Tuesday, May 17, 2011

George Orwell casts long shadow over prize

Displaying Orwellian attributes aplenty Tom Bingham's The Rule of Law and Afsaneh Moqadam's Death to the Dictator! were my top picks when judging this year's Orwell book prize

How much of an influence does George Orwell have on books being written today? Over the last few months, while judging this year's Orwell book prize, I've found myself repeatedly asking this question. While the prize doesn't require writers to slavishly imitate Orwell, it does stipulate that successful entries must display a number of Orwellian attributes, such as "clarity", "intellectual courage" and "critical thought". Above all, works should aspire to Orwell's ambition of "turning political writing into an art". So the question of Orwell's continuing influence, rather than idle speculation, was integral to the judging process. We were being asked to hold today's political writing up to an Orwellian standard, and assess it accordingly.

A number of things became clear. Firstly, Orwell continues to have a discernible influence on today's writing in terms of some types of book that are published. More than anyone else, he popularised the genre of immersive reportage, in works such as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, using it primarily to investigate poverty. This approach remains popular. My fellow judges and I read a number of books that start from the premise of going out into the world and actually doing something (rather than merely observing) and writing about the experience. Examples included Katherine Hibbert's Free: Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society, Charlie Carroll's On the Edge: One Teacher, a Camper Van, Britain's Toughest Schools, and Tim Butcher's (longlisted) Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa's Fighting Spirit.

Secondly, and I think more problematically, Orwell continues to cast a long shadow over any book, whether fiction or non-fiction, that deals with the abuse of political power. Several entries felt superficially Orwellian in this respect, most notably Heather Brooke's The Silent State, about the increasing lack of accountability in British government, and Helen Dunmore's The Betrayal, set in Stalin's Russia during the early 1950s (and the only novel on the shortlist). Yet Orwell's influence in this regard is perhaps more bogus than real, the product of our tendency to extend the word "Orwellian" to any piece of writing that is concerned with sinister, shadowy forces and overweening state power. Certainly Brooke's and Dunmore's books, good as they are, don't bear much resemblance to anything Orwell actually wrote.

Thirdly, Orwell continues to make himself felt in terms of intellectual influence. Many of today's political writers regard Orwell as a touchstone: none more so than Christopher Hitchens, whose Hitch-22 was on our shortlist. Orwell is Hitchens's hero, and in his memoir, he describes how he influenced his thinking and, indeed, his whole approach to journalism. But, once again, this doesn't mean that Hitch-22 is a particularly Orwellian book. Hitchens's writing, accomplished as it is, lacks the clarity and apparent simplicity of Orwell's; equally it is impossible to imagine Orwell writing a conventional biography replete with show-offy tales about his famous chums.

The final way in which Orwell influences today's writers is the hardest to describe, but to my mind the most important. Orwell's truly defining characteristic as a writer was surely stylistic, and had to do with the unflinching, rigorously honest quality of his prose. Reading him, you always feel that he is working things out for himself, proceeding in his arguments solely from his own observations, not from the received opinions that most writers rely on as a substitute for real thought.

This was the quality I most wanted to see in the books I read, and occasionally I found it ? in, for example, Afsaneh Moqadam's superbly unsparing account of a protester's capture and imprisonment during the Iranian upheavals of 2009, Death to the Dictator!. This book, largely overlooked on its release, was the single work I was most excited to discover. Our eventual winner, though, was Tom Bingham's The Rule of Law, which, in a different way, also displays a very Orwellian preparedness to cut to the heart of an issue that has immense importance across the world today. It is a topical, as well as worthy, winner.


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/may/17/george-orwell-prize

Bruno Mars Thierry Henry Cheryl Cole Simon Cowell

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