Customer Reviews

1985: What Happens After Big Brother Dies

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Dalos's 1985 is an intellectual masterpiece of historical parody. Constructed as a series of historical documents by and about the main characters of 1984, it gives the reader a sense of historicism. Also, an entire subplot of the "author's" personal tribulations surrounding his investigation into controversial events takes place in the footnotes, which go from objectively historical to personally cynical as the novel progresses. Dalos fits lots of information into a small novel. A valuable read for any interested in literary parodies, the literature behind Prague Spring (of which Dalos was a part), and Eastern European literature when the Iron Curtain was still hanging over half of Europe.

1985 is a satirical sequel to Orwell's 1984. It was actually written in Hungary about 1982, so the very title is prophetic: nobody imagined what was in fact to happen in the Communist world in and after 1985. Meanwhile, it's based loosely on the Prague Spring of 1968, with some echoes of post-Mao China in the late 70s.

In a neat reversal of Orwell's talents and priorities, 1985 combines a weak plot with wonderfully drawn characters. Orwell's people, pure vehicles of his story, come to flawed and engaging life here. Winston and Julia have their complexities: Winston rigorously principled in politics but a horny opportunist in his personal life; Julia personally upright but politically amoral. We are privileged to see the serene party boss O'Brien squirm and sputter as the Thaw spins out of his or anybody's control.

One of the most appealing things about this book, to me at least, is Dalos's treatment, more respectful than Orwell's, of the female characters. Neither Julia nor Winston's estranged wife Katharine (here "Katherine") is admirable or even much likeable, but where Orwell tended to treat them as sexual foils to Winston, Dalos sees them as political and human individuals.

Dalos's Katherine is an ultraleftist, a sort of English Red Guard follower of the arrested Big Sister (Big Brother's Jiang Qing-like widow), and every bit as unpleasant as Orwell hinted she was. But she is something more: a lonely fighter for an unlovely cause, with little besides courage, but plenty of that. Even when she invades a coffeehouse gathering to denounce her husband and his cronies as a bunch of counterrevolutionaries, I feel more sadness than outrage. Later I shed a tear when she and Winston are briefly reconciled, before she commits spectacular suicide in protest against Eurasian occupation. (Dalos had earlier been in political hot water as a "Maoist", and here combines rejection of that ideology with a quiet sympathy for its adherents.)

So yes, I highly recommend this book. Without detracting from the greatness of 1984, it adds humor and humanity, as well as a sense of what communism looked like from the inside.