The fiction department

George Orwell started turning up in novels long before his death. His fictional debut goes as far back as his fellow Old Etonian John Heygate’s Decent Fellows (1930), in which he features as an anonymous school prefect watching the headmaster cane a malefactor in his study. There were subsequent appearances in the wartime writings of Inez Holden, and as “Basil” in Stevie Smith’s The Holiday (1949), as well as a possible sighting in the early volumes of his friend Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, in which “Alf Erridge”, Lord Warminster, found brooding over bound volumes of Chums and Boy’s Own in the library at Thrubworth, might be thought to share some of Orwell’s puritanical detachment.

To these early walk-ons can be added a recent clutch of novels that attempt to dramatize various aspects of his career. These include Dennis Glover’s The Last Man in Europe (2017) – this was Nineteen Eighty-Four’s working title – which begins with George meeting his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, in the Hampstead bookshop where he worked in the mid-1930s; Norman Bissell’s Barnhill (2020), which follows the dying man around late-1940s Jura; and Peter Hodgkinson’s Orwell Calling (2022), an ingenious, if not fanciful, reworking of Orwell’s time at the BBC, which finds its hero caught up in a murder mystery. Sandra Newman and Adam Biles’s new novels veer off this track by abandoning fictionalized biography for, respectively, a reinvention and a projection of two of Orwell’s major works.

A good 30,000 words longer than its template, Julia goes straight to the heart of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s central puzzle: the role of its intransigent and no-nonsense female lead. Modern critics tend to argue that the Winston/Julia relationship is a put-up job and Julia a honey trap, commissioned by O’Brien and the hard-faced men of the Inner Party to serve Winston up on a plate to the re-educators at the Ministry of Love. Hard evidence for this claim rests on a passage that Orwell deleted from the original manuscript, presumably on the grounds that it gave too much away. Here Winston and Julia come across each other near O’Brien’s flat. Winston is oppressed by “a curious feeling that although the purpose for which she had waited was to arrange another meeting, the embrace she had given him was intended as some kind of good-bye”.

At the same time Newman homes in on another of the novel’s key features. This, it might be said, is the lack of effort that Orwell puts into Julia as a character. With the exception of Winston’s opening remarks and a handful of speculations about her inner life (“She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated”, etc), we learn next to nothing about Julia and what goes on in her head. The implication is that little does. Resolutely unintellectual and not keen on reading, she reacts to Oceania’s legendary banned book, Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by falling asleep during Winston’s recitation of it. For all her tough talk, she is sometimes more figurative than decisive, and Newman’s principal remit is to grant her an agency that Orwell pretty much denies her.

Naturally the author has a whale of a time fleshing out a series of situational backdrops that Nineteen Eighty-Four sometimes takes for granted. There are deft glimpses of Julia – now surnamed “Worthing” – carrying out her daily routine at the Fiction Department (specimen book title: “Inner Party Sinners: My Telescreen Is Broken Comrade!”), trading black-market goods with her prole chums the Meltons and occupying her leisure hours at the women’s hostel, where the girls sit around watching propagandist TV programmes about “Our Friend, the Potato”. A stint at lavatory-cleaning duty turns up a dead foetus in the bowl, and a saunter past the football stadium turns our eyes to its mural “showing Butler’s famous goal against Eastasia”. All this, together with the neatness of the writing (“the rude musk note of unwashed girl”), has the effect of giving Julia a personality, albeit one little less rebarbative than that of the ur-Julia, as well as filling in the Oceanian back story. There is, for example, tantalizing mention of her parents, who “defended all the Party’s early crimes – the burning of Parliament, the massacre at Sandhurst, the murder of the two princesses”.

Some kind of English revolution, we infer, has taken place in the early 1950s: significantly, traitors to the cause are disparaged as “Attlees” even three and a half decades after the Labour leader’s untimely death. The difficulty with this kind of playfulness is that it can soon turn knowing, if not absolutely tongue-in-cheek. There is an awkwardness to the scene in which Mrs Melton brings news of a bomb attack (“I was out by the house where the Irish live, that building that was the Dog and Trumpet before the landlord got hisself purged”), a feeling of scenery being shifted obtrusively into place. The same goes for the Junior Anti-Sex League’s trips to the Museum of Venereal Diseases. Once the narrative switches to Julia’s involvement with Winston, on the other hand, it turns sharper and more focused, and the risks she is taking with her life are more clearly exposed.

Julia’s affair with Winston – she has also seduced his colleague Parsons, and has plans for their co-worker Ampleforth – predates her involvement with O’Brien. (“Now, you have made a very good start with Smith … He shall be your training subject.”) The winkling out of personnel from Records turns out to be more of a bureaucrats’ power struggle than a zealots’ hunt for subversives. An eventual pregnancy is covered up by a visit to the artificial insemination clinic. From Julia’s angle the Last Man in Europe is a deeply unprepossessing cipher, and some of the bleakest passages find her caustically reflecting on scenes or lines of dialogue taken from Orwell’s original: her comment on Goldstein’s explanation of “doublethink” is that “The dimmest schoolchild could have told you as much”. Yet more pointed, perhaps, is her assumption that The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is, like herself, a plant, invented by “the Truth boys … for of course the book was their work, not Goldstein’s”.

But, as the Thought Police’s descent on her and Winston’s love nest above Mr Charrington’s antiques shop soon reveals, Julia has seriously overplayed her hand. Supposing that she will be allowed to walk free from the Ministry of Love, she ends up having the rat cage intended for Winston attached to her face. Tough cookie that she is, Julia simply chews the head off the first rat and encourages its partner to feed off the corpse. There follows an extended coda in which the narrative tugs free from Orwell to confirm earlier hints about the existence of a full-scale rebellion against the Oceanian state and to reunite her with a hitherto enigmatic fellow inmate from the hostel. Julia, catechized by a man named Reynolds about the lengths to which she is prepared to go in service of “the Brotherhood”, discovers that the new boss is much the same as the old one.

Animal Farm (1945) has already inspired several spin-offs and continuations. The best of the bunch might be David Caute’s Dr Orwell and Mr Blair (1994), an origin story set in the winter of 1943 and featuring a twelve-year-old boy named Alex Jones. Beasts of England, which takes its title from the novel’s revolutionary anthem, is much more of a skit, in which Manor Farm has morphed into the south of England’s “premier petting zoo” while a pig named Buttercup, who has just begun his sixth term as “First Beast”, tries to keep a lid on the mounting chaos that seethes beneath him. Proof of Biles’s satirical intent shines off every page, from the mural featuring “Traviata, the formidable old Jonesist sow – with her inimitable quaffed hairpiece and pearl necklace” to news that the sheep have devised a new chant (“MANOR POUNDS FOR MANOR BEASTS”) and “started seeking forces outside the farm to blame for the current difficulties”.

Much of this is very funny and, as such, strays onto the margin of originality: Animal Farm is full of sly humour, a quality that Sylvia Topp, in her biography Eileen: The making of George Orwell (2020), attributes to the influence on it of Orwell’s first wife. Biles takes up the baton and offers a particularly good joke about the families of itinerant squirrels being invited to pick the farm’s fruit “because all of the farm’s inhabitants agreed that it was better such labour be undertaken by any beasts but themselves”. This leads to an inevitable first-principles debate about what actually constitutes a “Manor Beast”. As in Julia, an occasional sense of a writer grown too conscious of their own facility wafts into view. I laughed delightedly at the scene in which one goose tells another to “Pry on, you crazy gosling”, but readers unacquainted with Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here may not be so forgiving.

As to the future of the “Orwell novel”, one can easily foresee a version of Coming Up for Air (1939) retold by George Bowling’s mirthless wife, Hilda, a retread of Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), reimagined by Gordon Comstock’s put-upon girlfriend, Rosemary, or even a mash-up of A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) featuring the tramps with whom Dorothy fraternizes on the road to the Kentish hop fields. Just as I was writing this piece came news that Paul Theroux is set to publish a novel entitled Burma Sahib, concerning Orwell’s time in the East. The argument to be made about most of these titles, real and imagined, is that in the end they don’t tell us very much about Orwell. But this may be the point.

D. J. Taylor’s most recent novel is Flame Music, 2023. His Orwell: The new Life appeared in May

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