big Brother, and the many novels it inspired, including Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952); Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953); and^4 Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess (1962). Margaret Atwood started writing The Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin in 1984, and described her novel as "speculative fiction of the George Orwell variety." Other significant literary progeny include Super Sad True Love Story (2010), by Gary Shteyngart; 1Q84 (2015), by Haruki Murakami; The Circle (2013), by Dave Eggers; The Subprimes (2015), by Karl Taro Greenfeld; Future Home of the Living God (2017), by Louise Erdrich; and Hazards of Time Travel (2018), by Joyce Carol Oates.
To further enhance the 70th-anniversary celebration of Orwell's cautionary tale, David R. Godine is reissuing The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, a landmark four-volume set first published in 1968 and long out of print.
Orwell has much to tell us in this time of escalating political conflicts, as evident in Nineteen Eighty-Fours return to the best-seller lists as we grapple with the implications of identity theft, ever-more intrusive surveillance, "post-truth politics," and "alternative facts." Lynskey writes, "Nineteen Eighty-Four is most of all a defense of truth." It is also a call to speak out, because, as Orwell warned, "totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "1984 Turns 70: As 1984 turns 70, a biography of George Orwell's dystopian novel tracks its influence and relevancy." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 19-20, 1 June 2019, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A593431386/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4d283e08. Accessed 29 Apr. 2025.
THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH The Biography of George Orwell's ''1984'' By Dorian Lynskey
Shortly after the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump and his counselor's invocation of ''alternative facts,'' anxious readers, bracing themselves for the worst, propelled George Orwell's ''1984'' back to the top of the best-seller lists. Published in 1949, under the shadow of Hitler and Stalin, the novel projects a nightmare vision of a future in which truth has been eclipsed. Its inventive vocabulary of state power and deception -- Big Brother, Hate Week, Newspeak, doublethink, the Thought Police -- clearly resonated with the despair of present-day Americans. As does the very term ''Orwellian,'' used increasingly to describe any number of troubling developments: from Trump's habitual lying to the toxic politicization of the news media; from the expansion of campus speech codes to Silicon Valley's hijacking of our data and attention (the citizens of ''1984'' are monitored continuously by ''telescreens'').
Orwell's novel is the subject of Dorian Lynskey's wide-ranging and sharply written new study, ''The Ministry of Truth.'' Lynskey, a British journalist and music critic, believes that ''1984'' -- one of the 20th century's most examined artifacts -- is actually ''more known about than truly known'' and sets out to reground it in Orwell's personal and literary development. This is just as well, since Orwell, ever suspicious of armchair intellectualism, made a practice of writing directly from experience, to the point of plunging himself into many of the crises of his day.
In 1936, he joined a coalition of left-wing forces opposing Franco in Spain. Intending to fight fascism, Orwell discovered its diabolical twin, Soviet communism, and became, in Lynskey's words, acutely aware of how ''political expediency corrupts moral integrity, language and truth itself.'' He left Spain a committed anti-communist -- and lifelong adversary of Stalin's defenders -- and spent the World War II years back home in England. In 1946, Orwell moved to the island of Jura, where, at the age of 45, he completed ''1984'' shortly before succumbing to tuberculosis.
Lynskey focuses much of his book on the origins and the afterlife of ''1984.'' He devotes several early chapters to the rise of utopian and dystopian fiction, told through compressed portraits of figures like H. G. Wells (who ''loomed over Orwell's childhood like a planet'') and Yevgeny Zamyatin, the author of ''We'' -- a sort of precursor to ''1984.'' And he documents the various political and cultural responses to the novel, which was a sensation from its first publication.
''1984'' has inspired writers, artists and other creative types, from Margaret Atwood to David Bowie to Steve Jobs, whose commercial introducing Apple's Macintosh computer famously paid homage to the novel. Its political fate, however, has been somewhat cloudier. What Orwell observed of Dickens, that he is ''one of those writers who are well worth stealing,'' has proved no less true of Orwell himself. Socialists, libertarians, liberals and conservatives alike have vied to remake him in their own image and claim his authority. Orwell's contested legacy may be rooted partly in his self-divisions. He was a socialist intellectual who hated socialists and intellectuals; an alienated soul who ''lionized the common man,'' as Lynskey puts it. Still, the filial (and often proprietary) attachment that Orwell's work tends to evoke in his admirers points to something else: the morally urgent yet highly companionable nature of his writing, which can leave one with the feeling of having been directly addressed by a mind worthy of emulation.
Lynskey largely refrains from participating in the quarrel over Orwell's and his novel's true teachings and rightful heirs. If anything, ''The Ministry of Truth'' can seem too remote at times from its subject matter. For a ''biography'' of ''1984,'' it contains surprisingly little sustained discussion of the work itself, mostly referring to it in brief, though insightful, asides that are dispersed throughout. There could have been more in-depth analysis of the dynamics of power in Orwell's totalitarian state, whose leaders, we are told, are the first to have dispensed with even the pretense of serving humanity. (They pursue power as an end in itself, not as a means to some alleged ideological goal, and exercise it by inflicting pain on others.)
Nor does Lynskey illuminate the literary or intellectual qualities that distinguish Orwell's novel from its many predecessors and descendants in the dystopian genre. In short, while we learn a great deal about the evolution and influence of ''1984'' as a cultural phenomenon, we sometimes lose sight, in the thick of Lynskey's historicizing, of the novel's intrinsic virtues -- of what makes it distinctive and accounts for its terror and fascination in the first place.
Lynskey is surely right, however, to note that the meaning of Orwell's novel has shifted over the decades along with the preoccupations of its readers; and that in our low, dishonest moment, it is ''most of all a defense of truth.'' Reflecting back on the Spanish Civil War and the falsification of its record, Orwell worried that the ''very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.'' Yet he never seems to have resigned himself completely to hopelessness.
Winston Smith, the doomed protagonist of ''1984,'' inhabits a world in which individuality has been made almost obsolete, history is daily rewritten and reality is fabricated according to the whims of the state. Winston attempts, despairingly and bravely, to rediscover what life was like before the rise of Big Brother. He is shocked that his lover, Julia, is indifferent to the state's assault on truth -- the unreality of the present is all she has known and all she believes ever was or will be. Her complacency is the counterpart to Winston's energizing despair. In this way, ''1984'' elevates despair into a sort of necessary condition of truth-seeking. It is here if nowhere else, Orwell suggests, that hope for humanity may lie.
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THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH The Biography of George Orwell's ''1984'' By Dorian Lynskey 355 pp. Doubleday. $28.95.
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PHOTO: A poster for the 1956 movie version of ''1984.''
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Mendes, Lev. "Big Little Lies." The New York Times Book Review, 21 July 2019, p. 21(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A593975083/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5e0f27a6. Accessed 29 Apr. 2025.
Lynskey, Dorian EVERYTHING MUST GO Pantheon (NonFiction None) $32.00 1, 28 ISBN: 9780593317099
The end is just around the corner--and has been for thousands of years.
It was Churchill who intoned that the future will be just one damn thing after another. That view informs this entertaining journey through the many theories of imminent Armageddon. Lynskey, a journalist and podcaster, has collected a huge amount of material, ranging from biblical prophecies to sci-fi movies. Many, of course, have believed that the end of the world is nigh, with perhaps a chosen few surviving. With dry wit, Lynskey connects these apocalypse fantasies to modern culture and human nature. The past half-century has seen a procession of worrying forecasts about overpopulation: resource depletion, plagues, nuclear war, the Y2K bug, and the Mayan calendar. Often it was the brightest experts who made the predictions--but made no apologies when they turned out to be laughably wrong. Hollywood has long loved disaster movies, throwing in aliens, zombies, and other post-collapse scenarios. The end of the Cold War changed the portentous picture, but chronic worriers soon found other causes, with Covid-19 and climate change setting off new rounds of dread. But this raises the question: Since the experts have been wrong so many times, should we believe them now? Lynskey is not sure why many feel the need to see only a dismal future, but catastrophic thinking can easily become a fashion. "The doomers," he writes, "have overdosed on dread." The point, the author says, is to find a place between empty despair and mindless optimism.
Exploring a host of apocalypse fantasies with dry wit.
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"Lynskey, Dorian: EVERYTHING MUST GO." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817945780/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8bcf1e2c. Accessed 29 Apr. 2025.
Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World. By Dorian Lynskey. Jan. 2025. 512p. Pantheon, $32 (9780593317099); e-book, $14.99 (9780593317105). 236.9.
For many people, the 2000s have felt like one crisis after another. Wars, a pandemic, extreme weather, terrorism, and political strife have made the early twenty-first century seem like the end times. But, in this exploration of the cultural phenomenon of apocalypse, Lynskey shows that modern humans are not the first to be convinced that they were witnessing one. Drawing from historical sources, fiction, and film, the author examines existential fears ranging from comets and the events in the Book of Revelations to the atomic bomb and artificial intelligence. Lynskey argues that the modern "doomers," who acknowledge a proximity to the end as a way to flex an unearned moral and intellectual seriousness, have accepted the inevitability of human destruction to the point of inaction. Too much fear leads to giving up, which does nothing to help protect the future for those to come. With rich analysis and a remarkable level of research, Everything Must Go allows readers to feel a connection with generations past and offers a new lens through which to view our current moment.
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Chanoux, Laura. "Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 5-6, Nov. 2024, p. 3. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829739651/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=62099cc1. Accessed 29 Apr. 2025.
Byline: Ben Yagoda
In 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock, designed to assess the world's "vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies." Initially set at 11:53 p.m., the minute hand has ventured forward and back over the years. In January 2023, it was placed at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to doomsday ever, and there it stayed in January 2024. It will be reset on Tuesday. Given catastrophic wildfires and other climate-change-fueled disasters, and political instability in regimes around the world, many with nuclear capability, do not be surprised if the clock ticks forward.
We can take a little comfort, perhaps, in the fact that envisioning the end of the world and/or humanity is nothing new. In "Everything Must Go," Dorian Lynskey surveys the impressive number of people who have done this envisioning, often in strikingly similar language. He begins with the biblical Revelation of John of Patmos before moving on to asteroids or comets slamming into us, bad weather never ending (the unrelenting gloom in 1816 led Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and Mary Shelley to apocalyptic thoughts), the nuclear bomb, the population bomb, a Chernobyl-style reactor disaster, a Y2K computer meltdown, pandemics and other diseases, artificial intelligence, global cooling, and now global warming.
Weirdly, the book isn't depressing, partly, I suppose, because these disasters haven't completely wiped us out (yet). The clever and insightful writing of Lynskey, a British cultural historian and podcaster, also helps it to avoid being a downer. In company with such works as Martin Green's "Children of the Sun," Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory" and Daniel Okrent's "The Guarded Gate," his book shows that exciting intellectual history isn't an oxymoron. These works combine sharp writing with capacious research, rigorous thinking, interesting mini-narratives within the larger story and well-drawn character portraits.
"Everything Must Go" is especially strong on the last item. Lynskey artfully profiles well-known figures such as Byron, Shelley, Edward Teller, H.G. Wells, Herman Kahn, Rod Serling, Carl Sagan, Kurt Vonnegut and Stanley Kubrick. But the book shines in its gallery of lesser-known but no less fascinating people: the American writer Philip Wylie; the computer pioneer and coiner of the word "cybernetics," Norbert Wiener ("the archetypal absent-minded boffin"); Nevil Shute, author of the apocalyptic novel "On the Beach" (with "a face like a disappointed bloodhound"); and, most poignantly, the physicist Leo Szilard.
Szilard was an important member of the Manhattan Project but, almost alone, came to regret what came out of it. Lynskey writes, "Of all the men responsible for ushering nuclear achievements into the world, Szilard was to work hardest to undo his achievement, wrestle most publicly with his guilty conscience and develop the keenest understanding of the relationship between science, fiction and politics."
Lynskey, whose previous book "The Ministry of Truth" is a study of the origin and legacy of George Orwell's "1984," is fascinated by the interplay of fact and fiction and the striking parallels and resonances that history offers. Thus he shows how Shelley's 1826 novel, "The Last Man," established the tropes that are all over contemporary stories like "The Last of Us" and "The Walking Dead." And how Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964) transformed the nuclear saber-rattling of Herman Kahn and Gen. Curtis LeMay into a satire that has outlived their influence. Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," meanwhile, uncannily foresaw current fears about AI.
Lynskey marshals a great deal of information, but his book moves along engagingly, elevated by his insights and descriptions. For instance, on Douglas Rain, who voiced the artificially intelligent HAL in "2001," Lynskey writes: "It is a remarkable performance: at first bland, fussy and smug; then sinister and sly; and finally melancholy and pleading. Kubrick often pitted ruthless, machinelike individuals against anguished humanists, but in 2001 the computer is needy and verbose while the astronauts are taciturn and blank."
And then there is this nice use of forensic literary criticism: The British writer J.G. Ballard "made his fictional home in deserted tower blocks, wrecked automobiles, rusting machines, derelict houses, silent beaches and ghost ships. According to an online concordance to Ballard's work, the word empty appears 979 times and abandoned 475. He presented ruins as the natural state of things, as if the period when these locations had been habitable were just a fleeting, inconsequential aberration."
As the book comes to an end, Lynskey faces a problem. He has just recounted two millennia of apocalyptic predictions, many issued with certainty, none of which, as noted, have come to pass. Yet he believes (as do I) that the current threat of climate change is different. The challenge, then, is to make this case - that climate change, if not reversed, will be the thing that fully does us in - and not to appear as a Boy Who Cried Wolf or Chicken Little. That's especially hard because of the nature of the problem: Even as the planet shows increased signs of distress and emergency, few more vivid than the ongoing wildfires in California, many people's daily lives have proceeded much as usual.
Not even fiction writers and moviemakers, historically so quick to imagine diverse doomsdays, have been much help. "Compared to nuclear war," Lynskey writes, "the climate emergency deprives popular storytellers of their usual tool kit. How does one craft a tight plot out of a crisis that unfolds over decades rather than months or days?" What's more, "our collective complicity in a carbon-fuelled society is a buzzkill, morally and dramatically."
In the end, Lynskey doesn't have the magic words to pull the world out of its cognitive dissonance. But, to be fair, who among us does?
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Ben Yagoda's books include "About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made" and "Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English." His podcast is "The Lives They're Living."
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Everything Must Go
The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
By Dorian Lynskey.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Washington Post
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Yagoda, Ben. "It may feel like the end of the world, but that's nothing new." Washington Post, 24 Jan. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A824737603/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=99d3a76b. Accessed 29 Apr. 2025.
A new book by the British cultural journalist Dorian Lynskey chronicles our centuries-old obsession with doomsday scenarios.
EVERYTHING MUST GO: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, by Dorian Lynskey
When it comes to make-believe disasters, our appetite is endless; yet we're loath to anticipate real-world disasters until it is too late.
It's a discrepancy that Dorian Lynskey explores in ''Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World,'' which happened to land on my desk as wildfires were tearing through Los Angeles. Lynskey, whose previous book was a ''biography'' of George Orwell's novel ''1984,'' charts the doomsday scenarios that have enthralled and terrified people through the centuries. But our current era also offers us an unrelenting stream of catastrophe from around the world; we can no longer find respite from actual bad news. ''What is notable now is that apocalyptic angst has become a constant,'' Lynskey writes. ''All flow and no ebb.''
Lynskey, a British cultural journalist, has the kind of omnivorous sensibility essential for a project like this. He has immersed himself in pulpy sci-fi, gloomy poetry, the literary criticism of Susan Sontag and the Book of Revelation. He sometimes gets so excited about his cultural stockpile that he can get carried away, letting loose a barrage of examples when a bit more restraint would do; at 500 pages (endnotes included), this is a book that would have lost none of its erudition or energy had it been 25 percent shorter.
But Lynskey also happens to be a terrifically entertaining writer, with a requisite sense of gallows humor. The extremity of his subject provides plenty of absurdity to work with. Reflecting on how a Nobel Prize-winning scientist predicted that ''On the Beach'' (a 1959 film that takes place after a nuclear war) would be ''the movie that saved the world,'' he notes wryly: ''It is amazing what people thought a novel or a movie could achieve.''
This hyperbolic hope springs eternal -- the notion that if only a story were hair-raising enough, a complacent public could be ''traumatized into awareness.'' Such was the case with the atomic bomb, which made for grisly prophecies not only of the sudden carnage of a fiery blast but also of the prolonged suffering of a nuclear winter. In Max Ehrlich's novel ''The Big Eye'' (1949), a scientist lies about a planetary collision ''in order to scare humanity straight.'' Surveying the cultural landscape, Lynskey finds no shortage of ''prophylactic predictions.''
''Everything Must Go'' begins with a short prologue on God and Armageddon before moving swiftly to a more secular age. Lynskey's tour starts in earnest in 1816, after the eruption of a volcano in Southeast Asia resulted in a ''year without a summer'' in Europe. Lord Byron wrote the poem ''Darkness,'' envisioning a sunless Earth that becomes ''a lump of death.'' Compared with the heavenly bliss promised at the end of Revelation, Byron's godless planet was bleak stuff indeed.
The rest of Lynskey's book is organized thematically, chronicling a churning culture that mirrors back to us our proliferating fears. The more we know about the world, the more we know about the myriad threats that might do it in. Lynskey moves smoothly from apocalyptic tales about comets and asteroids to killer robots and infected zombies. Nuclear annihilation remains a possibility, even if it has receded in the popular imagination as other dangers -- pandemics, global warming -- have come to the fore.
''Much of what we call postapocalyptic fiction is more accurately described as post-catastrophic,'' Lynskey writes. ''The world has not ended, but a world has.'' What happens after everything is annihilated doesn't offer much in the way of narrative potential. You need at least a few survivors to keep some dramatic momentum going.
Some stories reflect a ''survivalist mindset,'' with well-armed preppers prevailing in the aftermath of social collapse. Lynskey, citing an anthropologist, calls these types of narratives a ''distinctly American phenomenon.'' Many such stories also contain the suggestion, sometimes explicit, that the old civilization was unbearably corrupt and that its violent collapse was overdue. For anyone who chafes at modern life, the post-collapse world can be blessedly simple in its cruelty. The science fiction author David Brin derided these stories as ''little-boy wish fantasies about running amok in a world without rules.''
On the flip side are those works that remind us of all the comforts and privileges we currently take for granted. ''People often report that exposure to potent images of the end of the world can make the existence of the world as it is seem suddenly miraculous,'' Lynskey writes. He also suggests that stories about the apocalypse make us feel less alone. After all, what they depict is a collective experience, however grim. Lynskey recalls a dream he had about the end of the world that left him with ''an enormous sense of relief that my own death coincided with everyone else's.''
But melodramatic fantasies about the end can also serve as a kind of lurid distraction from some of the more persistent problems at hand. The science fiction novelist Ted Chiang has remarked on how Silicon Valley tech bros seem particularly seduced by outlandish dreams of derring-do: ''The question of how to create friendly A.I. is simply more fun to think about than the problem of industry regulation, just as imagining what you'd do during the zombie apocalypse is more fun than thinking about how to mitigate global warming.''
And sure enough, Lynskey says, most literary fiction about climate change is characterized by ''a terrible impotence.'' The novels of Kim Stanley Robinson, who describes his approach as ''anti-anti-utopian,'' are a notable exception. Lynskey lauds his refusal to resort to the easy binary of irrevocable collapse or glorious triumph. Amid all the plotting pyrotechnics he recounts in this book, it's the small human details that move Lynskey most. As Robinson writes in ''The Ministry for the Future,'' ''We will cope no matter how stupid things get.''
EVERYTHING MUST GO: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World | By Dorian Lynskey | Pantheon | 500 pp. | $32
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction critic at The New York Times.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: An atomic bomb test at the Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1946. The bomb has inspired grisly prophecies, not only of the sudden carnage of a fiery blast but also of the prolonged suffering of a nuclear winter. (PHOTOGRAPH BY Jack Rice/Associated Press FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Szalai, Jennifer. "In Pop Culture, the End of the World Is Always Nigh." The New York Times Book Review, 9 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A826726759/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a0107e29. Accessed 29 Apr. 2025.