Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood” …
When you leave the world with an era, a defining state of art that carries your name, then you have stepped into history, not as a memory that will fade, but with the assurance that like Kings and Queens of old, your name will persist for all time.
In the fields of literature such epochs are seldom bestowed, but to be held in the same high regard and same exulted breath as Shakespeare, Dickens and Tolkien, is to hear the same brush of time that praises terms such as Victorian, Elizabethan, the Romantic, the Renaissance and the Modernist eras; and for that we owe the man behind George Orwell, Eric Blair, a debt of gratitude that he would arguably never have desired, but to which all the same must be acknowledged as we as human beings grapple with the fallout of his vision and warnings, of how society evolves to be one of control and domination.
Millions of words for a man of courage, a million more for one who comes across as one of the great thinkers of the 20th Century and who perhaps rivals legendary names such as George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, and Noam Chomsky, and yet we find ourselves perhaps reducing his name to one particular moment; that of the dystopian made real, the Orwellian Motif.
In a period that seems to despise the great thinker, where anything that makes us uncomfortable is glossed over, where every chronicle is whitewashed, altered, substituted, in case it makes the official narrative questionable, to still have George Orwell’s work providing the essential point of providing a warning from history, is the provision and greatness of the writer prevailing.
That we should be alive in a time when his prophetic words from such notable works as Animal Farm and 1984 have carried weight, where terms such as doublespeak, Big Brother and alternative facts have become widely accepted as the ‘norm’ is terrifying, where we can no longer question a government because it is bad for the morale of the country, that a minister of state can misspeak when everybody knows they lied. This is the real pity of Orwell’s towering intellect and writing, that we gave his name to the totalitarian project at hand.
For Pierre Christin and Sebastian Verdier, the chance to understand the man comes from exploring his life and placing it down in graphic novel form, and in Orwell, that understanding is resolute, it is intricate, powerful, and it is kind, but then despite his dark thoughts that played out against having lost his wife, the development of T.B. in his lungs, and having witnessed barbarism as the Nazis aided the Nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War, he managed to keep his kindness intact.
From his early life in which the artists show his loneliness, through his travels and early writings where he writes elegantly of the poor and helpless, and through to his final days on Jura, and his eventual death in London, Pierre Christin and Sebastian Verdier capture the essence of the man in stark detail, a man perhaps made for the stunning effect of the Graphic Novel.
All men are created equal, some though will strive to think of higher things in which to prove that all can be treated as such. A stunning and enlightening graphic novel that leads the way to looking at the writer in greater and finer detail.
Pierre Christin and Sebastian Verdier’s Orwell is out now and available to purchase from SelfMadeHero.
Ian D. Hall