Julia

What a grotesque, lurid novel. I was sure before I read this that all the negative reviews were misogyny. But no, really the book is not very good. I question why it got approved by Orwell's estate.

I was all in for a feminist revisiting of the 1984 story. I liked some of the first parts of the book, seeing Julia's agency, her canny understanding of the people around her. Her sex scenes with Winston were particularly hilarious, playing the role of a sweet girl fluffing up her man so he can fulfill his masculine role. All without harming his fragile ego. That part of the book I liked.

But the rest of it... a lot of the novel is a sort of tedious set of explicating the horrors of what life under IngSoc would be. Torture porn at its worst, but most of it a sort of tedious recitation of extended worldbuilding. Of misery. It struck me as entirely missing what made 1984 so great, how Orwell explicated how totalitarianism can subvert people. Instead Newman just seems to be writing a book about how bad it'd be to live in a totalitarian state. Yes, I agree, it's awful! Do we need that book to be written? As fiction, drafting off of such a well known classic book?

In some ways this book reminds me more of The Handmaid's Tale. The book itself but also the extended universe of TV writing. Clearly the woman's perspective is part of what me thinks that. But also the sort of relentless unspooling of the world of Airstrip One, vignettes revealing depredation after atrocity after horror. I just wish it were all in service of something illuminating. Instead I fear this book is entertaining, at best, and a dismal job of that.

Still it's competently written and compelling enough. Good characters, some interesting insights. Just cloaked in a lot of awfulness whose literary purpose I am questioning.

(PS, I highlighted some passages in the book because I thought they were particularly well turned phrases. Hilariously I realize now they are almost all about sex.)