1984

The Clocks Strike Thirteen

The clocks are striking thirteen, and that single detail tells you everything George Orwell wants you to know before the first paragraph ends. London on a cold bright April morning in 1984 still looks like London — wind that hurts the face, gritty dust spinning in doorways, the smell of boiled cabbage and old mats in a tenement hallway — but the rules of the world have rotated by a notch, and the clocks now tick to twenty-four hours instead of twelve. The shift is small. That is the point. Big Brother's London does not announce itself with rubble and fire. It announces itself by changing one number, and watching to see who notices.

Winston Smith is thirty-nine, has a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, and works at the Ministry of Truth in a department where his days are spent rewriting yesterday's newspapers so that yesterday's predictions match today's outcomes. He lives in Victory Mansions, a decaying block where the electricity is cut during daylight for the "economy drive in preparation for Hate Week." On every wall and every coin and every postage stamp, a poster shows the face of a man in his mid-forties with a heavy black moustache and the caption underneath: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. The poster is a lie and a truth at once. There may not be a literal Big Brother, but the watching is real. The telescreen in Winston's flat receives and transmits at the same time. You can dim it. You can never turn it off.

Oceania has four ministries, each housed in an enormous pyramidal building three hundred metres tall, dominating the skyline. They are named in deliberate inversions. The Ministry of Truth manages news, entertainment, education and fine arts — which is to say, it manages lies. The Ministry of Peace runs the perpetual war. The Ministry of Plenty oversees the rationing of chocolate, razor blades, gin and shoes. The Ministry of Love handles law and order, has no windows, is wrapped in barbed wire and machine-gun nests, and is the place from which no one returns. Inscribed across the facade of Minitrue, in letters of immaculate concrete, are the three Party slogans: