*I would add a disclaimer that I am writing about a very new book and spoilers will be inevitable. I heartily recommend reading Sandra Newman’s ‘Julia’, before reading what I have written below. There are also spoilers for ‘1984’ but I feel less inclined to apologise for those!
It is a wonderful time to be a woman retelling classic stories from ‘her’ perspective. Readers of Greek Mythology cannot have failed to notice the volume of recent releases following this theme. We have stories centred on Circe, Medea, the women of Troy, the women of Ithaca. Most are very good and add a freshness to well-known works. They generally follow the modern feminist framework, centring the perspectives of the often-neglected women of these stories, whilst attempting to not so subtly remove some of the gloss from the traditional male ‘heroes’. Sandra Newman’s Julia is written very much in the same spirit. The break from Greek Mythology is an intriguing development and makes one wonder what could be next. Perhaps a retelling of Crime and Punishment narrated through the eyes of Sonia or a version of Huxley’s Brave New World that centres Lenina. In a time of diminishing originality, this genre holds great potential for some interesting work.
Perhaps the difference is that we do not need a female perspective to recognise the shortcomings of the male protagonists of Crime and Punishment and Brave New World, and this is part of the sport. Winston Smith is in Newman’s crosshairs, and in her retelling, his character is diminished greatly. Far from the ‘Last Man In Europe’ – Orwell’s original working title for 1984 – Smith is frequently self-centred, obnoxious, and worst of all, boring. His search for truth is treated by Julia as a childish obsession and she regularly expresses a private dislike for him. When the characters meet for the final time, having been tortured in the Ministry of Love, Winston is reduced to just another inconsiderate male:
“Then she realized with amazement that he hadn’t noticed she was pregnant. All he saw was that his lover had lost her figure. He’d been cheated as a man: that was all the bloodshot eyes expressed”.
Winston may be The Last Man in Europe, but he is also just a man, with all the shortcomings that come with that. The others don’t fare much better. Parsons is an easily manipulated simpleton, who despite his Party loyalty, commits frequent infidelity at the first opportunity. Ampleforth, is treated a little kindlier, but his love of poetry is often reduced to the object of a childish naivety. Even O’Brien, that intellectual inner-Party giant who manipulates and tortures Winston, is revealed to be a bore and a fraud who has, naturally, stolen his most profound thoughts from a woman. The men are, in many ways, crudely caricatured and rendered ridiculous. This never feels more intentional than the famous Room 101 scene. Having screamed for Julia to be savaged by rats rather than himself, Winston first fails to even notice her when wheeled directly past, then proceeds to fall asleep when made to watch her being subjected to this punishment on his behalf, such is his level of self absorption. This level of boorishness feels a little on the nose. Such is the distaste reserved for Winston Smith, that the final reveal of Big Brother as a senile old man, long removed from the solid, moustached face that haunts the posters of Oceania, is something of a small affair. This contrasts with the gentle and generous way in which a character like Vicky is treated, and the portrayal of her relationship with Julia throughout the story is a real high point of the book.
The book is, for the most part, beautifully written and handled by an author with great talent. Take the following paragraph:
“She remembered her child self peering out from under the nest of coats, the gramophone skipping with the stamping of the dancers, and the anarchist man who had danced with his Italian wife so slowly; both closed their eyes and their faces touched. Freedom was in that touch, its bald sexuality in the hot crowd. And it was in that later time when she climbed into the plane with Hubert and took flight above the dark-bright ocean, her whole body singing with noise and fear. It was in the smugglers’ boat they had glimpsed, drawing out its slender tail of foam, a boat full of chocolate from another universe, one with different trees, under which people smoked French cigarettes and drank wine and were ‘free’. They said, ‘I love you’.
Such were Julia’s thoughts in the days before she did the thing that killed them’.
There are a number of wonderfully written paragraphs like this one, and more impressive still, is the authors ‘world-building’. The dystopia of Orwell’s creation is padded out and we are presented a larger view of this world. That said, this feels very much like a reinterpretation than an effort to build on Orwell’s world directly. The truly terrifying aspect of 1984 is the crushing oppressiveness of Big Brother, and the sense of total control held by The Party. Winston feels like the last man holding onto what is true, and in this he is alone until he meets Julia. Newman’s world feels far more influenced by The Handmaid’s Tale. We are given a corrupt regime falling apart at the seams, where very few people appear truly pious to the Party. Everywhere, there is rule-breaking and small acts of defiance. The threat of vaporisation remains but feels less oppressive than in the original. There is a striking banality at the heart of the story. Julia is recruited by O’Brien to lead a number of men into ‘sexcrime’. As such, the meetings with Winston above Old Charrington’s shop proceed with Julia in full knowledge that they are being watched and Winston is being led to his torture and death. This certainly gives Julia a greater agency though perhaps makes her a little harder to warm to. The banality though, is that at the root of O’Brien’s plot is that the Fiction department are trying to undermine the Records department so it may be dissolved and it’s budget handed to Fiction. This brilliantly shows the hollowness with which regimes of this nature operate at the bureaucratic level. It means that poor Winston is not the revolutionary he believes himself to be, rather a lowly pawn in a game of inter-departmental jostling. It is different from Orwell, and perhaps comes from the advantage of writing long after the fall of the Soviet Union, whereas Orwell was stuck writing in 1947.
That said, Orwell’s reading of the situation in Russia was remarkably prescient at a time when it was considered good manners praise the regime, especially on the British left. Writing of Orwell, the Polish poet and essayist, Czeslaw Milosz, who as a cultural official, had seen the Stalinization of Eastern Europe from the inside, said:
“A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only be hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life”.
High praise, indeed. It is easy today to attack and satirise the Soviet Union. It should not be forgotten that in Orwell’s time it was unfashionable to do so, and he was frequently accused by those on the left of assisting the forces of conservatism. Also, much about the Soviet Union was still unpublicised and unknown which makes it all the more remarkable that Orwell was able to portray its inner workings so accurately. Orwell and Newman both portray different aspects of totalitarian regimes with great effectiveness.
Julia is a well-written and interesting attempt to build on a classic. It follows a fashionable framework in which the male characters are intentionally diminished whilst the women are elevated. At times, this is done quite crudely and even spitefully, and one wonders if the author has any regard for the original text. However, the way Newman builds the story is excellent and it is refreshing to see Julia given a full and nuanced story of her own. She also writes quite beautifully. I found the book challenged me, and made me bristle at times, but has also remained with me and given me plenty to think about. In many ways, it is not a partner to Orwell’s work but a challenge to it, and this does not always sit comfortably with those who love the original. Even so, it is gripping, well-written and leaves behind a lasting impression.