Julia, Sandra Newman: Review
Christopher Hitchens once said that George Orwell mattered because he correctly identified and was against the three great forces of his time, Colonialism, Fascism and Communism. Neither man is alive to witness the current moment of reckoning by the literary and intellectual world of Orwell to the great issue of everyone’s time, and one that Orwell missed, which is feminism and the rights of women, and a shame that is too.
Sandra Newman’s book Julia has been labelled a feminist rewrite of 1984 and perhaps part of a fashionable cancelling of Orwell, but that wouldn’t be correct. Newman doesn’t write with any agenda that is called feminist unless it is feminist for women to exist and have thoughts and make choices. The increasing number of people who forget these rights of women may do well not just to read Julia but also to go back and re-read 1984 so they can remember what happens when individuals are stripped of their agency.
Reckoning Orwell to feminism is good. At the very least it validates his anti-colonial and anti-fascist and anti-communist ideas for another hundred years. The man Orwell, by most accounts, was unaware of and ignored women, By some accounts, he actively kept women down. New writers and historians have to look at this stuff as he couldn’t or didn’t see it. It encourages one to return to Orwell and reread.
His writing was about being critical of the world to make it better and he would not exclude himself from that. A glance through his letters shows he participated in a similar process with Rudyard Kipling. Orwell idolised Kipling as a young man. But decades later Orwell carefully and forensically reviewed his feelings to a complex figure in British colonialism in a changing world.
People assume that 1984 is about technology and screens watching everything you do. But it only partially is. The great part of functioning totalitarianism is the reducing of a language’s vocabulary, known here as Newspeak, to such a point that humans cannot articulate themselves. Through Newspeak, humans are shorn of their humanity as they communicate only slightly above the level of thumbs up or thumbs down.
Newman has great fidelity to the spirit and development of Newspeak through the constant survivor protagonist Julia. Despite vivid demonstrations of all types of atrocity, Julia’s life is at times jolly, even charming, and part of that is in the use of the real English of the early 20th Century. The common contemporary author would surely slip in far too many ‘amazings’ to be authentic. It was diverting to find that Newman wrote with an almost baroque sense of detail to 1940s English.
Never was this more than in Julia’s relationship with Vicky which traded innocence against knowledge with stolen glances and speaking around the subject. Another highlight is the relationship of Julia to Ampleforth who holds in his brain one of the last depositories of poetry in Airstrip One. Julia loves him in a more meaningful way than Winston Smith because Smith is aware to some extent of what is going on and seeks out resistance. Ampleforth wants to be left alone to recite Kubla Khan and smell the flowers; he is the most tragic figure in the book.
Newman has empathy for Orwell. What he wrote was Dystopian. But as Julia shuttles back and forth between her work at the Ministry of Truth and ‘Prole’ neighbourhoods, much more frequently than in the original you realise how much of 1984land was simply life in the Blitz. Orwell spent nearly the entire Second World War in bombed-out London and there was no guarantee that victory against Germany and Japan would secure an end to scarcity and bombing.
Newman’s empathy is also therapeutic to the prude Orwell. She can see that sex and pornography, a great issue of our own time, plays a more obvious role in the suppression of all people under totalitarianism, The machines make pornographic novels which are personalised to each individual to make them associate only shame and criminality for their sexual urges. Notwithstanding the incentives of social media and Large Language Models to ensure our brains beg for the next content reel, the last time England experienced a revolutionary tyranny, under Oliver Cromwell, sex and decency were also means of suppression. The English are not known for being sexually enlightened.
Orwell was a journalist first and foremost. As a novelist he wrote of his own inferiority complex to peers such as James Joyce. Much of his novel writing contains characters that represent himself. So it is likely that he would have approved of Julia as an expansion of his masterpiece through the craft of Newman who distinguishes herself as a novelist first and foremost. In fact, it is likely he would see Julia as a necessary book that should have been written far sooner.
Of all books, this one definitely shouldn’t hinge on the approval of a dead man. But I feel Orwell would have even felt relief that his ideas could be so novelised in accordance with his principles of writing with intention, the essence of totalitarianism and despite Newman being American preserving the story’s English core.
Near the end, Julia moves slightly away from the idea that the future would be a boot smashing on the human face forever. At that point Orwell might have felt his idea, the very essence of his idea, starting to be lost in some sort of magnetic happy ending — until Newman herself, liberated at last from the original text, stamps on the final page leaving our hands touching our noses for blood.
