The rush to adapt Nineteen Eighty-Four may have stemmed from an assumption that this was a book for the current moment, not one for the ages. In The New York Times Book Review, Mark Schorer suggested that its “kinetic” brilliance “may mean that its greatness is only immediate, its power for us alone, now, in this generation, this decade, this year, that it is doomed to be the pawn of time.”
