However, ultimately, the novella’s weaknesses and Burgess’s essays, offering intelligent and thought provoking insights into Nineteen Eighty-Four, both serve as a testament to Orwell’s brilliance. Whilst the unusual format of the book is an interesting experiment, the novella does not have the same impact or resonance as Nineteen Eighty-Four and even though Burgess is at pains to point out that he is not a racist and warns that: “we have a duty not to turn abstractions like class and race into banners of intolerance, fear and hatred,” it does, at times, make for uncomfortable reading. Like Orwell, he agrees that war is a necessary state instrument for keeping a population under control, as it creates a climate of fear where people are ready to surrender their freedom.
He believed, in the future, America would use the vast cybernetic and electronic resources at its disposal to keep its population under surveillance and that war in the future would be fought with conventional, rather than nuclear, weapons on ideological, rather than national grounds. More prescient and interesting are, however, his thoughts in the epilogue on war and surveillance. Burgess, clearly, did not foresee, that in the same year of 1985’s publication Margaret Thatcher would be elected as UK Prime Minister and a new era of severely curtailing the powers of Unions would ensue. Perhaps the most fascinating part of the book is the epilogue interview, where Burgess concedes his novella is less a prediction of the future, than a satire of the present, which was around the period of the Winter of Discontent. Whereas in Nineteen Eighty-Four the television is used an instrument for surveillance, in 1985 it is a passive form of entertainment that merely dulls the senses. A lengthy handwritten manuscript by Julian Symons, reviewing an Anthony Burgess novel 1985 that was released in 1978. In the novella, Burgess depicts a stagnant, mundane and brutal society in the stranglehold of Trade Unions who’s almost continuous strikes for higher wages merely fuels a spiral of inflation and where a rise in Islamic fundamentalism is sponsored by Arabic oil money. 1985 is part essay, in the form of Burgess interviewing himself on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and part novella, giving his own dystopian nightmare vision of the future.
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