Anthony Burgess takes on Orwell with a follow-up that is both more and less successful than the original. He begins the work with an exegesis of 1984 that’s a genuinely interesting read, though his theories on the cyclical nature of history are old hat to anyone who’s read The Wanting Seed. But after staking out his position on Orwell, Burgess proceeds to try his hand at anti-idyllic society. Here he has an edge on his predecessor inasmuch as his political constructs are a little more down-to-earth and a great deal less sentimental. Replacing outright totalitarianism with dysfunctional syndicalism starts out as a good idea. The problem is that in fairly short order things turn … well … silly. Though Burgess’s world is more believable in some respects, it’s also much less impressive. The author brings his usual gift for language to the task, but I can’t help but wish he’d accomplished something a bit more substantial.

DNF. I enjoyed that first half of the book, which had some interesting observations to make about Orwell and his novel 1984. However, I couldn't bring myself finish Burgess' fictional response to 1984. This is set in a hyper-violent version of the UK, now called TUC Land because the trade unions have taken over. Burgess himself admitted that dystopian fiction is really about the time in which it is written and he chose here to focus on fears about the power of the unions, teenage violence, hyper-sexualisation and immigration. Interestingly, he predicted graphic images of lung cancer on cigarette packets (which didn't appear until much later), but otherwise Burgess doesn't seem to have foreseen the impact of technology on our lives. He definitely didn't predict the complete crushing of the Trade Union movement by Thatcher and subsequent Conservative governments, leading to the erosion of workers' rights. I still think Burgess is a provocative and erudite author: it's just not what I'm interested in reading at the moment.

على الرغم من انه الكاتب اعطى العرب اكبر من حجمهم و ظن انهم رح يمسكو المجتمع الاوروبي بهيك وقت .. و على الرغم من نظرهم الي كلها حقد و كره للعرب .. الا انه الكتاب جدا و ممتع و في كتير من الشياء الصح الي صارت اجتماعيا و اقتصاديا بالعالم بشكل عام

After repeatedly swooning over Burgess’ writing, the time has come for me to be deeply disappointed. ‘1985’ is meant as his response to Orwell’s ‘1984’, an alternative perspective of the future if you will.

The book is split into two parts, the first one is a non-fiction piece that analyses the historical context in which ‘1984’ was written and critiques the level of trust in that prediction. I didn’t find it as interesting as I had hoped: Burgess speaks about some elements that I would find any reader could think of, such as how language affects the way of thinking, sex vs. love and what this means for the main characters, and depicting a world that is constantly and forever going through war. It’s nothing that eye-opening. Also, Burgess comes across as quite offensive and even points out aspects he considered poorly constructed or political thoughts that I found really right wing.

The second part is his view of 1985, 10 years into the future at the time of the book being written. It’s just not that different? UK is now Islamic, children are being sexualised and there are bogus procedures, bureaucracy and mechanics, little job security but plenty of monitoring and supervision. We hear of Bev who loses his wife and job while having to provide for his sick daughter, yet he is just really meh. There is no reason to care, pity or gain any interest in him and the whole thing just drags on. Sadly, not even the writing worked for me, it seemed like the story was going in circles and it was far less original than hi other books.

Nope. I’m sad.

It is always interesting to see one good author's take on another. In this case Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed, evaluates and criticizes George Orwell's 1984. After extensive interviews and essays on the nature of Orwell's seminal work, Burgess pens his own short novella, entitled 1985 (to avoid plagiarism, so he says.) Burgess's view of the cacotopian future is much closer to his own vantage point in strike plagued late 70's Britain, than was Orwell's in the immediate post WWII era. Orwell had originally envisioned calling his novel Nineteen Forty Eight such was the perceived similarity between his own environment and that of Winston Smith's, but the publisher persuaded him to set it in the future. Burgess, living through that era as well remembers clearly the chronic shortages of razor blades and soap, the pervasive smell of boiled cabbage, the ubiquitous rubble and the slogans emblazoned on walls and billboards. Burgess even suggests that 1984, rather than a dark forecast of a dystopian future is actually a satirical stab at socialist England in 1948. In his essays, Burgess addresses questions such as these: As a devoted lifelong Socialist, what made Orwell cast INGSOC in such horrific terms? Why does an author and novelist distrust words so much that he would create Newspeak? How does the rise of the Labour Party and the British trade unions foreshadow the real loss of personal freedom that underscored the horror of the totalitarian Big Brother? What is it about revolutions that are inherently progressive? If you loved 1984, read this and find out one man's answers to these and many other questions.

It would be hard to describe how disappointed I was by the author of Clockwork Orange when I heard his actual views on politics and government. First half of the book – the reflections on 1984 and Orwell – is mostly a collection of conservative right-wing half-truths like: state helping the poorest = killing the beauty of charity, workers in unions = state economy destroyed etc. What is saddening the most is the fact that one can actually find some interesting insights about (for example) the post-war British experience and Orwell's place in it. Also the author proves that he is well educated and read. But that doesn't change the fact that most of the book (the story itself including) is just notes-from-the-underground-like rambling of a dissatisfied conservative. The story itself is an anti-utopia, where union strikes lead to deaths of people (Wage increase for the working class? How dare they!) and loss of values leads to chaos. But in reality (in my opinion) it's just an internal dialogue of the author, continuation of the previous parts...

A sloppily-written, half-assed, woefully-conceived agenda piece. Burgess should have been publicly shamed for writing such vomit. And maybe he would have been, had he but lifted his nose out of his typewriter.

Fascinating read. Recommended.

Struggled to get into it and became a chore to finish. Not really sure why - haven't read 1984 so that might be part of it?!

First part of a book is great. His thoughts about "1984" gives you opportunity to remember book details. Second part was pretty boring with some akward and some interesting parts. I don't feel sorry for reading it, but definitely not coming back to it.

I have had a considerable amount of time to read this. (That time was prolonged by a rereading of 1984, as I had read a book a long time ago and couldn't catch most of the references in time for the first few pages to be enjoyable. You have to have read it for most of the book to make sense.) However this review will be kept short and prefaced by the following disclaimer: I like Burgess so there is naturally some bias.

Perks:
1. A response to Orwell that isn't taking him completely in earnest while appreciating his contributions in 1984 to the literary pool of fiction about political thought, freedom and state control, and free speech, education and violence (the latter two which are more intertwined than one would think), socialism and its discontents; he mentions in a particular passage about the decline of productivity which follows on the heels of the lack of inclination to put in effort for something not yours.
2. Dystopian speculative fiction that doesn't embrace the oft touted bland and dull-by-repetition dichotomies of evil men controlling women, evil corporations over innocent consumer, or evil state over free citizen. (Please write something else, or do it differently.)
3. Burgess is attentive to nuances and apparently able to speak a little about everything from Renaissance writers to contemporary British politics (read: when he was alive). Caveats abound, especially where speculation is involved; he talks at length in one chapter about the usefulness/uselessness of speculative fiction as prophecy, and whether accurate 'prophecies' even matter. I love it when he talks discursively and I can read it all day.
4. A few chapters are in the format of a series of 'interviews' with the writer, and both format and writer I find interesting. The book is loosely structured into two sections: the first is a collection of thoughts/essays/'interview', crafted as responses to Orwell's book (hence the title); the second is meant to be a sequel or reworking of Orwell's underpinnings into a completely new story.
5. The interviews had a platonic dialogue quality about them in the question-and-answer format; lots of banter, pointed questions asked, some answers given, perspectives reframed. I suppose the questions were there to anticipate any thoughts/misgivings readers of his answers might have. They didn't anticipate mine, but the answers offer food for thought and will stay with me for a while.
6. The story itself was intriguing, but to speak of it would be to spoil it. The characters weren't terribly interesting but the world-building was, which I suppose is a large part of the point of speculative fiction. The lovable ultraviolent rogue Alex returns in another form: imagine street gangs speaking in Latin and Greek in a world where education is purely technical and utilitarian and speech is simplified to the purely quotidian and communicative, a world where these gangsters listen to history and literature teachers (whose subjects are now obsolete) teach lessons in illegal underground universities.

Hindrances:
1. Too much linguistics in the section on Workers' English. (But this is Burgess and his interests so I will let it slide.)

George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948, in the UK aftermath of World War 2. Thirty years later, in 1978, Anthony Burgess wrote this, his two-part response. Burgess’s Part 1 is a collection of literary and political commentary on Orwell’s novel. Burgess’s Part 2 is an original novella, alternative to Orwell’s novel.

Part 1 – When Burgess details how the real 1984 will not resemble Orwell’s dystopian 1984, he is not criticizing Orwell so much as the popular notion that speculative fiction is prophecy. Of course, those of us who read in the genre know better. But apparently, this is a point which Burgess feels needs to be made, I think not to the 85% working class portion of the population, who he admits do not read his books, but to the educated class, who do. Indeed, a working assumption in his essays is that the reader is familiar with not only Nineteen Eighty-Four, but also Brave New World, We, A Clockwork Orange, and a host of other philosophical/religious/literary works. The irony is that just as real history diverged in the thirty years between the writing of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and of Burgess’ 1985, so again has history diverged in the more than forty years since the writing of Burgess’ 1985. I do recommend reading this Part 1 to understand Nineteen Eighty-Four’s specific references to 1948 UK, which are more than just context. I, being born almost a decade later, in a land far away, did not recognize many of them without Burgess’ help. However, Burgess’ anti-socialist, anti-hippie, anti-feminist, and anti-gay, rantings are also of his own time and place.

Part 2 –
The novella 1985 is Burgess’ dystopic reaction to the agenda of UK’s Labour Party of the 1970s, especially the labor unions' use/abuse of the strike. Since the labor movement was largely dismembered in the 1980s by Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US, we might now need to define a few terms. A “closed shop” is a situation where a labor union has negotiated a contract with the employer, where all employees are required to be dues-paying members of the union. A “general strike” is an event where various labor unions have agreed to strike together with each other’s strikes, in order to strengthen each other’s bargaining position.

In the opening of the novella, the entrenchment of these practices leads to the death of Bev Jones’ wife Ellie. The hospital she has been admitted to is burned down by arsonists, while the firemen’s union is on strike, and the military backup to fire protection honors the picket lines. As a result, Ellie is burned to death, and her dying words in Bev’s arms are “Don’t let them get away with it.” Bev’s subsequent refusal to cooperate with the rules imposed on society by labor, take him further and further into ostracization and legal problems in a parody of a Nanny State UK, now known as TUCland.

The thoroughly weakened UK economy has been unable to respond to extortionate prices of oil imports, and is now dominated by Arabia. The Arabs have obtained legal ownership of major national assets, such as the North Sea oil fields, and are increasingly aggressive in protecting those assets and imposing Muslim religious and societal conventions. It is a comic reversal of past British colonial practices in the rest of the world. I don’t think Burgess intended it as a comment on colonialism, but rather uses that as a scary bogeyman, preying on a particularly vulnerable component of the contemporary British psyche. And I’m using “comic” here, not to mean hilarity, but in the ironic sense that Burgess defines when critiquing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I feel the impact of this point is lost, and the entire novel somewhat undermined, when a complete Arab takeover is somehow averted by a single lets-all-just-be-good speech by the young King Charles III.

In spite of the name, this novella is not directly related to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four. Thematically it deals with libertarian social and political philosophies, rather than metaphysical concepts such as the nature of free will (A Clockwork Orange) and historical truth (Nineteen Eight-four), and is a lesser work than those.