1985

by Anthony Burgess

Hardcover, 1978

Status

Available

Call number

PR6052.U638 N4 1978

Genres

Collections

Your library, University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

Publication

Description

In characteristically daring style, Anthony Burgess combines two responses to Orwell's 1984 in one book. The first is a sharp analysis: through dialogues, parodies and essays, Burgess sheds new light on what he called 'an apocalyptic codex of our worst fears', creating a critique that is literature in its own right.Part two is Burgess' own dystopic vision, written in 1978. He skewers both the present and the future, describing a state where industrial disputes and social unrest compete with overwhelming surveillance, security concerns and the dominance of technology to make life a thing to be suffered rather than lived.Together these two works form a unique guide to one of the twentieth century's most talented, imaginative and prescient writers. Several decades later, Burgess' most singular work still stands.… (more)

Media reviews

The Observer

It seems strange to find a novelist as imaginative, as genuine as Mr Burgess finding Orwell wrong here and right there, ending the perorations of'1984' with the statement that '1984 is not going to be like that at all'. (He says once that Orwell wasn't really forecasting the future but takes it

back several times.) Must I observe that a novel can no more be right than a symphony be true?... Quite soon Mr Burgess moves beyond Orwell and, scattering etymologies as he goes, takes us through freedom, good and evil, right and wrong, the State, freedom again, Bakunin and anarchism and youth (excellent), free will and freedom again, brain-washing, the inefficiency of Russian restaurants and love. None of this is less than entertaining. The best part argues that there are no free societies, only free individuals. I think that that view fiddles with what 'free' means, but it is well argued here.

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The New York Times

“1985” is half novel, half criticism. By this I do not mean that it is a mixture of the two like some of Mr. Burgess’s recent novels, which try to tease and anticipate literary criticism in a sub-Nabokovian way. I mean that it is split down the middle. The first half is a projection for the

following year. It is an audacious scheme, involving many fresh dangers, and the book is an unexpected half-success. That is, the first half is reasonably good, the second half unconscionably poor...

Mr. Burgess’s 1985 is too chaotic to be a metaphor of anything but chaos--but, then again, this does not quite “explain” its inertness. Alas, Mr. Burgess’s failure is, vexingly, boringly, ineffably, a failure of language. Mr. Burgess’s recent prose is characterized by professional haste and a desire to be a stylist. The result is a knotted, cadenced, bogus lustiness: Every sentence is sure to contain some virile quirk or other, often (you feel) as a product of will rather than of inspiration or care.

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New York Review of Books

Perhaps Burgess just doesn’t get it. His introductory essay, well argued though it sometimes is, reinforces the impression one had formed some time ago that for Burgess the world’s ills are conceived of as a set of irritants aimed principally at his own person. Burgess sees himself, no doubt

rightly, as an individualist. He thinks that if there were less government there would be fewer bureaucratic agencies devoting themselves to making his life less bearable by introducing such soulless novelties as decimal coinage. A few years ago, when he was still living in Italy, Burgess wrote articles for British newspapers saying that the British ought to be more like the Italians, who had learned how to live with chaos. This was before the sudden popularity of kidnapping and terrorism suggested that Italy needed a lot less chaos than it was getting... Burgess would probably like 1985 to be thought of as a teeming grab-bag of ideas. In fact it is a scrap heap... 1985 sounds like the same union-bashing gone in for by all those members of the British managerial class who are convinced that their entrepreneurial flair is being stifled. It seldom crosses their minds that they, too, are part of the problem. Solipsistic without being self-searching, Burgess shares the same irritable conviction that he knows how things should be. 1985 is a yelp of annoyance, already out of date before it is published. Nineteen Eighty-Four, a minatory illumination of the darkest propensities in human nature, will be pertinent forever.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member saibancho

One of the most stimulating books in many ways for its incisive and occasionally belligerent analysis of Orwells 1984 and implications for current (1978) politics and societal/political development. The first half of the book contains essay/dialogues in the form of what I presume are interviews or

interlocutions with 1984 and related issues as the theme.

Part 2 is Burgess's effort at a 'parody' extended musing on a possible 1984 revisited, his '1985', a Britain at the mercy of the Unions. It is hilarious stuff, although quite thought provoking..it is pretty laughable, and comes across as a cross between A Clockwork Orange (out-takes maybe from the writers cutting room floor) and On the Buses!!! Violent youths on the rampage with a thirst for Latin and Greek..getting their ancient langauge fix from Underground University..homeless tramps willing to trade a bit of Catullus for a drop of gin and a nicked ham sandwich..preposterous. But some good moments - the Islam angle, his daughter. It is a novel written in outline as it were with little development of the characters or plotlines. A sketch really.

I cant help thinking that Burgess makes the mistake (like a lot of readers of 1984) that the dystopia it envisages could only come from the Left or Communism/Sovietism and right off identifies the hero of 1985 as a 'free man' who rails against the immorality of a worker withholding their labour citing 'duty' etc and fair play. It all comes across as almost little Englander rightwing ranting. It is strange that he couldn't see or accept that 1984 translates just as well into a right wing fascist regime with no workers rights, corporate domination - e.g. neocon controlled US or UK as a possible dystopia, but simply falls into the stupid trap of thinking that an idle man must be a socialist/unionist sympathiser, one of the 'brothers'. Perhaps someone of his generation found it hard to see the evils inherent in both sides of the political coin in their endless project to moronise and control human society for their own nefarious purposes.

The book comes across as very anti youth which again perhaps is not surprising from someone who must have grown up when there was no such thing as youth culture and most movies of his youth would have depicted characters supposed to be young things..at the age of 45!! Burgess is very disparaging of 'the students'..you can almost imagine him cynically cheering on the boot boy police to beat up a bunch of foolish longhairs to teach them the error of their ways and the superiority of the oldies. So a tad ageist and old bore like..but engaging nonetheless. You will laugh at 1985 but be quite thought provoked too.The first part I found much more engaging since he goes into quite a detailed critique of Orwells work as well as the man himself and here Burgess is on more solid ground. Its odd that he is so good at critqueing 1984 and successfully pinpoints some areas where he feels that it failed as a novelistic depiction (ie the 'love' relationship of Winston) of a dystopia..and then went on to write such a godawful hilarious almost Daily Mail parody (1985).

Could make a good comparison essay when considered alongside Greatorex's 1990

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LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini

I'm kind of glad this is a brief review (cos i am travelling) because otherwise I could risk railing against Burgess at excessive length. Basically it was 1978 in Britain and, as my dad says again and again of living there during that time, "Nothing worked," and so the conservative curmudgeon

Anthony Burgess wrote a sequel to 1984 where unions paralyze the country and every strike is a general strike and "The United Kingdom" (TUK) bcomes "TUC (The Union Congress) land" or Tucland, syndicalist hellhole. Some parts of this memorably hit home--the whole first part is a series of perspicaciousessays that in some ways recapitulate the whole present-day Huxley-over-Orwell by-our-lusts-and-not-our-fears-will-they-control-us bit; and then the second is about "Bev Jones," our new Winston Smith, whose wife dies when the firemen refuse to put her out because of job action and who goes on a one man crusade to bring the rotten system down and is dealt with summarily and institutionally and cacotopically (the distinction between dystopia and cacotopia is one useful thing Burgess brings us). It's all over the top, but there are bits that hit hard (the screen-rotted, prematurely sexualized daughter, who ends up sold to an Arab sheik, eating cream horns as they wheel her onto the plane, parents already forgotten), and cute bits (the street toughs, updating Little Alex and his droogs, who quote Shakespeare and Socrates because the schools only teach machine tools and the history of the union movement--the humanities are subversive again), but often it's just so fucking tedious: Burgess has a tendency to think that if we just get a lecture from a disapproving schoolmaster--and Bev is literally a disapproving schoolmaster--about the Great Tradition or the individual conscience we'll all snap into line. It's occasionally almost John Galtish, his fear of the collectivity, but more often it's snide quips that fall flat (like we're all supposed to sneer that the students don't study Latin they study Basic Swahili, like we give a flying fuck about this loathsome Little Englander's cultural biases) or Burgess the cranky Catholic envisions Islam as the ultimate backers of the union movement, trying to hollow out Britain's soul for Allah (the oil shock really shocked people!); or Burgess the cranky linguist sketching out a standard "Workers' English" (WE), an updated Newspeak of working-class features ("I was/you was/(s)he was" and on and on) that fascinates for the tension between his overall Tory's desire to prescriptively disapprove and his trained linguist's recognition of the processes of language change and the legitimacy of the process and the desire to flesh it out desccriptively (a lot of the tension comes out against things like gender-neutral pronouns, ze and the like, which would be irrelevantly inoffensive if he didn't introduce it by saying things like "and then there's the feminists." There are cute in-jokes though, like "Professor Quirk" who writes the manual on WE--Randolph Quirk being the author of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. There are also in-jokes that fall flat, like how two of the dudes in the fascist army that Islam is funding to take Tucland down are Derrida and Chakravorty (as in Spivak). Why?)

Ultimately though it's a pretty evil book because in imagining a cacotopia built on excess and exploitation of principles like a decent wage and power for the powerless and non-homophobia (gay people in this are also unionized and call themselves "Gaypros"(titutes), which is best just frowned balefully at and moved on from), Burgess is completely on the wrong side of history, as shown by the fact that instead we got totally the opposite of this, a winner's cacotopia where the rich get richer. Burgess did his small part to enable Thatcher with this book, so like fuck im man. He had the chance to imagine the good guys as bad guys or the the bad guys were bad guys, like Orwell, and he made clear what side he was on but in sharp contrast to Orwell it was the wrong side, the side of power. I hope he would have at least had the decency to act sheepish that the Left, who he imagines taking apart the humanities, are in 2014 their great defenders and the right wingers the ones who gutted the British university. Of course! Basically Burgess is just wrong and living in a delusional kind of conservative fantasyland--the dupe who thinks he's an iconoclast, but unfortunately has some writing chops to put to bad use.

(Okay, not so brief.)

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LibraryThing member pussreboots

1985 by Anthony Burgess is a two part response to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The first part is a lengthy essay and dialog looking at the origins of Orwell's novel and its relevance then and now. The second part is Burgess's own dystopia written in a world expanded from that of

Orwell's.

While I enjoyed the near future glimpse of things in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the second half of 1985 felt labored and overworked. It read like he was fighting against his urge to write like Orwell.

But the first half, the essay section, was fascinating. Burgess dives into the history of the book and its creation. His thesis is that the title was no simple pulling a date out of a hat. Rather it's a play on the time when it was written: 1948. The UK was devastated by the Second World War and the changes being made to the government and social services reflect an attempt for the nation to reinvent itself. Not everyone was convinced such huge changes were warranted at that time (or ever). Orwell's novel is an exploration of what life would be like if government bureaucracy and oversight was taken to the extreme.

Had I not been borrowing the book from the library, I would have read Burgess's essay in conjunction with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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LibraryThing member DinadansFriend

The prose is clear, and Anthony Burgess' distopian future is a more right-wing version of a country where the evil labour unions have paralyzed the economy. Orwell's world had a more generalized view of tyranny, which was non-economic and therefore more chilling. Mr. Burgess book seems merely bad

tempered.

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LibraryThing member baswood

Digging down through the list of unread books on my shelves; the next one to surface was 1985 which was published in 1978. It has the feel of something being cobbled together, probably stemming from a critique of George Orwell's 1984 which takes up the first hundred pages. Burgess then goes on to

create his own dystopia, where he tells the story of Bev Jones' fight against the the unionised chaos of Britain in 1985. The publication is rounded off with an essay on "Workers language" and an epilogue.

First things first: I found the critique of Orwell's 1984 interesting enough. Burgess asks himself some simple questions and then answers them with plenty of wit and style. Orwell's 1984 was published in 1949 and while his vision of the world 35 years after he wrote his novel was not at all accurate, Burgess finds plenty of things that have pointed the way to how things still might turn out, remembering that he was writing in 1978 still six years before 1984. Perhaps he should have waited until 1984 to write his critique. Reading his extended essay now in 2021 seems pointless.

Burgess' own attempts to rewrite 1984 as 1985 are presumptive and disrespectful. It really is a piece of garbage, lacking in imagination and with an underlying whiff of racism, misogyny and elitism. The so-called winter of discontent of 1978 in Britain is the background. It is taken as the starting point for the trade union movement seizing power through strike action. When 1985 comes around the unionised closed-shop in Britain (renamed Tucland) controls the means of production; leading to chaos and an increasingly authoritarian regime. At the time of publication Burgess' book may have felt like right wing propaganda and reading it today feels like a bootless exercise. I soon lost patience with his essay predicting a Workers English and the Epilogue takes the form of an interview, where Burgess spouts more rubbishy thoughts about the immediate future. A book that may well have pandered to some elitist friends, but for me it is not worthy of being put in the second hand book collection box, and so out with the rubbish it goes 2 stars.

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