By April 1947, Eric Blair, whom the world knows as George Orwell, conceives what he believes will be the book that will fix his reputation for all time. However, at age forty-three, he’s fighting the tuberculosis that keeps him bed-ridden, so writing becomes nigh impossible. But even if you didn’t know Orwell from Adam—and didn’t read the jacket flap—you’d still know what happens. He’ll finish Nineteen Eighty-Four, which will indeed cement his reputation, but the effort will kill him.

This framework, not quite a premise, sounds almost Greek in its tragic outline, yet The Last Man in Europe, though interesting, never rises anywhere close to that level. I can’t blame Glover; he’s writing a novel with an ending too famous to be a surprise, about an author whose thinking is as relevant now as then, if not more. “Big Brother” and “doublethink” have entered the language; saying, “What they’re doing is like 1984!” evokes a police state.

As a novelist, then, how do you create tension in a foregone conclusion? Answer: The journey, which could involve several questions. How does Orwell manage, despite his illness? How do his ambition and political passion lead him to ignore his doctors’ advice? What life experiences have brought him to his dystopian vision?

Glover gets partway there. He excels at the essential, dwelling on the politics, as Orwell himself would have preferred. You understand how he thinks, how he’s always trying to observe, the political atmosphere that shapes him, and how he reacts to whatever he finds false or hypocritical. Glover’s prose, like Orwell’s, is absolutely lucid, sharp, and direct.

What an adventurer Orwell is, and not just as a writer intent on verbal and intellectual provocation. He descends into a coal mine, en route to writing The Road to Wigan Pier, his description of depression-era, working-class struggles, and feels self-conscious as a decidedly middle-class person. He enlists in the war against Franco and is nearly killed twice, once by his own side, events that inform Homage to Catalonia.

Along the way, Glover tells you how his protagonist has gathered the bits and pieces that wind up in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Buying black-market razor blades, submitting to excruciating medical treatments, staying in a farmhouse overrun by rats—all those scenes, and more, find expression in the masterpiece, literally or in essence. Though Glover handles many of these clues in subtle fashion, sometimes the treasure hunt feels like wink-wink, nudge-nudge, inside jokes.

Even so, I still like the dinner with an aging, cantankerous H. G. Wells, or a school classroom where the adolescent Eric Blair has a back-and-forth with his teacher, Aldous Huxley, about what the most crushing type of dictatorship would look like. (From the earliest age, Orwell seems to come in contact with everybody in British literary circles.)

But I still want to know who Eric Blair is when he’s not thinking or writing politics, and Glover doesn’t show me. Since we know that Orwell can’t die in Spain, for instance, the plot, if there is one, consists of episodes that exist to provide political subject matter. Much as I admire Nineteen Eighty-Four and many of his other works, I want to see the man behind them, not just the political man.

How does he really feel in his “open marriage” when his wife sleeps with someone else? It zips by in one sentence, as does guilt over his own love affairs. Glover gives us mostly surfaces, and maybe Orwell didn’t want anyone to probe him any deeper. But if so, why? And if you probed anyway, what would you find? That’s what’s missing, here.

The mask does slip toward the end, as Orwell races against his mortality, physical limitations, and his publisher’s prodding. I glimpse the yearning for fame and money that has largely eluded him (Animal Farm excepted), and the frustration that so little time remains, leaving no room for error or hesitation.

Some Orwell enthusiasts will be delighted with an (almost) purely political depiction and enjoy the revelation of sources for his magnum opus. But from this polished treatment of one of the most polished writers of the twentieth century, I come away unsatisfied. ( )

I really loved this! It's historical fiction, but the author really did his homework and got all the facts right. It tells the story of how George Orwell came to write both Animal Farm and 1984and follows along as he brings them to life. The attention to detail was a beautiful thing, and I felt like I understood Orwell's personality by the end of the novel. Orwell had TB, and he was literally on his death bed by the time he was finishing 1984. The treatment for TB back them was a grueling thing - I learned more than I wanted to know and cannot imagine having to go through that. I was amazed that the doctor let him smoke even while in hospital because he (the doctor) felt it helped him to cough up the sputum from his lungs. Incredible. Also Orwell typed up his final copies of the manuscript in bed with his manual typewriter balanced on a tray on his lap because his publisher failed to get him the promised typist. So sad that he did not live to see the novel's success. ( )

As I wrote in my previous post about the launch of Dennis Glover’s The Last Man in Europe at The Bookshop at Queenscliff, this novel is a fictionalised account of George Orwell’s life when he was writing 1984, (which was originally going to be called The Last Man in Europe). It’s an unusual kind of historical fiction, sticking closely to the historical record, exploring influences on Orwell’s writing, and supplemented with Glover’s imaginative reconstructions. It’s a book to appeal to Orwell enthusiasts and those familiar with his works especially 1984, but as to how it might work for people who haven’t read Orwell, I can’t say.

I think, however, that it’s actually quite courageous to write a book like this about such a famous author. Amongst his other accomplishments (see my previous post) Glover is a scholar of Orwell, but so are countless others, and there will be experts who read this looking for flaws rather than enjoying the ride. The advantage for the everyday reader like me is that pressure like that means we can assume that the facts are not in contention.

Written in serviceable prose without any authorial flourishes other than frequent flashbacks to illustrate the sources of Orwell’s ideas, Glover’s novel begins in 1937 with Eric Blair’s doubts about his future as a writer. Like many an author before and since, he was finding that apart from changing his name to Orwell, nothing much had changed since the publication of his first book. An old Etonian without financial resources to match, he yearned to be successful both from a personal and political point-of-view. Orwell was an intensely political creature, and like many intellectuals in Britain, he was a socialist because he believed that socialism would redress the inequality that he witnessed and wrote about in his books.

Today, when everything Orwell wrote is devoured by readers all over the world, it is hard to believe that his books were mostly ignored until the success of Animal Farm. Those books were fueled by his idealism and his disillusionment. In his all too brief life he had worked in the Indian Civil Service under imperialism; he had fought against fascism in in the Spanish Civil War. He had witnessed two world wars and a depression, and he had seen terrible poverty and shocking violence. By the time he came to write 1984 he was convinced that communism under Stalin was a terrible distortion of an ideal and he was appalled by what he knew of show trials and oppression. He also knew from having worked in the propaganda office during WW2 that even in a democracy truth was being warped in order to manipulate behaviour.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/08/22/the-last-man-in-europe-by-dennis-glover/ ( )