Starred review from March 13, 2023
Novelist and book critic Taylor (On 1984) delivers a sterling account of the life and works of George Orwell (1903–1950). Born Eric Blair in Motihari, India, Orwell moved with his family to Oxfordshire, England, while he was an infant. Following his schooling, he worked as a policeman in Burma before returning to England, where he began his career as a writer and adapted his pseudonym from Suffolk’s River Orwell. Taylor digs into the creation of Orwell’s most celebrated works, noting the acclaim that followed the 1945 publication of his Stalinism allegory, Animal Farm, despite having been rejected by multiple publishers because of the novel’s criticism of the Soviet Union while the country was fighting alongside the U.K. in WWII. Orwell furthered his critique of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote while battling tuberculosis. He died from the disease at age 46, a year after the novel’s publication. Taylor doesn’t elide the less savory aspects of the author’s character, noting that Orwell’s “dislike of homosexuals follows him through his work like the clang of a medieval leper bell,” and the meticulous research illuminates how Orwell’s political commitments informed his fiction. This stands out in the crowded field of Orwell biographies.
August 11, 2003
George Orwell (1903–1950), né Eric Blair, seemed only a marginal Depression-era writer about disillusion and hopelessness among ordinary working types until the Spanish Civil War, when in 1937 he was shot through the neck and nearly killed, furnishing him with the lens to see totalitarianism and betrayal as, possibly, the future human condition. In his now classic Homage to Catalonia, then a commercial failure, he wrote of papers reporting facts that were lies, patriotism that was propaganda, loyalty that was treachery, heroism that was cowardice. The results, in a bleak career abbreviated at 46 by unremitting tuberculosis, emerged in the dystopian fable Animal Farm
and in the mean urban wasteland of 1984, in which history is rewritten daily, and obedience is the only recourse for the brainwashed powerless. Taylor, author of an earlier biography of Thackeray, limns Orwell's life graphically, and relates his early fiction and journalism persuasively to the iconic postwar novels, describing his writing as "an endless scroll constantly refined and brought up to date, in which early entries reemerge to assume an expected resonance." Tendencies to cliché disappear as Taylor warms up to his theme of an Etonian displaced in a remorseless world. A few brief chapters seem merely stuck in, but Orwell's essentially lonely and downstart life, and his triumphs almost too late to matter, make for compelling reading. 16 pages of b&w illus. not seen by PW.