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Why Orwell Matters. By Christopher Hitchens. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Pp. 211. $24.
As 1984 approached, interest in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and in Orwell himself swelled to massive, probably unprecedented proportions: a surfeit of books, essays, symposia, op ed pieces and even television specials-in a few of which I was complicit. As the frenzy began to abate, a colleague asked me one day, "Do you think people will still read Orwell once 1984 has passed?" The question put me in mind, uncharitably, of an anecdote related by the great mezzo soprano of the early years of the last century, Louise Homer, who told of being seated at dinner next to a Senator who obviously knew nothing about music but gallantly wanted to break the ice: "Will opera continue," he asked, "now that Mr. Caruso is dead?" I initially put my colleague's question into that category, the laughably naive; but the more I thought about it and as historical events began shifting the ideological landscape, the more the question struck me as germane-and important. Recast declaratively, it provides the title of Christopher Hitchens's new book, Why Orwell Matters.
Had he shifted his tense-why Orwell mattered-Hitchens's task would have been a piece of cake. One could easily make the case that Nineteen Eighty-Four was the most important twentieth-century work of fiction: not the best, certainly, aesthetically, but the one with the greatest social impact, a book that actually influenced the course of history. In his essay on "good bad books," Orwell identifies as "the supreme example" of this genre Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, "an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents," but one "essentially true" and written in a good cause. This clunky, lachrymose book exerted, of course, probably a greater historical impact than any other fiction of its century; everyone knows Lincoln's (supposed) comment on meeting Mrs. Stowe, "So you're the little lady that caused this great war."
Nineteen Eighty-Four, of literary merit infinitely superior to Stowe's book, occupies an analogous place in the last century, a fiction that, along with Animal Farm, weighed decisively in shifting the balance in the intellectual Cold War. In the immediate post-World War II period when Stalinist-Maoist Communism vied for the minds of men, Orwell...