Unluv Week

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A review of year84 by Brennan Conaway

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George Orwell had a difficult job when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four: the novel had to drop the reader into a world almost completely different to his or her own while it had to be constructed in the world of its then readers and be comprehensible to them. The terminology of this is one example: INGSOC is devising a new language, Newspeak, which will allow it to direct thought, but the transition is not complete. In the Appendix the narrator explains:

… any word – this again applied in principle to every word in the language – could be negatived by adding the affix un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis, doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant ‘warm’, while pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively ‘very cold’ and ‘superlatively cold’.

In a previous page, though, it has also said:

In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing.

Yet if Newspeak were to be ubiquitous there would be no word “hate”, as in Two-Minutes Hate: it would have become extinct, as such a word would be replaced by the negative principle. In his clever re-working of Nineteen Eighty-Four, year84, re-writing the English of the 1940s into Newspeak, Brennan Conaway has recognised Orwell’s novel, like all re-written literature (and there were whole departments in the Ministry of Truth doing this, remember), would be something completely different. That is “Hate Week” would become Unluv Week. And Nineteen Eighty-Four would be completely different.

In his “Intro” Conaway explains his intention, the guidance he found in Orwell’s Appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak”, and the difficulties and inconsistencies he found in Orwell’s examples. Comrade Syme told Winston Smith what would happen – an instruction that Conaway takes as his prime directive:

The whole literature of the past will … exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.

Conaway explains:

This meant changing Nineteen Eighty-Four in such as way that Orwell contradicts himself. The tragic story of Winston’s attempt to rebel against a totalitarian government and celebrate his love for Julia becomes, though ideological translation, the triumphant tale of a brotherly bureaucracy returning a citizen to sanity after crimethink has put him in danger.

Some examples of Conaway’s work are illuminating. Let us ignore the first paragraph – some of us have imagined that in Newspeak – but take the first sentence of the second paragraph:

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.

Oldthinkers might recognise some negative thought in that line. In year84 it becomes:

The hallway smelled of uncold stew and new carpets.

That is, firstly, the use of the negative un- formation; secondly, the ideological substitution of “new carpets” for “old rag mats”; and, thirdly, in this example, the verb formation remains the same – “smelled” would be “smelled” in both Oldspeak and Newspeak. A few lines down, the verbing that Orwell predicted becomes obvious as the line

The voice came from an oblong metal plaque…

becomes

The speaking comed from the oval metal telescreen…

What happens to Winston after he has emerged from Room 101? He sits in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, with thoughts he can and cannot control in his head. Orwell wrote:

He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were. Some things had happened, others had not happened.

Conaway introduces a paragraph break, re-writing this as:

He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was an untrue memory.

He was worryed by untrue memories sometimes. They were unimportant, if he recognised them. Somethings had happened, others had unhappened.

From which we can see how he has been able to master the grammar of Newspeak – in the use of “worryed” or “unhappened”, for instance. Of course, a bigger question would be, could anyone have an interior life, in which they saw pictures in their mind, in the world of Big Brother? Conaway may not answer that question but he has skilfully used the implications of Newspeak to write year84. Comrade Syme predicted much of what he had to do, and the three mottos of the party – given what Syme said must become of them – which Conaway quotes at the end of his “Intro” and then appear as the last three lines of Part One – show how well he completed his task.

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year84, by Brennan Conaway (2023, Ministry of Truth/Self-published, ISBN13: 9798218234188). Pp199.