Nineteen Eighty-four: bad good or good bad fiction?

You don’t need to be Will Self to find fault with Orwell’s novel. But are its huge faults also essential to its virtues?

George Orwell is “the supreme mediocrity”. His texts are “lacklustre”. He plays to “the dull and cack-handed gallery”. Nineteen Eighty-four is overrun with “obvious didacticism”. He has “little originality”.

But don’t shoot me! I’m just the messenger. Those quotes – as fans of internet flame wars will already know – come courtesy of Will Self, who slaughtered one of our most sacred cows on Radio 4’s A Point of View in August.

During the last 50 years there has been a whole series of writers – some of them are still writing – whom it is quite impossible to call ‘good’ by any strictly literary standard, but who are natural novelists and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good taste.”

Perhaps it even … gains something from the clumsy long-winded manner in which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at selection, and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is slowly built up.”

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