Julia 1984 – A Review

-Sandra Newman

The voice from the telescreen boomed indistinctly, and she stood with chin raised, gazing up at the enormous face. Twenty-seven years it had taken her to learn what kind of smile was hidden behind the black moustache. But it was all right, everything was all right. She had won the victory over herself at last. She hated Big Brother.

When I first heard that there was to be a second novel written in the world of 1984, and one that was supposed to be a feminist take on one of the most important pieces of literature in the Western canon, I must admit my hopes weren’t high. Presenting the events of the first book to a second set of eyes rarely, in my opinion, works out very well even when it is written by the same author: the alternate character interpretation of Aunt Lydia in The Testaments, which stands in stark contrast to the character portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale, is difficult to swallow at least partly because it implies one of the more unpleasant characters in the older book was actually good all along and that her acts of evil, often petty, were for a greater good. Julia, Winston Smith’s love interest from 1984, is nowhere near as vile as Aunt Lydia, yet presenting the events through her eyes runs the risk of minimising or degrading Winston Smith.

And after reading Julia, I have to admit the results are decidedly mixed.

Julia starts at the moment lays eyes on Winston Smith for the first time, framed in a manner exploring the lives of lower-class party woman in the world of 1984. It is strange to realise that Winston, for all that he is trapped in a totalitarian nightmare, is actually one of the most privileged characters in the setting. Julia lives in what is effectively a barracks with other women, watched constantly by the party, and - like the rest of the women - is at risk of exploitation by powerful men. They are forced to pretend to believe in the party’s ideology, while making concessions and compromising themselves to gain even a minor degree of safety. For example, on one hand, the Party regards sex as inherently wrong and nearly every female character is supposed to disdain it, but on the other they are often forced into sex, which results in pregnancy, and the only way to escape charges of unsanctioned sex is to apply for artificial insemination. Early in the book, Julia realises Vicky - a young and naïve women who has been exploited by an older man - is pregnant and needs an excuse, but because of the near-constant monitoring (both through bugs and informers) can only hint at it and in the end the poor girl winds up having a back-alley abortion rather than go through with the pregnancy. There is no such thing as safety, despite their best efforts, and saying the wrong thing can easily be disastrous.

Through Julia’s eyes, we also see the formation of the regime and the effects on people who live outside the city. Julia found herself living on a farm, after her mother took her child and fled from the conflict raging over England, watching helplessly as the old order passed away to be replaced by inexperienced bureaucrats wielding power over people and farms they simply didn’t understand, a cross between Cambodia, North Korea and the early days of Bolshevik Russia. The schoolrooms are run by stern and brutal teachers, who teach learning by rote and severely punish children who cannot memorise the Party’s approved texts. The book describes in gruesome detail precisely what sort of people flourish under such a system, from informers who betray their neighbours to paedophiles; Julia herself is forced into a relationship by an older man, and she is uneasy aware that several younger girls were taken to see some party bigwigs one day, after which they simply vanished. It is a testament to how dark this world is that Julia’s mother concedes the one good thing about her lover, her rapist, is that when he knew the Party was finally coming for him he shot himself, rather than let himself be interrogated. He would almost certainly have betrayed Julia if he had lived longer.

Like many others in such controlled circumstances, Julia responds by rebelling in what few ways she can. Sex is one of them, and her initial impression of Winston Smith is not exactly positive. It takes her time to get close to him, made harder by the constant monitoring, and some of their interactions take on newer and more sinister meanings. She finds it exciting to tease him a little, yet is also fearful of the beast that lurks underneath all men; she rolls her eyes at his belief, as they dive further into their covert rebellion against a system that is not inclined to forgive anything, that the proles will eventually rise and save them. But Julia, as is made clear from the text, has more contact with the proles than Winston.

Their love affair is discovered, of course. Julia finds herself used by O’Brien to lure Winston further and further into sin, at least partly because Julia is a little more perceptive than Winston and realises fairly quickly that Carrington’s shop (and the room above they use for their trysts) could not exist for long without the Party knowing about it and approving. She is caught up in a maze of conflicting emotions, a seething mess of torment that only grows worse when she is approved for artificial insemination and is injected with what (she is told) is Big Brother’s semen. Now pregnant, Julia was forced to play her role and aid in Winston’s arrest, one flicker of hope torn away brutally when she too is sent to prison. The only thing that saves her from far worse treatment than Winston is her pregnancy, and that will not last forever.

After torture, Julia is released (like Winston), and left to play out the rest of her life as a warning to the rest of the Outer Party. Finding a kind of solace in being ostracised by everyone save her fellow former prisoners/object lessons, Julia (unlike Winston) manages to convince herself that she hates Big Brother. It is that that gives her the strength to flee the city when she discovers the country has been invaded, eventually encountering the invading army - a combination of English exiles and escapees from Airstrip One - as it takes Big Brother prisoner and completes the destruction of the regime. Julia asks to see the man she has been told to idolise for most of her life, and is shocked to discover that - at the end of his era - Big Brother is a senile old man. She reflects, bitterly, that his body could almost certainly no longer produce sperm, leaving the precise question of who fathered her child up in the air. It may or may not be a happy ending, but at least she has hope.

Just as it is impossible to understand Romeo and Juliet without understanding that the two lovers were young, it is impossible to understand 1984 without realising that it is not so much a thriller or an action story, regardless of poor doomed Winston’s pretensions, but a piece of literature describing life in an omnipotent tyranny that destroys everything it touches, including the brief love affair of Winston and Julia, not only because it can but also because it must. The thought police are not so much looking for enemies as they are creating them, deliberately entrapping Winston just to give themselves something to do. This is both a strength and weakness of the original book: the soviet union appeared undefeatable in 1948 when 1984 was written, but at this point we know that such regimes eventually collapse under their own weight. This is not to say, of course, that such collapse is painless. The sheer level of hatred such regimes engender, the bitter frustration of being unable to speak your mind and the curdling of harmless thoughts into something dangerous because they cannot be expressed, ensures the explosion - when it finally comes - is terrifying. The French Revolution would not have been half so violent if the French Monarchy had not been so repressive.

This provides an interesting contrast between the two books. Winston is trapped an ever-present now. To him, the picture of a boot stamping on a human face forever is all too real; the Inner Party is all-powerful and the Thought Police are infallible. The constant rewriting of history is created a world in which the Party is in power, has been in power, and will always remain in power forever. Julia, by contrast, saw the foundation of the Party and the Rise of the New Order from a very different point of view, and knows the Party is made up of people, who are deeply corrupt and have no qualms about exploiting their position to enrich themselves. This should make her naturally more rebellious than Winston, and in a sense she is.

At the same time, the fact that Julia is manipulated into helping to entrap Winston and catch him in the act gives her character a far darker nature than in 1984. This offers the interpretation that Julia has no choice, that she is a product of a repressive and truly horrific regime and therefore has little resembling the morals of someone born in a more civilised society; it also suggests that Julia was a target as well as Winston, that she too was being entrapped even as she helped to trap others. It is unpleasant to realise that Julia is inadvertently responsible for revealing Winston’s greatest fear, leading to the denouncement in Room 101 and Winston’s mental surrender to the Party. It is also strange to realise she slept with nearly every named male character in the original book, and that she was also responsible for Parsons’ arrest through telling him to use ‘down with Big Brother’ as dirty talk in bed.

Winston himself, seen through Julia’s eyes, is also a different character. Sometimes pathetic, sometimes angry, sometimes a rebel without a cause or a clue. Indeed, there are times when he has stereotypical incel-fantasies about hurting women, the kind of fantasies men often have when they are deprived of more suitable ways to vent their feelings. (Domestic abuse was terrifyingly common in Soviet Russia, and remains so in dictatorial states today; women, understandably find such fantasies alarming.) Julia is often internally dismissive of him, mocking his belief they are doomed and that they have to get what pleasure they can before the inevitable catches up with them. She is less inclined to be intellectual than Winston, but when does she have the time to develop intellectual interests? There is far less privacy, let alone intellectual freedom, for unmarried young women.

I have very mixed feelings about the reimagining of their affair. The whole point of 1984 is that the Thought Police cannot allow any threat to the Party’s dominance to exist, even something as minor as a love affair between a low level functionary and a mechanic. The idea of Julia not being genuinely in love with Winston damages the original relationship in some way, and making her an active partner in betraying Winston and others degrades her character.

On a wider scale, Newman adds a considerable degree of depth to the world of 1984 and outlines what is like to live in such a state. The endless shortages are made clear, with the black market the only functional economic net in the city, as are the indignities women and low-ranking Party members are forced to accept - or else. Julia sees more of the world than Winston, from wandering into the world of the Inner Party - like many other real-world regimes, the Inner Party members and their families have luxuries the rest of the world are denied, treated like aristocrats in every sense the word - and then travelling outside the city, where she encounters rebels and liberators. Where 1984 is intensely focused on Winston, Julia brushes against other characters, from a prole mother running the black market and trying to make sure her daughter marries well to Vicky and even a woman who was once a senior member of the Party, now a prisoner whom Julia encounters while held in jail herself. This adds an odd little twist to the story’s changed theme - the Party is in fact falling apart at the seams - because Julia’s mother met the senior member when she was a great deal younger and she has gone up to the top and then down again.

This is illustrated by another point: early in the book, the prole mother is proud of her daughter for getting engaged to a well-connected young man; later on, with the wolf at the door, this love affair has come to an end and the poor girl has to pretend she ended it herself, in hopes of staying safe from her fellow proles.

Newman also offers a great deal of social commentary. The lack of proper sex education and birth control leads, rapidly and inevitably, to unwanted children, illegal abortions, and a great many other tragedies. The inability to talk about such matters openly ensures that many are ignorant, or - worse - dangerously misinformed and the results are often horrific. The endless Hate sessions seem ludicrous, but celebrations of hate turn people into monsters and poison entire societies. The Hate Month shown in the book has uneasy parallels to events in North Korea, Iran, and Palestine, as well as college campuses in the wake of the Gaza War. These are not intended to show support, but to intimidate people into keeping their mouths shut and pretending to love Big Brother. Ironically, as Donald Trump’s victory in the recent election suggests, such displays are often counter-productive. Watching college students cosplay Kristallnacht shocked the world.

The ending of the novel is a very different take on the world of 1984 and part of me thinks it would better if it had ended with Julia’s realisation that she hated Big Brother. Winston is trapped forever in a nightmare, unsure when he will be finally taken and executed and yet certain that one day it will happen. Julia encounters rebels, and witnesses the fall of the regime: she even discovers the truth behind the portraits of Big Brother. It reminds me, in some ways of the ending of The Owl House or even The Trial of Anna Cotman, in which the ultimate villain is much harder to take seriously without the mask, and lacks any grand cause. The ideal of Big Brother is very different from the reality, much as Saddam Hussein was just a man when he was finally hanged. In hindsight, the hate served an obvious purpose in keeping the dictator’s subjects under his thumb until it was too late.

I have mixed feelings about it. The ultimate point of 1984 is that the regime will never come to an end. By contrast, Julia offers hope - but it is the hope of outside liberation, rather than an uprising that destroys Big Brother. Perhaps Newman will write a second book, from the point of view of someone who managed to flee Airstrip One, join the rebel army, and return in triumph. Or perhaps it would better to leave such things to our imaginations.

In conclusion, what can I say?

1984 remains one of the most important books in our canon for a reason. It is a grim reminder of just how bad tyranny can be, a cautionary warning we should heed in a world where we are, as the meme says, developing the torment nexus. We live in a world where we are threatened by enemies within and without: the former insisting loudly that they are driven by good intentions while forgetting where good intentions lead; the latter exploiting our good nature, the morals we have developed over the centuries, and turning them against us … and in doing so, eroding them to the point of uselessness. Julia adds a certain depth to the universe, not just in fleshing out characters who are unmentioned in the original, but in outlining both the greater world around London and the effects growing up in such an environment, surrounded by lies and the evidence of lies, can have on human minds.

It has its flaws. In some places, it cheapens the original book. But the author does a very good job of creating the same atmosphere, and also offering hints of hope mixed with fear. And perhaps it will cause some people to think of the dangers of building the torment nexus, of allowing disagreement to be criminalised and dissidents to be dehumanised, to strip rights from people you don’t like or disagree with only to discover, too late, that those who play with fire will often get burnt. If the ultimate lesson of any sort of radical movement is that it will eventually be destroyed in a purity spiral, or taken over by people who intend to exploit it while using the movement’s lingo to justify their actions and excuse their crimes, it is no bad lesson to learn.

Down with Big Brother!