BOOKS: 1984 and A Clockwork Orange

Nineteen Eighty-four – you just can’t get away from it.  Culturally it’s become more than the sum of its parts, like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band you don’t need to enjoy it (or even have fully read it), you just need to know it well enough to be able to appear credible.  

It is a clumsy read in places.  Winston Smith, the protagonist of the piece, is a cipher.  He represents Orwell.  When Winston tries to connect with the proles in a pub one suspects this is how the Eton boy Orwell felt trying to bond with the working class he tried to connect with but ultimately couldn’t (“Wanna live like common people?”)  Orwell’s politics aren’t seamlessly woven into the text but spelt out in marker pen. We read pages of the diadactive subversive book Smith gets his hands on, a shockingly crude technique for a book with this reputation.  

From the first chapter onwards you are waiting to see how Winston will be caught and what will happen to him.  You don’t care because you are concerned for the character of Winston – you care because you want to find out what happens in the Ministry of Love, where the bad things, and therefore the interesting things happen.  This isn’t a book that expects its readers to care about it’s main focus of attention, but to learn about life in Airstrip One.  There’s no humour in the prose but sheer exposition…

George Orwell at work in Room 101...

And that leads me to something I’d never noticed before.  The appendix linked to the book, which is written as a supposedly dispassionate history of Newspeak linked to the main text – a page from a history textbook– contains one line where it mentions Winston Smith by name.  This is jarring.  This implies that the main part of the novel has been used as a primary source for the unknown historians of Newspeak.  But the main text of the novel is not written in the first person (it is not, for instance, Winston’s diary).  So if this third-person account of Winston’s life is being used as a source whose voice is it?  Is it a dossier in the Thought Police’s files?  When you notice this it calls the authorial voice of the novel in to question, and creates an even deeper sense of unease.  Who are we when we read Nineteen Eighty-four… are we not seeing Airstrip One life through Winston Smith’s eyes after all, but through the dispassionate eyes of The Party?  The lack of humour in the prose tallies with this reading.  Nineteen Eighty-four is a record of life according to The Party in 1984.  The reader is a member of the Thought Police, and probably not a very high ranking member.  Orwell has created quite a rare thing – the unreliable third-person narrative.  This is the best way to read the book now - as a creepy, perverted, curiously emotionless report.

Anthony Burgess (who we last mentioned patronising The Beatles) calls out Nineteen Eighty-four in his book 1985.  The most interesting point about Orwell Burgess makes (and the most obvious one once it has been made) is that Nineteen Eighty-four is about 1948.  Burgess was an almost-contemporary of Orwell.  Certainly he remembers 1948, and points out a lot of the parallels between Airstrip One and post-war Britain – all of a sudden the USSR was the enemy after having been our staunch ally against Nazi Germany, in much the same way that Eurasia and Eastasia alternate as the enemy in the never-ending war in Nineteen Eighty-four.  The poor quality Victory cigarettes Winston smokes were the same brand British troops were given.  The rationing of everything was, if anything, worse than it had been during the war – the razorblade shortage in Oceania would have been all too familiar to contemporary readers.  Big Brother was part of an advertising slogan of the time and, perhaps most comically, Room 101 was where Orwell worked in the BBC.

Nineteen Eighty-four, the godfather of dystopias, isn’t a predicition of what will happen.  Dystopic stories are the author’s present concerns turned up to 11.  Nineteen Eighty-four can be read as a Thought Police dossier of life in 1948 – and is therefore destined to date.

A Clockwork Orange; Burgess’ legacy whether he wanted it to be or not is different.  It doesn’t describe society in any structural detail; it just describes one where there are violent young men.  If it comes to pass that we live in a society without youths being violent then the book will immediately become irrelevant.  But for this reason, A Clockwork Orange will never become irrelevant.  

The iconic cover to A Clockwork Orange

Nineteen Eighty-four is ‘about’ society, but mainly 1948 society.  A Clockwork Orange is interested in the individual.  Burgess’ book is concerned with morality and its place within any society.  The main difference between these two famous dystopias is that, if in Nineteen Eighty-four we have a possibly unreliable third person narrator that is faceless and disturbing, in A Clockwork Orange we have an unreliable narrator that is seductive and exuberant.  It’s easy to forget, if you’re familiar with the film, how much more of a little shit Alex is in the book.  He’s arguably only a manslaughterer in the film but in the book he’s a stone cold killer when he commits his murder in prison.  

A Clockwork Orange is not (like Nineteen Eighty-four) about a man in a dystopic society who feels, vaguely, there could and should be something better – oh, if only he had some subversive literature to read!  A Clockwork Orange is about a boy in a dystopic society who doesn’t know any better and doesn’t particularly care.  It puts the id under the microscope.  Alex destroys, for fun.  The book puts the liberal reader in an uncomfortable position and shows no mercy to values – if you want a free society you have to accept the possibility, the inevitability of an Alex.  Otherwise you don’t want a free society and are just as reactionary as the novel’s government.  What side are you really on?  Fuck with society or fuck with the individual?  Neither is attractive but…  What’s it going to be then, eh?  The freedom Winston Smith craves is available in abundance in Burgess’ world –  but Alex is young and hates virtue for its own sake – and so isn’t virtuous.  And virtue isn’t something that can be drummed into someone via traditional kickings or via the ‘humane’ Ludovic Technique.  Virtue doesn’t mean anything in any society unless it comes from the heart

A Clockwork Orange stands up as a much more complex examination of a dystopic society than Nineteen Eighty-four because it is by its nature concerned with the eternal individual, not an inverted present that has moved on.  This is not to denigrate its achievements but to recognise that its achievement is within the world of social satire and has dated somewhat – as social satire does.  Alex finds a road to redemption in A Clockwork Orange, and a potential life.  Winston Smith finds a love of Big Brother and death.  Winston Smith is Orwell’s pawn, used to show a world and discarded.  Even Oceania shows more concern for Winston Smith than Orwell.  Burgess shows how someone can be the worst kind of product of a fucked up society and still make good – because Alex would exist in any society.  A Clockwork Orange is concerned with the nature of humanity. Nineteen Eighty-four is concerned with the Britain of 1948 taken to its extremities and is by default less powerful than A Clockwork Orange because we are further away from 1948 than we are from being human.  

MUSIC: The Beatles' Early Albums

Although I on and off listen to The Beatles quite regularly (at leas a few times in a year), why hadn't I listened to any of their earlier music since being a teenager?  What could their pop from the early 60s have that their solid albums from the late 60s didn't?

In the mid-90s The Beatles ‘reformed’ without John Lennon, who was unavailable due to health problems.  Another influential band are about to complete the process of doing a very similar reformation at the end of this month, and we’ll get to them all in good time.  

Obviously The Beatles getting back together after so many years was news, and there was a great deal of hype, which hit home to the younger me how much The Beatles meant.  I mean obviously I liked them a lot and everything but there was something different going on there.  I mean, there wouldn’t have been the same amount of attention for Herman’s Hermits that’s for sure…  I think it was the first time I had ever got the sense of The Beatles being something different and meaning more to people than just another band from the 1960s.  It was first time I properly understood how much significance they actually had.

The Beatles were then and are still very, very popular but with a slightly peculiar reservation when it comes to credibility.  Most people who still listen to The Beatles don’t listen to about half of their albums, namely the first 5 (the Beatlemania ones, if you like).  Rubber Soul through to Let It Be are normally what the cool indie kids listen to, and with good reason – these are the albums that are more complex and interesting.  The period where they found Dylan, drugs, mysticism and legal disputes.  I still remember the first time I heard Revolver, with the garbled count-in of ‘Taxman’, and thinking the cassette was broken because it sounded so weird.  And then by the end of the album realising where The Chemical Brothers had got their career from on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.  ‘Love Me Do’ just wouldn’t have held the same sonic revelations.  I expect those amongst my generation who got into The Beatles started similarly – why would you listen to something so prosaic like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ when you could listen to all the weirdness of ‘I Am The Walrus’?  

This album, for Kurt Cobain, represented The Beatles at their peak

Kurt Cobain is probably the only artist (certainly the only icon) from the last 20 odd years to state a preference for the songs from the early 60s (‘About A Girl’ was famously written after an evening of listening to With The Beatles, and it definitely comes from exactly the same headspace as ‘Don’t Bother Me’).

The Beatles themselves, certainly Lennon and Harrison, didn’t seem particularly sentimental about this era.  Lennon speaking at the end of the 60s said he felt it had gone against his nature to dress in a suit, selling out to make money, although Lennon was a constant revisionist who often told a version of history that most suited his current audience.  But for all of them things from the start of their career were going to make them less proud than things from later on, because they had progressed as artists.  They weren’t going to make great claims for things they felt they had long surpassed, which is why they seemed less enthusiastic when talking about those songs.

However, it remains a fact that all that screaming and hysteria that followed The Beatles like a curse wasn’t for songs from Sergeant Pepper but for the early stuff.  They became “bigger than Jesus” (in Lennon’s hubristic but accurate words) with songs like ‘She Loves You’.  Bob Dylan sat up and took notice of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ when he was the most influential singer songwriter in the world, which seems laughable now – as if Dizzy Gillespie had been inspired by George Formby.  It’s a question of relativism and historical bias.  Because The Beatles outstripped their earlier work in no time at all, it’s easy to overlook that earlier work, and to forget that they hadn’t mapped out their career in advance.

Having recently acquired copies of all the remastered albums I spent a week giving all the early Beatles albums – the unfashionable Beatles albums – a good old airing.  I enjoyed most of it, but it made very clear that at that point they were primarily a singles and live shows band.  Albums were just where singles could be resold with some filler to, well, fill up the running time (although in honesty all of The Beatles’ albums have a fair amount of filler – look at Let It Be).  Even the best songs from this era are difficult to listen to if you’re searching for anything meaningful from the lyrics (which are generally a combination of the words ‘love’, ‘her’, ‘you’, ‘him’, ‘me’ ‘man’, ‘woman’ and occasionally ‘diamond ring’).  But that’s a wrongheaded way of listening to these songs because they weren’t trying to express anything complicated (or anything specific at all).  They were trying to be exciting in a short amount of time, and transfer that excitement to other people.  Anthony Burgess said that “they perform a simple job, adequately”, but he was wrong – they performed a simple job extraordinarily well.  If the lyrics are worthlessly repetitive then the music is versatile and unexpected.  

The albums are shamelessly fun, catchy and deceptive – and punchy enough that when quite unlovable songs like ‘Mr Moonlight’ come on, they go away quickly.  Also, there are more songs you move your hips to.  Perhaps that’s why Help! is viewed as the transitional album, because it’s the last time they even tried to make songs people could dance to.  Rubber Soul is excellent, but from that point on it’s music for the head, not for the hips.

Beatles For Sale is the only Beatlemania album I found it hard to warm
to - it's full of insipid covers and limp originals, and its title suggests
 it was intended as no more than a cash in

Playing ‘Love Me Do’ next to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and trying to comprehend  that there’s only 3 years between them is mindboggling.  They don’t only sound decades apart but worlds apart.  I’ll never love With The Beatles, but I’ve realised that I like it a lot (Lennon’s snide, sarcastic voice was made for such cynicism as ‘Money’).  These albums do have a sense of urgency in a way that the later albums (made by the slightly older and much richer men) don’t. In terms of artistic ambition the later albums win hands down, but listening to the earlier albums gets past The Beatles as mythic cultural legends and reminds you of what made them famous in the first place.  

The fact that everyone was vaguely disappointed by that 90s reunion was that it forcibly reminded people that The Beatles were musicians before they got to become legends.  The public were expecting something legendary from legends, and they got ‘Free As A Bird’ instead.  It was by no means terrible, and arguably more worthwhile than banging out the oldies for money like The Rolling Stones. However, you got the feeling that by reforming they had traded in a bit of their reputation as well.  This is something we will discuss again in a few weeks time in relation to the Pixies…

EPILEPSY: Keep Taking The Tablets

Don't Say Brainstorm - An occasional chat about Epilepsy...

"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "You ask a glass of water..." - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

I’ve recently had a change in medication again, and it’s not the smoothest transition.

It has the effect of making me exhausted.  Absolutely shattered.  The dreams I have are more surreal than they used to be but seem much more real.  It’s just a matter of time, waiting for the body to adjust to this new medication, and things will get back to normal – but just waiting for normal service to be resumed can seem like hard work in itself.  First world problem I know – a self-indulgent complaint from the well fed with free access to drugs – but apparently I seem slightly drunk because I’m running a bit slower than usual, and seeming drunk at 9am is bad for my reputation.  I suppose you could say it's like being drunk with all the fun taken out of it.

Of course I’m not really complaining – well, maybe just a bit, but the bottom line is always going to be that if something is going to reduce my chances of having fits then I’m all for it.  Daily medication is a fact of life for many people in the world, millions of epilepsy sufferers and many more millions who have other illnesses.  I am sure that the vast majority of people would say that the good that their drugs do far outweighs the bad.

Medication has been a presence for every day of my adult life, and a few days of my adolescence for good measure.  Has it changed me?  How would I know?  Put very simplistically, the medications I have been on slow down or dull the brain to reduce the chances of seizures.  So is the version of me I have lived with for half of my life a slowed down and dulled version of some other possible me?  If I didn’t have to take these drugs would I be quicker on the uptake, wittier, more creative and ambitious?  (How could I be wittier?) And would I like this alternative, drug-free me more or less?  I don’t mean to suggest I would be completely different; however, if I hadn’t been on medication for the last 15 years I would be at the very least a slightly different person because I would have had an entirely different experience of life.

Being on medication means taking responsibility for your own condition – making sure you have enough drugs stocked up, enough with you when going away somewhere and remembering to take them.  This is true whether you are well equipped for such responsibility or not.  As an irresponsible young male, I think I did relatively well at organising this side of my life.  There have been very few occasions when I forgot to take my pills, and those times that I did taught me the hard way to have a better memory.  In a way it provided, and still provides, a form of structure, a ritual that bookends the day. 

There are so many different types of pills to be on for epilepsy. 

There are over 20 types of drugs for epilepsy.
Incidentally, my table is littered with blister packs such as these...

Sodium Valproate is one of the most common, and the first type that I was on.  It was moderately successful, in that the seizures were drastically reduced; but the aim is to cut out fits entirely, and I have had at least one fit every year that I have been diagnosed.  After moving to a combination of Lamotrigine and Levitiracetam 5 years ago the fits reduced further, but after a spate of seizures last Christmas a third drug, Carbmazepine, has been added – which is where you came in.  These tweaks in medication are always discussed with the consultants I have seen, and my attitude has generally been ‘why not?’  Despite my griping about the initial effects of this new drug I’m very pro-medication, and am thankful to live in a time when medicine exists at the level of sophistication it does now.  Having epilepsy in the middle-ages would have sucked.  At best you would get some Valerian root to chew on; at worst given up on as a lost cause, and left to convulse as and when you pleased.

There can be a stigma about medication.  Some people who are prescribed medication don’t want it, perhaps because they themselves see it as a stigma.  I have heard an account of someone who didn’t want to go to a doctor or get medication for their seizures because they thought they might lose their job.  The person in this account was a lorry driver.  This kind of thing is why I am pro-medication (and educating people about the condition).  Though sympathetic to that person’s situation that is undeniably irresponsible behaviour, putting the sufferer’s life and the lives of others at risk.  If people were more informed about epilepsy that individual might not have had to feel forced into neglecting his condition.  As it turned out the seizures in this case were mild, were controlled by medication, and the job was kept.

In the 21^st century the medication we have helps people with a condition like epilepsy live healthy and (relatively) normal lives.  Pharmaceutical drugs should be embraced.  For a short period of time I may not enjoy the fact my new medication has sapped some of my energy – but I know that in the long run it gives me a chance to have a life like other people, which is something that everyone should be entitled to.  Generally speaking, were I to avoid taking medication not only would I be failing to confront reality but I would be denying myself that basic right. 

Maybe if I hadn’t been on medication since this whole epilepsy thing started I would have been a different person (for better or worse); but either way I would have been a person that lived in fear of a treatable medical condition ruining everything – probably with strong justification.  Ultimately, I am a better person for feeling safe and independent, and feeling exhausted for a few days is a small price to pay for that.

For more information about epilepsy contact the Epilepsy Society and Epilepsy Action