Julia
Sandra Newman, Granta, £18.99

MANY people read George Orwell’s 1984 at school before they’ve come across other literary dystopias. Given the unrelenting, very English gloom that pervades it, chances are it puts them off the genre for good. 

Savvy teachers talk up the author’s inventiveness in coining terms like Newspeak, Big Brother, the Ministry of Truth, Ingsoc etc. These have novelty value when first encountered and provoke debate, but have become cliches through overexposure. Orwell’s prescience as regards surveillance is obvious, but its restating has become tiresome and simplistic. 

Winston Smith is half a person, a set of eyes and an empty shell. That’s the point: the State has hollowed him out, and his spirit is as stunted as his body is poorly nourished. In her retelling of the novel — authorised by the famously controlling Orwell estate — Sandra Newman attempts to revivify the story by imagining Oceania through the eyes of Julia, Smith’s lover. The purpose is twofold: to remind us Orwell’s book was heavily gendered and to show how totalitarian societies use and abuse women in specific ways.

For the first two-thirds of the story, there’s an effective, if ponderous, tension similar to that found in the original, neatly set off against Julia’s ironic take on the hypocrisies that thrive in authoritarian systems. The protagonist whizzes around London on her bike like a millennial and shags whoever’s willing and passably able. 

Unlike Orwell’s novel, this one has a sense of humour: airmen mock Newspeak as twatspeak, arsethink and doublepluscunt; telltale signs of wrongthink including sporting an unusual beard and “farting during our leader’s speeches.” As a parody, Julia is entertaining. 

It also works as a thriller, principally by skirting around the dark unknowns at the heart of the Oceanian political system. Newman’s prose has pace and there are moments of lyricism, as when Julia recalls flying over the edge of Airstrip One and seeing light shimmering on a metallic sea; there is a world beyond this one, she intuits. 

The last section of the novel, however, is slow-going. While Julia waits to go into Room 101, we meet, briefly, Diana Winters, a former senior revolutionary turned outlaw, who informs Julia the ministries are corrupt, pettifogging and full of ambitious slime balls. As if she/we didn’t suspect as much. 

She also reminds Julia that she is too insignificant to merit lengthy interrogation. Newman is presumably taking a lead from realities of the USSR and Eastern bloc where oppression and fear were mingled with absurdity and idiocy. 

The problem is that the inciting incident incites nothing much at all and detracts from the horror of the setting. More generally, Newman clogs up her plot with what sometimes reads like padding, as if the author was distracted, too, or slightly bored. The O’Brien scenes are drawn out, their dialogues flabby. Subplots about dormitory-sharer Vicky, Julia’s mother and her youth add detail but sap tension. The work scenes are almost Brave New World ludicrous. 

As we breach the 300-page mark, the tone is uneven verging on swaying and the seams are all too visible.

Julia ridicules Winston Smith even while she romps with him, berating his misogyny, pessimism, ignorance and pomposity. When he tells her that, from the moment of declaring war on the Party, it’s better to think of oneself as a corpse, she scoffs and says: “What rot!” But even the take-down is undermined by the dated diction. 

This hints at a fundamental issue with the reinterpretation. 1984 projected a horrific future; Julia is a retro rehash, an arch period piece. Orwell’s book has been too long and too firmly a fixture on school, university and mass-media syllabuses to surprise anyone. It has also arguably been acclaimed just a bit too enthusiastically; dystopian fiction dates faster than other varieties and I’d bet far fewer people reread the text than gushingly allude to it. 

We live in an era of emulation, sampling, derivation, copycats, tributes. Julia is just such a homage: a well-crafted riff on a far more original book, and a publishing ploy to cash in on a renowned title. 

But the reworking is too long and not relevant enough. You would have to possess an unlimited capacity for doublethink not to see that our present global political reality is terrifying and getting worse, thanks to digitally contrived corporatism, climate-induced catastrophes, widening rifts between north and south and east and west, and gaming superpowers helmed by morons and madmen. AI is already out-big-brothering 1984’s moustachioed monster. 

Orwell’s novel was before its time; this one was dated at conception. We need, as readers, and writers, to move on, with urgency.