Julia by Sandra Newman book review

George Orwell never went down the memory hole, but a layer of gray dust settled over his work after the Cold War.

His two great dystopias, “Animal Farm” and “1984,” calcified into high school classics. Overuse bent his clever neologisms into clichés.

Apple appropriated the terrifying motif of “Big Brother” for a glitzy TV commercial. And Orwell’s name became a common adjective — Orwellian — an increasingly blunt instrument to hurl at anybody guilty of baldfaced obfuscation or, ultimately, at anybody you disagree with.

Near the start of the 21st century, those allusions exploded, along with the deserts of Iraq, as President George W. Bush rummaged around for weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

After passage of the Patriot Act, Americans’ private lives were subjected to surveillance more sophisticated than the telescreens of Oceania. So apt did the comparison feel that some wag at the Orange County Register ran a fake news story reporting that the Orwell estate was suing Bush for plagiarism.

All politicians are equal, but some are more equal than others. Indeed, it took the ascension of a multiply-bankrupt reality TV star to make Orwell doubleplus relevant again.

From the first day of President Donald Trump’s reign of chaos, “1984” provided a handy codebook. White House press secretary Sean Spicer insisted that Trump’s inauguration crowd was the largest ever — while all of us looked at contrary images on TV. Fluent in Newspeak, Minister of Truth Kellyanne Conway explained that the incoming administration was relying on “alternative facts.”

Given that publicity campaign, Orwell’s novel spiked to No. 1 on Amazon. Sales of “1984” skyrocketed 9,500 percent, and the publisher announced a special 75,000-copy reprint to meet the rush of demand. “Just remember,” Trump told a crowd of veterans the next year, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” which sounded eerily reminiscent of Big Brother’s insistence that Party members must “deny the evidence of your senses.”

As the clocks strike 13 once again, it’s time to venture back to Oceania and experience that dystopia with fresh eyes — or other eyes. That’s exactly what Sandra Newman does in her subversive new novel, “Julia.”

With the approval of the Orwell estate, it’s a retelling of “1984” from the perspective of Winston Smith’s lover. The effect of that single shift is uncanny: The world Julia describes is entirely familiar but subtly altered from the one Winston experiences.

In addition to filling out the tragedy of Julia’s adolescence, Newman introduces several ingenious twists that let the plot proceed largely as expected but with curiously different implications.

Except for one extraordinary scene, everything Newman does takes place within the confines of that grim original story. Somehow, she has stuck her tweezers into Orwell’s bottle and rebuilt the ship pointing the other way.

Many of the characters, the Ministries of Truth and Love, the ever-shrinking dictionary, the constantly rewritten histories, the Two Minutes Hate, the endless war with Eurasia (or is it Eastasia?) and all your favorite horrors from “1984” are here.

But while “Julia” depends on Orwell for its architecture, the novel’s ironic tone is Newman’s own. By switching the perspective from Winston, she has effectively expanded the story’s palette.

The realm Newman describes is no more free nor tolerant than the one Orwell made famous, but it’s given considerably more room to breathe. (It’s also given considerably more pages, which is not entirely a good thing.)

All this flows from her lively heroine, Julia, which is a brilliant strategy for re-seeing this iconic story. After all, in “1984” Orwell himself notes: “In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda.”

So “Julia” considers just how such a young woman might really behave. As Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” has made plain, totalitarianism inevitably hits women of childbearing age in ways it doesn’t hit men. And Newman knows the dystopian terrain well. Last year, she published “The Men,” a novel in which everyone with a Y chromosome mysteriously vanishes.

Review: 'The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984'

In public, Julia appears to follow all the rules — after all, the Thought Police insist — and she sprinkles her conversation with inane Newspeak, feigns enthusiasm for obviously false Party propaganda and participates in the Anti-Sex League.

But she’s covertly funny and outgoing. Her first job was writing porn for proles — dreadful, sweaty tales with titles such as “Inner Party Sinners: ‘My Telescreen Is Broken, Comrade!’” By the time the novel opens, she’s a technician with the Fiction Department who lives in a hostel with dozens of unmarried women, some of whom are actual friends.

And she sleeps around — a lot — with one ineligible man after another, especially outdoors. In other words, like millions of people trapped under totalitarian governments, she’s found ways to cheat a crooked system, to grow flowers in the regime’s excrement, to thrive a little in the cracks that the telescreens can’t monitor.

All of which, by comparison, makes Winston Smith, here nicknamed “Old Misery,” seem like an insufferable bore. And yet something about Winston catches Julia’s eye. “Good-looking,” she thinks, “or might have been, if he hadn’t always looked so sour.” How thrilling, Julia thinks, to catch Winston “at some unspeakable crime” in a dingy prole neighborhood. “Mightn’t his drabness be a clever disguise?” she wonders before drifting off into some serviceable fantasy about him unleashed.

“Such were Julia’s thoughts,” Newman writes, “in the days before she did the thing that killed them.”

If you know “1984,” this feels like “The Wizard of Oz” switching from black-and-white to color. Unwilling just to fantasize about Winston, Julia goes about subtly seducing him. “The summer was saved from boredom,” she thinks. But Winston can’t shake his tedious melancholy, his exhausting obsession with the Party’s ills.

She tries to sleep as he reads aloud from some illicit manifesto “as if it contained revelation after revelation.” Please, she thinks, “the dimmest schoolchild could have told you as much.” Winston even keeps a little diary of his supposedly profound, criminal thoughts. “What rot!” Julia tells him.

“We are the dead,” Winston intones.

“We’re not dead yet,” Julia counters. “For goodness sake!” And then she blithely deconstructs Winston’s self-defeating, self-absorbed pessimism. “Which would you rather sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive!”

This dialogue is lifted almost verbatim from Orwell’s “1984,” but by recasting it with Julia’s internal commentary, Newman has created something in a different register. “Why,” she wonders, “was the damned man always complaining?” I’m reminded of Anthony Hecht’s brilliant retort to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” which begins:

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl

With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,

And he said to her, “Try to be true to me,

And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad

All over, etc., etc.”

Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read

Sophocles in a fairly good translation

And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,

But all the time he was talking she had in mind

The notion of what his whiskers would feel like

On the back of her neck.

But “Julia” isn’t just a glib mockery of Winston’s tortured soul. It’s a thoughtful exploration of a clever woman’s survival within an unimaginably cruel bureaucracy, one she dares to realize is ridiculous. “Thoughtcrime was nothing to do with crime. It wasn’t even a prelude to real crime,” she thinks with a start. “One might as well execute a boy of six for saying he would like to be a pirate.”

Julia arrives at a fresh condemnation of totalitarianism that refuses to accept it as worthy of political debate; she knows it’s simply an “unseemly farce.”

That’s not to suggest that Newman discounts the physical agony of totalitarianism — or Orwell’s “1984.” The shocking scenes you remember from school are still here, and just as vivid, but laced with the grotesque banality of office routine. It turns out that even in Room 101, the paperwork is a nightmare.

Although I wouldn’t presume to say that Newman’s novel is better than Orwell’s, I find “Julia” more humane than “1984,” which, admittedly, may sound preposterous given Orwell’s intentions. But Newman presents a fuller consideration of the variety of lives under a murderous, humiliating political system.

And her ending — oh, if we could only talk about the ending! It twists around more erratically than the tails of those rats so hungry to eat out Winston’s eyeballs.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.

Julia

By Sandra Newman

Mariner. 385 pp. $30

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