Book Details

Title:	1984
Author(s):	George Orwell
Genre:	Science Fiction / Graphic Novel
Copyright:	Copyright © 1949 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Comments:	I read this book the summer after 9th grade.  I discovered that I was going to be in the class of 1984 when someone signed my yearbook "Sr '84".  So I was slow - still am I suppose.  This book reminds me of politics today, although to a lesser degree.  It is amazing how similar "political correctness" is to Newspeak.
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Three superpowers dominate the world.  Eurasia and Eastasia are two and Oceania is the other.  Oceania is always at war with one whilst allied with the other.

Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in Oceania.  Big Brother controls everything in Oceania through the ministries of Peace, Love, Plenty and Truth.  Winston’s job is to revise historical documents so that inadequicies of the Party, the government of Oceania, are not known.  The Party monitors every move with "telescreens", hidden microphones and spies.  The Thought Police help the Party by eliminating all who appear to think or act against the Party.

Winston buys a diary and writes “Down With Big Brother.”  By writing this he has commited "thoughtcrime".  Many of his "crimes" are due to his attempts to remember things from his childhood.  He tries to determine specifics about London before the Revolution, but the Party has removed all records of how life was lived back then.

Winston and another employee of the Ministry of Truth, Julia, have an affair.  This, of course, is forbidden.  They start out having the affair as a rebellion against the Party but it soon starts having emotional strings attached.  Winston and Julia are eventually found out and arrested at their meeting place.

Winston is taken to the Ministry of Love and is tortured by O’Brien, who was a supposed confidant of his and Julia's in their "rebellion".  He reveals himself to be an Inner Party member.  The Party finally breaks and gains control of him.  The last sentence of the book is: “He loved Big Brother.”

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig iron and the overfulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plate commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. but at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste - this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The Ministry of Truth - Minitrue, in Newspeak - was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. The were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided: the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.