1984 unloosed an Orwellian flood of truly Biblical proportions. It was hard to believe any stretch of territory was left where fresh argument might find a foothold.
Friend and foe offered their new interpretations. The most important of all was a new edition of Nineteen Eighty Four elaborately annotated by Orwell's most knowlegeable biographer, Bernard Crick, and at the end of the year he produced another excellent report, reviewing all the reviewers. What more could be said?
But here in 1986 the flood starts again; the new piece of Orwelliana will produce further contentions. 'The world's evolution,' says the author, 'has placed him at the heart of our present complexities, and we go to his writing not in any spirit of aloof research but to find solutions to existing problems. '
Those who read Patrick Reilly's previous book on Jonathan Swift will need no incitement to get their hands on this one. Indeed, he recruits Swift as a kind of joint author to stand at his side and point the way ahead at the most awkward crossroads. And Swift, of course, was Orwell's mentor and model, the most significant of all.
The product offered by such a remarkable triumvirate should be something, and believe me, it is. Just in case I forget to mention the point later, this is a wonderful book, not to be missed, not a single page of it. Orwell-lovers, Orwell-haters and any benighted Laodiceans left in the middle, if there are such, should all read it with instruction and delight. Socialists should read it for a start, democratic Socialists; the rest have no right to defile the name. Who can doubt that 'the collapse of the vision of Socialism' has been 'one of the great intellectual traumas of the West,' and that therefore the means whereby Socialism is to be revived both as 'an idea and ideal' is 'for many in Europe the key question'?
To attempt the task while spurning Orwell is worse than mere arrogance or folly: it is, almostcertainly, an act of cowardice too, the very same charge which Orwell levelled at so many ofhis contemporaries. We have less excuse to dodge them now.
Patrick Reilly, by the way, will have none of the nonsense so often peddled in interestedRight-wing quarters sometimes shamefully accepted by Left-wingers who ought to knowbetter, that Orwell himself had deserted the Socialist cause; he know his Orwell much toowell, both the forever reiterated avowal of his allegiance right to the end and the implicationsof what he wrote, here unravelled with something like an Orwellian honesty and insight.
True, he could dabble in patronising references to individual workers or the working class he came to honour or love. Usually he detected these lapses before anyone else and was quick to make amends. Usually he paid everyone the compliment of offering the same kind of personal relations. Only the real underdogs got special treatment.
And sometimes he could see much further, in the interests of his adopted class, than many of their authentic spokesmen. Way back in the 1930s he realised how insulting it might be to transfer slum dwellers into working-class ghettoes where they couldn't bring their community ethos with them. He alone, or almost alone, saw the horror of tower blocks when they were no more than a malign glint in the architect's eye.
True enough, and the claim is brilliantly amplified, but just occasionally Patrick Reilly acclaims him as the only prophet. One other for sure was Ignazio Silone whom Orwell himself greatly honoured but Reilly does not mention. Silone held fast to his democratic socialism as firmly as Orwell in the face of even fiercer buffetings. 'I don't believe,' he said, 'that the honest man is forced to submit to history, and he said it when the torturers were even nearer at hand.'
One reason why he is so topical is that he and 'an instinct for the future, a seismographicability to sense disturbance when stability seemed assured.' And partly he derived this stregnth from 'the refusal to divorce politics from ethics, the distrust of political engineering as an end in itself.' These were some of the ideas which underwrite 'his prophetic status.
Moreover, the lone prophet needed an escape from the wilderness and a pay packet. He needed them most when all Establishment doors, Right, Left and especially Centre, were being slammed in his face, when he could at first find no publisher for Animal Farm, when no newspaper for which he wanted to write would publish what he wrote - except Aneurin Bevan's Tribune, the same Bevan who at that time was blacklisted by the BBC on Government instruction. And, anyhow, even before Tribune, Spain applied the cure. Orwell himself judged Homage to Catalonia his best work and many will concur. 'The intimacy neverfully achieved with the English working class - declared, indeed, so great is the class gulf, tobe beyond achievement - is miraculously and movingly consummated on the opening page. '
Altogether, what made George Orwell such a challenge to all the massed orthodoxies of his time - what still makes him the same force - was the moulding into one of his art, his character, his message. He learnt from many masters - Dickens, Marx, Joyce, especially Swift, and in making their wisdom his own he saw that democratic Socialism must understand deeper instincts even than the fight against hunger and poverty; not that he was or knave enough ever to underrate them. 'All of Orwell's books,' says Patrick Reilly, who proves the claim one by one, 'were conceived in a love affair with truth. ' All of them, in this new presentation, acquire a new glow and a new greatness.