Orwell: The New Life

By D. J. Taylor

Simon & Schuster/May, 2023

Reviewed by Bob Rae

July 12, 2023

Twenty years ago, D.J. Taylor wrote a biography of George Orwell that, at the time, Christopher Hitchens described in his Washington Post review as “Not only the best recent biography of George Orwell…but also one of the cleverest studies of the relationship of that life to the written word.”  Taylor has now written a new, bigger book that contains much new material, information, and perspectives that put his assessment and appreciation of Orwell on an even higher plane.

My own love of Orwell began with reading Animal Farm when I was 14, at the urging of my brother John, and has only grown with the years. His directness, mockery of pomposity, commitment to truth telling, love of popular culture, and his political courage have been my most constant literary companions for over 60 years.

The continuing flow of Orwellian scholarship has been extraordinary, but is richly deserved: Orwell’s life and contribution to our understanding of the modern world put him at the very top of writers of the modern era. Since the advent of surveillance-state expansionism and propaganda ubiquity, sales of Animal Farmand 1984 have exploded around the world, in dozens of languages. His understanding of totalitarian tyranny, his fearlessness in taking on the “smelly little orthodoxies” of his time, put Orwell at the very top of political writers. What Jonathan Swift did for his time, Orwell has done for ours.

Drawing on his own interviews, as well as the unprecedented work by Peter Davison to gather all of Orwell’s writings and letters at the Orwell Archives at the University of London, Taylor has written a masterpiece that itself is full of wit, insight, and deep humanity.

As Taylor himself admits, this will not be the last book on Orwell. There is simply too much there, too many ways in which his understanding of propaganda, surveillance, double-talk, Newspeak, chicanery, duplicity, lying, cruelty, hypocrisy, requires constant review and analysis. But it is the most comprehensive and clear-eyed assessment of Orwell’s life from start to finish.

The man who would become George Orwell was born as Eric Blair, in India, where Richard Blair, his father, was an official in the Indian Civil Service with responsibilities for managing the lucrative opium trade. He grew up in the south of England, went to private schools, eventually winning a scholarship to Eton College.  A mediocre student, upon leaving Eton he went to Burma as a police officer, serving the five years that informed his first novel, Burmese Days. While working on the Rohingya crisis, I found a wonderful book by an American journalist whose pen name is Emma Larkin; Finding George Orwell in Burma.

My own love of Orwell began with reading Animal Farm when I was 14, at the urging of my brother John, and has only grown with the years.

Larkin describes spending time retracing Blair’s career and postings in different parts of Burma, and, as Taylor confirms, his experiences affected his evolving political views. In later published essays such as “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging”, as well as in Burmese Days, Orwell draws a sharp portrait of colonial oppression and its human consequences.

Blair was furloughed after five years due to a serious bout of dengue fever, and on return to England broke the news to his family that he was not returning to imperial duties and was determined to become a writer. His second decision was that in order to write he needed to experience more of life not as a figure of authority, but as an independent person determined, as much as he could be, to shed the trappings of class and to reflect the lives of working people.

His first published book, the memoir Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933 under his new pen name, George Orwell, supposedly after the river Orwell. As an interesting side note, another name he considered at the time was H. Lewis Allways. Down and Out was well reviewed, and George Orwell was launched as a writer whose social and political commitment would inspire his writing over a remarkable 18-year career.

Orwell wrote novels, reviews, political analysis, satires, and poetry. His most active years were at a time of deep political battles and controversy, what one writer has called the “dark valley” of depression, war, and tyranny.  Orwell was not afraid of controversy, nor did he believe he could back away from the fight.

Drawing on unpublished material, D.J. Taylor also gives us a clear sense of the complexities of Orwell’s personal life – his challenging relationship with his father, his many love affairs, both requited and unrequited, and his continuing search for spiritual meaning in a world where traditional religious faith had lost its hold. It might surprise some readers to know of Orwell’s continuing, deep interest in religious issues and controversy. He was not a person of religious certainty, but he was searching for secular moralities that would limit tyranny and end the abuse of unlimited power.

As a writer, Orwell was constantly searching for truth and clarity. As a political activist, he did not take easily to the world of partisanship and political parties. His decision to go to Spain at the time of the Spanish Civil War drew him into a war that was more complicated than he had thought. Originally thinking he would join the International Brigade, upon arrival in Barcelona he decided to join a smaller group of independent leftists. He soon discovered that the Comintern was determined to purge the “Trotskyites”, and in Homage to Catalonia Orwell gives us a chilling account of the ruthlessness of Stalinists and their fellow travellers. Shot in the neck by a sniper, he returned to England with news of the excesses of both the left and the right, and the dangers of a new peril: totalitarianism.

When Molotov and Ribbentrop signed their infamous pact on August 23, 1939, carving up Eastern Europe between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Orwell concluded that democracy needed to find its voice. Hence the biting satire of Animal Farm and the terrifying dystopia of 1984.

Orwell suffered for many years from tuberculosis. Taylor provides a touching conclusion to this remarkable life, as Orwell raced against time to finish the manuscript for 1984. Orwell died in a London hospital in January of 1950, survived by his son, Richard Blair, and his wife, Sonia Brownell.

His legacy and insight surround us still.

Bob Rae is Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations.