Many of us will have referred to or quoted George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984, particularly when defending the concept of truthfulness. But it turns out that we are often less than honest about our relationship with it. Some years ago, a UK World Book Day survey found that 1984 is the book people blag about the most, with 42% of respondents admitting they’d lied about having read it when in fact they hadn’t.
The main reason for doing so was to impress people. But perhaps it’s more than that. 1984 is a cultural touchstone and many of its coinages, iconography, and quotes are so familiar that some people may feel as if they’ve read it even though they haven’t. Memory is fallible, so perhaps they assume they read it when they were younger, because so many people did. As Orwell writes in the novel: “Every now and then he’s troubled by false memories” – a line spoken to chilling effect by actor Andrew Scott, who stars in a new dramatisation from Audible alongside Andrew Garfield, Cynthia Erivo and Tom Hardy.
