Burgess é um crítico inteligente – isso pode parecer óbvio, mas nem sempre os críticos abrem mão das suas próprias opiniões ao analisar criticamente aquilo a que se propõem. A primeira parte de “1985” é recheada de um pensamento crítico envolvente que, ao contrário do que é alardeado, não se resume a “contestar o 1984”. O escritor vai além: a partir do romance de Orwell, procura destrinchar as suas origens na realidade inglesa pós-guerra, ocasião em que a obra foi escrita.

Isso não é feito de maneira ortodoxa: o livro é composto por vários ensaios, não relacionados diretamente entre si, e com uma entrevista feita com alguém não identificado. Essa entrevista é um dos pontos mais profundos da análise da obra de Orwell. Não são temidas as contradições: os personagens discutem, por exemplo, de que maneira a crítica ao totalitarismo, em 1984, se encaixava no pensamento socialista de Orwell. E imaginam a obra como sendo uma brincadeira.

Talvez, um exercício intelectual de Orwell. Ou, como diz Burgess noutra parte do livro, “uma metáfora ampliada da apreensão”. Um livro com o mérito de ser lembrado até hoje quando nos vemos diante de medidas totalitárias – mas, ainda assim, com a certeza de ser impossível na prática. Burgess esmiuça 1984 e o aproveita para fazer análises quase acadêmicas sobre o Socialismo Inglês, a novilíngua, o anarquismo, os conflitos de gerações e a morte do amor.

Na segunda parte, ele cria a sua própria novela. “1985” foi escrita em 1978 – a chance de errar era menor. Para Burgess, o futuro seria tomado por movimentos sindicalistas, que controlariam toda a sociedade e transformariam o próprio governo num mero fantoche. A greve passaria a ser praticamente um instrumento de guerra, praticada numa frequência assustadora em todos setores. Assim como em “1984”, o individual é absorvido pelo coletivo. Fora dele, não há sobrevivência.

O autor previa ainda a expansão árabe na Inglaterra. Não é uma novela má, mas diante de “1984” (e diante da própria primeira parte de “1985”) ela fica devendo. Os acontecimentos se passam rápido demais, e há até mesmo algumas partes confusas. Ao final da novela, volta a entrevista com o ser não identificado. Ele e Burgess discutem o futuro. É um diálogo curioso. Mostram suas apreensões e as projetam para o ano 2000 – sem que ninguém tenha previsto a internet ou telefone celular.

Essentially, two books in one: (1) A thought-provoking and intellectually-stimulating critique & analysis of George Orwell's "1984"and (2) a mini-novel that's not so much a sequel as a re-write of "1984" With both segments, Anthony Burgess (of "A Clockwork Orange" fame) has the benefit of 30 years of hindsight that Orwell did not have, i.e. 1978 vs. 1948 (remember, Orwell originally intended to title his most famous work "1948," and only changed it to "1984" as the last minute after a suggestion from his publisher--or was it his editor?).




In the fiction segment, while there is no Big Brother or Thought Police per se, nor are there superstates like Oceania, Euarasia, and Eastasia, i.e. the UK, USA, Australia, etc. still exist as independent countries, the unions have totally seized power (the cynical joke goes "TUK = TUC," in other words, The United Kingdom is the Trades Union Congress, and Englad is often informally referred to as Tucland), the State is the employer for something like 99% of the workforce, and the unions basically hold governments and individuals alike by the bollocks. The unions (or Syndicates, as they're also called in the novella) don't have quite the total physical and mental control of the people that Big Brother's Ingsoc does, but it's plenty nightmarish. Instead of Orwell's "Newspeak," there is "Worker's English (WE)," which is also a highly dumbed-down version of the language. The only groups with any sense of intellectual and economic freedom are gangs of thugs and petty thieves....or, dare I say, landlocked pirates?

The novella portion starts off with the protagonist's wife dying in a hospital fire due to the firefighters being on strike and refusing to attempt to put out the fire.* An ominous start to an even more ominous story. (*Later on in the novel, there is a reference to an incident where thousands freeze to death in the American Midwestern winter, specifically Minnesota, because the public utility workers are on strike and thus refusing to turn on the heat.)

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!!!!!
While "1985" doesn't exactly have a "happy" ending, at least the protagonist, Bev Jones, doesn't go down without a fight, and while he is tortured at a re-education camp,the tortures aren't quite as horrific as The Ministry of Love or Room 101 from Orwell's "1984," and at least Jones doesn't go out like a totally brainwashed meek little wussy the way Winston Smith does in Orwell's book, i.e. Jones dies, but he doesn't die loving the State or the unions.

Geesus Christ!! Was that a richful Fucking waster. This Book has nothing, i repeat, NOTHING to do with 1984. It's a dystopian, or a Burgess wants it to be called Cacotopian, novel like 1984 and that's about it.

The book spends the first half, HALF!!!, in a review/critique of 1984 and how in the years since its inception, things have changed and how Orwell would change his vision. If Orwell wrote 1984 in '75 or whenever this book was written how would he go about it. But it doesn't even do that well.

Burgess just rambles about the times during which the book was written and how that was different from Orwell's time. Much like the rambling I am doing here. Until you later find out that Burgess' intentions were just to explain why he wrote the novella to follow.

Then you get to the Novella. WHICH HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ORWELL OR 1984!!!! And you realize the first 100 pages were just a sneaky ass way to try to convince you that 1985 is practical and plausible and NOT 1984. Burgess' egotism wanted a way to write a dystopian novel without it being a sequel or and without having to justify it as an Orwellian themed novella that isn't ripping of Orwell. What an ass.

The Novella was pretty good for 60 pages or so, then just fucking ends. The ending up and vanished like a fart in the wind from a speeding motorist with the top down. And cruelly I didn't say thank goodness. Instead I just wished it did that 252 pages earlier.

It was a nice try at the time but, in retrospect, Burgess' vision of trade unions taking over England looks a little silly today. All in all, Orwell's harrowing fascist world of "1984" is the more compelling and, even today, the more plausible.
That being said, the novel is a good read and the preceding material about "1984" is very interesting.

First half was really interesting series of essays, second half was like watching GB news. Felt myself getting more stupid even reading it.

Half of this odd hybrid is an exegesis on Orwell's 1984. The 2nd half, a speculative novella, is almost as polemical as the exegesis. Yet it is entertaining in its way.

I came across a reference to this book while thumbing through a biography on Anthony Burgess about five years ago. Since then I have kept my eyes opened looking in used book stores and those kinds of places for a copy of the book. I could have probably found the book to buy online, but I rarely ever do that kind of thing for myself. Last week though in a semi-ironic act I actually went to a library and saw that they had the book, so I took it out and finally got the read it.

The structure of the book is a little weird. The first hundred pages are a collection of essays and a faux-interview with the author on George Orwell’s much misused utopian novel. The gist of the first hundred pages is that Orwell’s book was grossly misunderstood by many and that it’s really a bleak picture of London in 1948 and also at heart a comic novel. It’s also according to Burgess the culmination and defeat of a lifetime of a conflicting belief in the working class by Orwell. After getting through this part of the book is a novella by Burgess where he presents his own possible future for England, one which he sees I’m sure as equally comical but also also a little less naive to the state of the world (why Orwell’s naivety is difficult to explain here). Basically Burgess’ version of a horrible future is taken from the idea that the bombs never did end up falling that everyone thought would in the post-war era, and instead of bombs there were even greater horrors to the killing of humanity present.

Burgess wrote his book in the late 1970’s. The book came out in 1978, a time when England was in a lot of trouble. Wide-spread unemployment, striking unions, inflation and general civil-unrest were present. This is the stage that would bring Thatcher and Reagen to prominence, and their own anti-labor acts would put a stop the basic premise of Burgess book, but that was still in the future.

Burgess saw a world destroyed by the power of unions, where strikes were a common thing and they were always held for more money-something that was quickly losing it’s value. In Burgess world everyone went on strike, firemen, the army, chocolate makers, train-operators, anyone you can think of. And if a building burned down, it was the fault of someone who didn’t give into the strike. It’s kind of a conservative horror show here, but there is still something subversive underlaying Burgess story. More than just the awfulness of syndicalism, Burgess also saw a general dumbing down of the culture taken beyond being just the norm but to the regulated norm. Language decided upon the majority usage, if most people misuse words then the misuse must be correct etc., (he called this Workers English, and he saw it as something even worse than Newspeak, or Doublespeak). He also saw a bleak pragmatic future where culture was left behind because it had no market value. As a result only the hooligans, or maybe droogs and the old resistors to the new world knew things like Latin or Greek, or the works of Plato and Shakespeare, or cared about history.

The book has something reactionary about it, and it is certainly an elitists nightmare of a possible future but it’s also a warning cry against the leveling a dumbed down consumerist culture could possibly create. Some of the premises of the book have essentially been destroyed by the actions of Thatcher and Regan in the early 80’s but there is still something to be read in this forgotten book.

I wanted to read something completely different. I wanted to read something British. I wanted to read something political and thought provoking and in its own way radical. A comparison between 1948 and 1984 seemed a good choice, but isn't because I'm only 50% enjoying what I'm reading. Essentially, this is two books: A critique by Burgess of George Orwell's "1984"and a short story. Having said all of that, it is interesting, it is British, it is two distinctly different writers. Its also sadly 50% way too much literary masturbation for my liking !!!

I'm a huge fan of Burgess's work despite his right-wing views. Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers were masterpieces but I had to abandon this two-thirds through. The political essays were both pretentious and contentious and the tone grated. Make your own dystopia (again) rather than demolish or criticise Orwell's. I thought the idea was interesting but the execution was boorish and irritating. Once I got on to the story, (which took far too long) I was just revolted. Not so much by the union-bashing premise. Everyone is welcome to their opinion even if I don't agree. The mid 1970s were ripe for a bit of union bashing but the characterisation was pretty vile. Sexualised 13-year-olds don't go down so well in the 2020s as they did in the age of Jim'll Fix It.

I think I'm the only one who's ever read this, but I loved Burgess' effort and his essay on 1984. I found it on the new books shelf at the UNCG library, where, geek that I am, I was hanging out with my boyfriend in high school. We'd just go and sit and read, or look up old Rolling Stones on microfiche. I picked a lot of random books of the shelf then and sat there, reading them. come to think of it, I probably spent more time just hanging out there in high school than I did in college, when I could check out the books and take them somewhere else.

Ok, where to start with this one... It starts with a brilliant analysis of Orwell's 1984 which sets out to prove it is all comic farce and that it was actually about 1948 and the rise of British Socialism (if there ever was such a thing).

Burgess was a novelist of ideas if there ever was one, and here the idea is that unionism or syndicalization was choking Britain and was going to be its downfall. Not likely, Mr. Burgess. OK, that's yesterday's news from this vantage point in history and after Thatcherism. But in 1978 the coal miners strike was a big deal and was a bleak harbinger for the more conservative minded (i.e. most) Britons in the context of serious economic difficulties. Wonder what you would have made of Brexit, Tony.

On typical Burgessian hyperbole, and for darkly comical effect, he exaggerates this situation by portraying Blighty on its knees before both the syndicates and the arabs, with increasing statization of businesses, soaring external debt and rampaging inflation of... 55% yearly. Come on Mr. Burgess, one can very well tell you never lived in Argentina in the 70's or the 80's... or the 00's... or the present day... and Islam is not taking over here any day soon :D

So yes, he does come across like a reactionary and conservative curmudgeon, which he probably was by 1978. His ideas about anarchism are perhaps the most bigoted and biased, suggesting it all had to do with Bakunin having the hots for his sister. And socialism is a preposterous thesis which is never given a shadow of hope, producing downward normalization, equalization of poverty and annulation of culture and originality. Let's assume this as a standard position for people like Burgess who is after all having a lark, and then forget all about it.

Yes, forget all about taking it seriously. And let's read it as the darkly comic farce it is, with the latin quoting gangsters and the incestuous hebephrenic daughter and the Lawrence of Al-Dorchester figure. It does not resist political or ideological analysis. It rings a very close bell to Houllebecq's Submission. But it was not an excercise in prophesy. And, like he says of Orwell, he is not trying to "warn" us against a possible future, he was talking about his present day.

The progressive restrictions of individual liberties in the name of national security he was right about, though...

One word: (some sort of) fan-fiction. There’s nothing wrong with writing fan-fictions, but this is amusing to me. 1985 by Anthony Burgess at a glance can be seen as an unofficial sequel to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but merely it was just a re-imagining of the novel. Something like, the author thought to himself, “Hey, I’m living in the late 1970s, and I agree with George Orwell about some trends that, if continue, will happen in the next few years.”

So, Burgess wrote this novella (hardly a novel, because the first part of the book is just about him and his thoughts about Nineteen Eighty-Four) based on the current happenings in his life. Trade unions are becoming more apparent in Britain. Unions after unions go on strike whenever they feel oppressed. This causes a domino effect: a small strike by a trade union, over time when their voices are heard, will turn into a general strike by the public. This can affect a country’s developments to a halt.

In the novella, we follow through the eyes of a man named Bev Jones. Lost his wife in a burning hospital because the firemen union was on strike. He’s left to take care of his pre-teen daughter, Bessie, who is addicted to a drug that makes her unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Moreover, she knew about sex at her age of thirteen, which, in a way, there’s nothing wrong but we have to agree that sex education is a must for children like her. Anyway, Bev used to be a history teacher, but the Party prefers hands-on education than theoretical one. He works as a confectioner, but since his union is on strike and working while on strike is prohibited, he finally shows his responsibility as a father to send Bessie to a facility that can take care of girls like her—because with no income, he can’t afford to hold the house for him and his daughter.

Bev goes from town to town, scouring for food and begging from people. Sometimes he steals. At one point he found himself joining a group called The Free Britons, whose aim is to provide help during the ever-increasing crises of union strikes. This is the time when Bev, as a father, did a questionable act: he sold his daughter to be a wife to a rich sheikh. His reason is simple: can’t provide for his family so selling off his daughter (a minor) to a man around his age is one of the ways to have her properly taken care of. Yikes.

Anyway, not entirely sure if Burgess is afraid of Islam, because around the time of writing, Islam is an emerging religion around the world and, more and more people converted to it. So, in the story, The Free Britons is actually a front. Their real plan is to make Britain a Muslim state.
In the end, Bev committed suicide. He was captured, he couldn’t take it anymore, he decided to kick the bucket. Maybe, the loss of his wife was too much and his hatred towards the union strikes were too high, that he felt hopeless that he can’t do anything to avenge his wife.

So, in some way, Burgess probably makes a point about how trade union strikes can affect more bad than good to a society, and order must be maintained so no lives will be lost.