In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live-he got remarried on his deathbed-just as the novel’s pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smith’s attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. The biographical story of 1984-the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura, off Scotland-will be familiar to many Orwell readers. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.” After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare-he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life-but he took the erasure of truth hard. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia-and that made him a heretic on the left. Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. And in the Trump era, it’s a best seller. It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984. So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book.

In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984.

Neither the book nor its author stuck with me.

I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students.

1984 novel