1985 (Burgess novel)

Lore & Background

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, titled '1984', consists of essays and interviews in which Burgess discusses aspects of Orwell's book, including the concept of dystopia and the term 'kakotopia'. Burgess treats Orwell as somewhat bound by his times, viewing him as a war-exhausted Briton fearing the Soviet threat and atomic war, to the exclusion of other phenomena that would alter British society. The second part is a novella set in 1985, seven years in the future at the time of writing, based on Burgess's observation of British society in 1978. It imagines a future where trade unions have become so powerful that they exert full control over society, with only minor references to immigration; the Muslim presence is not a central or major force.

Reader's Guide

1985 serves as both a critical companion to Orwell's work and an independent dystopian narrative. The first part offers Burgess's analysis of Orwell's themes and limitations, while the second part extrapolates trends Burgess observed in 1978, particularly the expanding power of trade unions and the rise of Islam in Britain. The novella's protagonist, Bev Jones, struggles against a union-dominated system and an education system favoring practical studies over classicism. The work explores themes of re-education, syndicalism, and cultural change, echoing Burgess's earlier novel A Clockwork Orange. Its significance lies in its attempt to update Orwell's vision for a later era, though it remains less known than Burgess's other works. The radio adaptation on BBC Radio 3 in 1985 marked a notable cultural moment.

Did You Know?

• The novel was published concurrently in Penthouse Magazine in 1978.
• The first part of the book is titled '1984' and includes interviews where Burgess acts as both interviewer and interviewee.
• The protagonist Bev Jones loses his teaching job because unions favored education of practical value.
• Bev's daughter Bessie was affected by a thalidomide-like drug taken by her pregnant mother.

Origins and the Orwell Connection

Anthony Burgess conceived 1985 as a deliberate homage to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, publishing it in 1978 as both a critical companion and a creative extension of the 1949 classic. The novel's first half takes the form of essays and interviews—Burgess playing both questioner and respondent—in which he dissects Orwell's dystopian machinery. He explores the etymological roots of "utopia" and introduces "kakotopia" as a counter-concept, while positioning Orwell as a product of his specific historical moment: a war-weary British man haunted by Soviet expansion and the atomic threat. Burgess argues that Orwell's vision, while powerful, was constrained by those particular anxieties and failed to anticipate other forces that would reshape British life. He draws a pointed line between the totalitarian "Ingsoc" of the novel and the more prosaic reality of English socialism as it existed in the late 1970s. Rather than writing a straightforward sequel, Burgess borrows Orwell's conceptual framework to project his own observations forward, creating a speculative portrait of what Britain might become if the trends of 1978 continued unchecked.

A Dystopia Built from Domestic Pressures

Burgess's speculative 1985 is built on two interlocking anxieties that define the novel's second part. The first is the unchecked expansion of trade union power: in this world, unions have proliferated to cover every conceivable occupation, and a single walkout by one group routinely cascades into a general strike that paralyzes the nation. The second anxiety is the growing cultural and political presence of Islam in Britain, driven by large-scale immigration from the Middle East. London in this vision is dotted with mosques, its economy shaped by wealthy Arab property owners, and the narrative hints at a broader transformation of the country's religious and social fabric. The education system has shifted decisively toward practical, vocational training, marginalizing the humanities. When the strikes finally consume the entire country, King Charles III assumes direct command of a grinding, halted Britain. The result is a dystopia that feels less like a foreign totalitarian state and more like the logical endpoint of familiar domestic pressures—labor politics, immigration, and institutional inertia—pushed to their extreme.

Bev Jones and the Cascade of Loss

The novel's emotional core is Bev Jones, a history teacher whose life unravels in a cascade of losses. His wife is killed in a hospital fire that breaks out during a firemen's union strike, and her dying words—"Don't let them get away with it"—become the engine of his growing hatred for the union system. Already dismissed from teaching because the education establishment now prizes practical skills over the humanities, Bev takes a confectioner's job, only to have his union membership revoked for showing up to work during a strike, rendering him effectively unemployable. He deposits his thirteen-year-old daughter Bessie—a child rendered unable to distinguish reality from fantasy by a thalidomide-like drug her mother took during pregnancy—at a care facility, then drifts into vagrancy with a band of similarly displaced dissenters. His petty thefts land him in a state psychiatric prison where propaganda films and lectures aim to re-educate him into compliance, a mechanism Burgess also explored in A Clockwork Orange. He emerges unconverted, only to face the ultimate, devastating choice regarding Bessie's future.

Classical Learning as Quiet Defiance

One of 1985's most distinctive threads is its celebration of Classical learning as a form of resistance. In a society that has abandoned the humanities in favor of vocational utility, the study of Greek and Latin becomes an act of defiance. Among the street toughs who threaten Bev daily, Classical studies are fashionable—these outsiders, excluded from the mainstream education system, find in ancient languages a source of identity and status that the official world denies them. Bev himself, a proponent of Classicism, finds his professional identity stripped when the system rejects his approach to teaching. Yet the novel's most powerful image of knowledge as resistance comes in its final chapters: imprisoned for life in a secure hospital, Bev revives his vocation by giving informal history lessons to fellow inmates, tracing a continuous narrative from Anglo-Saxon England through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution into the twentieth century. As the present becomes increasingly impossible to reconcile with that past, he tells his class they might as well start over. They dismiss themselves. Left alone, his final act—touching the electric fence—is the ultimate rejection of a world that has made continuity of meaning impossible.

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