England Your England

There is something about satire that brings out the worst in critics; most often by turning them into pseudo-psychologists. The work of Ambrose Bierce was long subject to dismissal-by-diagnosis, as a product of the traumas of the Civil War combined with a pathological hatred of his parents, his wife, his friends and the universe in general. Karl Kraus was revenge-pathologised by a disciple of Freud, in a manner which Freud himself criticised as uncharitable. George Orwell's essay on Gulliver's Travels assumes that the narrator's voice in Part Four is that of Swift himself, and that Gulliver's deranged rejection of human animality and embrace of the values of a non-human species are uncritically endorsed by his creator.

Naturally, Orwell's own Nineteen Eighty-Four has come in for similar treatment. Having attacked authoritarian tendencies on the political left and defended the old-fashioned virtues, Orwell has retained a certain respectability among the British establishment; and Animal Farm, a specific allegory of the Russian revolution, can doubtless be enjoyed with a told-you-so snigger across the acceptable spectrum of British political thought. While often consigned, even by favourably-disposed critics, to the same consoling category, Nineteen Eighty-Four has always seemed to me a rather more awkward proposition.

When I first encountered the book, the standard interpretation was that it was a prophecy of the future (an inaccurate prophecy, hence verging for some on - shudder - science fiction), perhaps unduly pessimistic in outlook and a bit distasteful in its torture scenes; or else that it was a warning of the dire consequences should the beastly Russians ever be permitted what are now known as "legitimate security concerns." Orwell himself must take some responsibility for these caricatures, having bestowed Stalin's moustache on Big Brother (whose face, in accordance with the principles of doublethink, surely ought to change continually); yet The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism makes clear that the state of Oceania is a product, not of Soviet aggression, but of a special relationship between the British Empire and the United States. And Newspeak is specifically an adaptation of the English language, which makes Nineteen Eighty-Four rather less overtly Russophobic than A Clockwork Orange.

It seemed obvious to me from fairly early on that Orwell's dystopia was a picture of the world as it is; and the portrait has remained applicable through the Cold War, the War on Terror, and the current wars for peace - all of which, of course, have been episodes of the same ongoing war for freedom, democracy and civilised values. Recently it occurred to me that the book can also be read as a portrait of Englishness; if a slightly less charitable one than that in The Lion and the Unicorn. The class system is there, determined by character rather than family values but still as uncompromising as ever; the poverty and inefficiency are there, faced with expressions of quiet optimism while mass resentment is redirected into organised xenophobia and popularised witch-hunts. Even the Party's view of sex as a "slightly disgusting minor operation" and its faith in painful compulsion as the best way to keep society going are the pure stuff of respectable Englishness.

In his essays Orwell both lambasted English hypocrisy and dubiously insisted on its virtue as a restraining influence: the presence of hypocrisy, he wrote, at least implies the presence of a moral code. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, doublethink is institutionalised hypocrisy; the moral code is an Orwellian patriotism (my Party right or wrong, or both); and here we still are. Whatever the virtues or otherwise in his critique of SOC, there have been few more compelling assaults than Orwell's against the cosy complacency of ING.