Dorian Lynskey
Doublethink & Doubt
Orwell: 2+2=5
By Raoul Peck (dir)
George Orwell: Life and Legacy
By Robert Colls
Oxford University Press 208pp £14.99
Nobody under the age of seventy-five has heard George Orwell’s voice. The only extant video footage is in a silent movie of the Eton Wall Game. None of his many wartime recordings for the BBC Eastern Service has survived. By all accounts his voice, damaged by a bullet to the throat during the Spanish Civil War, was thin, flat and weak. In fact, the controller of the BBC Overseas Service complained that putting on ‘so wholly unsuitable a voice’ made the BBC appear ‘ignorant of the essential needs of the microphone and of the audience’. Even photographs of Orwell are few and far between, which is why you see the same ones over and over again. For the most part, he exists only on the page, and in our heads.
This poses a challenge to the documentarian, but is an opportunity, too. In the Haitian director Raoul Peck’s film Orwell: 2+2=5, which screened at the London Film Festival and is on general release in March, Orwell’s fellow Old Etonian Damian Lewis gives us the voice we like to imagine: wry, resonant, penetrating, crisply authoritative and quietly furious about the many varieties of bullshit he made it his mission to expose. Peck says that Orwell’s writing is the film’s ‘libretto’, and it is accompanied by scenes from adaptations and docudramas, copious news footage and a witty array of film clips (Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom, Oliver Twist, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and the recent horror film M3GAN all make an appearance).
As in I Am Not Your Negro, his 2016 film about James Baldwin, Peck uses Orwell as a kind of seer, commenting simultaneously on his own era and ours. Orwell never set out to be a timeless prophet, but in trying to explain the horrors of the 1930s and 40s he identified enduring truths about the cruelties and hypocrisies of power. Cue references to Edward Snowden, Jamal Khashoggi, AI, Iraq, Putin’s press conferences, cross-Channel refugees and (repeatedly) Trump. The strength of this connective tissue varies. While it’s bracing to cut from Orwell’s imperial service in 1920s Burma to atrocities in 2020s Myanmar, a segue from the Black Lives Matter slogan ‘I can’t breathe’ to Orwell dying from tuberculosis feels strangely offensive to both parties. Like Asif Kapadia’s Orwellian docudrama 2073, Peck’s film risks seeming like a compendium of everything that is wrong with the world. But I enjoyed its ambition nonetheless.
I doubt that Robert Colls, in his short new biography, George Orwell: Life and Legacy, feels the same way. Orwell: 2+2=5 would seem the work of a man too infatuated with what Colls calls Orwell’s ‘intellectual mystique, a “cool” more often bestowed on rock stars than writers’, and too confident about claiming Orwell for the Left. Colls swings in the opposite direction with a pronounced conservative bias. When hunting for current examples of the persecutions of ‘thoughtcrime’, for example, Colls averts his eyes from the Trump administration’s war on free expression and alights on British universities and publishers. His subtler observations – he likens Nineteen Eighty-Four to ‘a dream about being inside the head of a country that is in the process of losing its mind’ – must compete with the din of partisan axe-grinding.
Orwell’s idiosyncratic jumble of liberal, socialist and conservative instincts can accommodate both Peck’s and Colls’s needs. His fabulously wry first wife, Eileen, described his landmark 1941 essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ as ‘a little book explaining how to be a Socialist, though Tory’. Even in his most revolutionary moods, Orwell was very specific about what should stay and what should go. Small wonder that he found fault with every version of socialism except his own. But then he gave nobody an easy ride, least of all himself. With the sole exception of Animal Farm, he described all of his fiction as ‘awful’ or ‘bollox’ and took masochistic pleasure in itemising all the faulty predictions that he made during the war. ‘It seems to me very important to realise that we have been wrong, and say so,’ he wrote in Partisan Review towards the end of 1944.
Peck focuses on what Orwell got brilliantly right – about fascism, communism, imperialism, nationalism, the abuses of new technology and the lies people tell themselves without necessarily realising. But even when Orwell was proved wrong, which was often, he was wrong in a sincere and interesting way. To quote his disclaimer in Homage to Catalonia, ‘I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest.’
Truth-seeking was Orwell’s creed. As Colls writes, ‘all his life Orwell would charge his enemies not so much with evil but with fraud … All swindlers. All a racket. Down with rackets.’ He trusted things he had personally seen, heard or felt while wrinkling his nose at theory and rhetoric. This justifies Milan Kundera’s blunt claim, as seen in Peck’s film, that Orwell ‘hated politics’. He developed his own organic English socialism by pitting the cheerful solidity of the working classes against the dishonest contortions and sterile fads of the intellectuals.
Where Colls’s chronological approach has the edge on Peck’s time-hopping is in clarifying Orwell’s evolution as a political thinker and the immense effort he put into re-examining his priors. In 1938, as Eileen noted, he retained ‘an extraordinary political simplicity in spite of everything’. The Road to Wigan Pier is oblivious to vast swathes of working-class life, while Homage to Catalonia, brilliant though it may be, is a keyhole view of the Spanish Civil War. Contemporaries such as his future friend Malcolm Muggeridge, in his remarkable 1940 book The Thirties, had a stronger grip on the big picture. The Second World War transformed Orwell by purging some bad habits, from his crude, alarmist pacifism to his unthinking anti-Semitism, and sharpening his eye. Colls argues nicely that, through his wartime output for the BBC, Tribune, Partisan Review and others, Orwell ‘composed, in effect, a prose opera of the English people’. He became the man who could write masterpieces.
Anyone who has engaged with Orwell will be cognisant of his flaws: the seductive generalisations, the hyperbolic denunciations, the frequent appeals to ‘common sense’ (really an umbrella term for the opinions of George Orwell). But his weaknesses, like his strengths, flowed from his obsession with moral clarity in a world drowning in humbug. In many ways, his politics were unsophisticated, yet more sophisticated thinkers were more likely to miss the wood for the trees.
For this reason, Orwell’s reputation has comfortably withstood every unflattering revelation, from his carelessness towards women to his unresolved prejudices. Perhaps the real danger now is that he becomes a floating signifier for people who have only read Nineteen Eighty-Four, if that, and understood almost none of it. When the richest man in the world recently addressed a far-right rally in London from a giant TV screen while wearing a ‘WHAT WOULD ORWELL THINK’ T-shirt, the jokes wrote themselves. Both Peck and Colls counteract such clumsy hijacking simply by drawing attention to what Orwell actually wrote. In 2025, it is not his enemies that Orwell needs defending against but his pseudo-admirers.