You could be confusing that with cockney slang. ;)
replyIt will be fine. Most Brits are comfortable with the poor quality of Orwell commentary from over the pond. American Orwell fans mostly don't even read his key novels like Keep the Aspadistra Flying, just his juvenile science fiction stuff.
replyJuvenile science fiction?! He wrote 1984 in 1948 and died two years later at age 46. So I would say that was his most mature work...
replyThe odd thing is Americans seem to take Aldous Huxley enormously more seriously than the Brits do, and they may be right in doing so.
replyI'm going to pretend you're talking about The Doors of Perception.
Even though you are obviously talking about Brave New World.
replyI'll just drop:
reply In an interview with Ron Martinetti of American Legends website, Laura Huxley called Island "the finest and final work." In Laura's opinion, "He put everything in that. Brave New World was a warning and Island was an offering."
I had a perhaps overly heavy consumption of {X}-topia literature in my early teens.
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replyI'm a huge fan of Eric Blair's writing. Looking at the bookshelf now: "Down and out in Paris and London" is what I've reread the most (I've got two copies, one ready for gifting).
replyDemoting Orwell's masterpieces (1984 and Animal Farm) to "juvenile science fiction stuff" while holding up Keep the Aspidistra Flying—a mid-tier social realism novel about a middle-class poet struggling with commercialism—is top-tier British condescension (extra points for misspelling Aspidistra while doing so).
replyHow else can you keep ahead of the bots and their em-dashes other than by the use of pointless condescension and subtle misspellings? I mean, you've got to find a niche somehow.
replyTo be fair, while I enjoyed the fun language shenanigans and propaganda and political commentary of 1984, the actual plot was pretty bad imho. Then again one way of reading it is the protagonist is actually paranoid and is exaggerating everything, which isn't entirely a dig against Orwell. He was just aheaf of the curve with self insert fan fiction.
replyI think my favorite part of the book was when it just turned into reading the political thesis on the essence of oligarichal collectivism or whatever it is. It's a great cynical parody of modern society, but I still think everyone misses the point is that it isn't so much about surveillance as it's about power through language.
You could just as easily have the book set in 1884 without any of the "future tech" and have basically the same plot going around with busybodies and peeping toms filling the rolls of the telescreens.
Hahaha
replyLet me guess - you live in the UK?