For decades, feminists have been pointing out undeniable limitations to George Orwell’s work and life. As Deirdre Beddoe put it nearly 40 years ago, he was “totally blind” to the role that women “were and are forced to play”, and this insight is now being vividly fleshed out by other writers. Anna Funder’s recent Wifedom was a fascinating exploration of what it might have meant for Orwell’s wife Eileen to live in his shadow, while Sandra Newman’s novel Julia is an even more ambitious creation.
Here, Newman turns Orwell’s classic vision of the future inside out, and readers will find themselves gripped and surprised by what happens when the object of Winston Smith’s gaze looks back, and retells their journey into love and resistance. I began the book a little sceptical about whether a reimagining of Nineteen Eighty-Four would work as a novel in its own right. Fan fiction can rarely stand on its own, particularly when the source material is as precise and complete as Orwell’s. But Newman delivers on more than one level.
In the most basic way, Julia is a satisfying tribute act. Newman has deeply considered the language and culture of Orwell’s novel, which created its future setting by way of early 20th-century Britain, and takes us carefully through its familiar landscape. Indeed, these scenes are so well trodden for many of us that re-entering each one, from the grim windowless factory floor of the Ministry of Truth, to the fragile respite of the room above the junk shop, to O’Brien’s luxurious but threatening sitting room, can feel almost like encountering scenes from your own memories.
But as she probes his vision and moves beyond it, Newman also provides an imaginative and intellectual critique of Orwell’s novel. At the start of the second chapter, Julia signs out of her shift at the Ministry of Truth using the excuse “Sickness: Menstrual”, and immediately the novel travels into places where Smith could not and would not go. At the dormitory hostel where she lives, Julia’s connections with other women are revealed. These intimate and compromised relationships become the beating heart of the novel, and demonstrate how women’s lives under this totalitarian state inevitably differ from men’s at every point. Surveillance and loss of private life weigh differently on women, and the stakes – in terms of abuse, lack of physical autonomy, unwanted pregnancy – feel higher, even before the plot turns to its more deadly phase.
As she maps out this new territory, Newman forges a work that has its own emotional logic, and a character with her own vivid life. The portrait of Julia’s childhood is an ambitious mix of horror and freedom, and brings the reader to a deeper understanding of her gritty focus on survival. I was convinced by the way Newman maps Julia’s sexuality, how it is necessarily shaped by her constant experiences of voyeurism and abuse, but how she still courageously holds on to her right to pleasure.
I was also jolted, even shocked, by some of the decisions taken by this reincarnation of Julia. Because even though we think we know the plot, Newman takes an unexpected turn early on, and never stops surprising the reader. I’m unable to recount her best inventions without spoiling them, but by about halfway through, I began to feel more convinced by Julia’s responses to this totalitarian state than I had ever been by Smith’s.
Yet after that halfway point, the novel starts to weaken. The entry into darkness, into the Ministry of Love, does not have the power of Orwell’s journey. The torture chambers he imagined felt desperately real, built from accounts of survivors of gulags and concentration camps, so that even the unlikely creation of Room 101 became horribly convincing. Newman’s prison has something of the performative cruelty of The Hunger Games or similar recent dystopias, and her desire to win hope out of the darkness gradually leads her on to less convincing ground.
The book reaches what feels like an effective and sharply delineated denouement just over 50 pages before the end. Instead of ending there, however, Newman continues with scenes that bring Julia’s personal journey to a more dramatic conclusion. The shocking power of Orwell’s novel lay in his refusal to allow any crack in the totalitarian state where the light might get in. He discarded false hope regarding an individual’s effect on the system, and left the reader endlessly wondering what resistance means when there is no chance of success. Newman’s novel gradually turns into something like the replay of a video game, in which you are allowed to respawn as another avatar, to move through the same scenes with new lines, and get to a different place. This new trajectory is much less convincing than the original’s hard-won knowledge.
Afterwards, however, the book stayed powerfully with me. Julia’s will to survive, her childhood experiences, her sensual joys, her relationships with other women, all make this a complex and empathic vision that stands up well beside Orwell’s original, and at many points enriches it.
• Julia by Sandra Newman is published by Granta (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
