George Orwell apologised to his close friends the writers Anthony Powell and Julian Symons for his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. He told one that it was “a good idea ruined” and the other that “I ballsed it up rather, partly owing to being so ill while I was writing it.”
For a work often seen as the greatest political novel in English of the past century, and certainly the best known and most quoted, this seems an unnecessarily harsh self-review. It’s clear that, ideally, he would have reworked the novel. As it happens, he wrote his apologies from a hospital bed. Orwell died barely six months after Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.
Nearly 75 years later, Sandra Newman’s new novel, Julia, is not so much a reworking of Orwell’s novel as it is a lively and intelligent reorientation of its focus. Her version is told not from the perspective of Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, but that of his lover, Julia.
