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CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS. Why Orwell Matters. BASIC BOOKS. 208 PAGES. $24.00
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS is always contrary about something, so it is with no great surprise that we find him attacking his reviewers. "There's always an early paragraph," he moans, "usually written in a standard form of borrowed words that says, `Hitchens, whose previous targets have even included Mother Teresa and Princess Diana as well as Bill Clinton, now turns to ...'" So there it is.
Hitchens's concern over the beleaguered state of modern letters was also of more than passing notice to another contrarian type, George Orwell. Orwell was perhaps even less kind to the press than Hitchens; when he was not censuring their mangling of proper English (he was once "upset for days" when the Tribune printed "verbiosity" in one of its articles), he was abusing them as "professional liars" and "halfwits." "Early in life," he wrote, "I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper."
Hitchens has long taken Orwell to be a kind of intellectual father, and so like father, like son. The similarities between the two men are numerous: To name just the most obvious, they are both English liberals with socialist sympathies, who nonetheless depart from liberal orthodoxy on key subjects. But most importantly, both have long wrestled with questions regarding the relationship between politics and language, between the political life and the literary life. In Hitchens's past writings, the figure of Orwell remained in the background of this larger discussion - the source of a quotation or two - but now in his latest offering, Why Orwell Matters, Hitchens's mentor has become both the work's subject and its pervading spirit.
IN HIS DISCUSSION of Orwell, Hitchens again plays the advocate, but unlike his other works (The Trial of Henry Kissinger, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice), this time he is squarely on the side of his subject. His treatment of Orwell can be most properly described as an appreciation, though he avoids the extremes of the cult of "St. George" - fans of Orwell who, in Hitchens's words, turned his prickly hero into the "object of sickly veneration and sentimental overpraise." Hitchens does manage to register some minor arguments with Orwell - he...