Newman, whose past work includes the speculative and dystopian fictions “The Country of Ice Cream Star” and “The Men,” constantly referred to her copy of “1984” to ensure consistency in all details — and the resulting novel manages to hew closely to the source text and, curiously, invert it. (As The Washington Post’s Ron Charles wrote in his review, “Somehow, she has stuck her tweezers into Orwell’s bottle and rebuilt the ship pointing the other way.”)
We spoke over the phone about reading — and rereading, and rereading — a classic and working with the “notoriously protective” Orwell estate. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Do you remember what it was like when you first picked up “1984”?
A: I read it maybe in junior high school, because I’d read “Animal Farm” and loved it. Then I read “1984” — at that age, I was just proud of kind of understanding it. The second time I read “1984,” I was in my early 20s, and I found some of the treatment of women really problematic — or painful, I guess, is a better way of putting it. Even in your own head, alone in your room, you feel like, oh, am I being a scold? Am I being a humorless, boring person who can only see this one aspect of a great literary work? That emotional struggle within myself sort of ruined it for me. When I was 20 years old, I read all of his political work and loved that much more uncritically.
Q: What got you thinking about writing a retelling of the novel?
A: The estate of George Orwell asked me if I would be interested. I thought: “This is a novel. Could it be my novel?” I’m old enough that I did not want to spend two years writing a mediocre novel that I then am ashamed of. I also felt that it’s a daunting responsibility: You have to live up to the job and do something with it that has some sort of political significance.
When I reread “1984,” it was a very strange sort of reading. It seemed as if the book that they wanted me to write, from the point of view of Julia, was something that George Orwell had envisaged and he’d set up all of these scenarios that beg to be written. I mean, that sounds like it can’t be true, like I’m just trying to sell the book — but I swear to God, if you read “1984” there are all of these things that you want to know about Julia that the book doesn’t tell you. Her character doesn’t quite add up, which you would normally assume is because Orwell wasn’t that interested in that character. But it suddenly becomes this terrific opportunity. That was when I went from “Well, this is a strange but intriguing idea” to “Oh my God, if they don’t let me do this, I will die.”
Q: Did the estate talk about why they wanted this book and what they were imagining for it?
A: The estate is notoriously protective of Orwell’s legacy, the meaning of his work and the dignity of his work. They didn’t really give me any guidance at all about what it should be, but I did give them an outline and a first chapter before they went ahead.
I love enabling constraints. Usually I make them up — I don’t have other people introducing them. But it was surprisingly painless, partly because everybody had it in their head that it was a serious literary novel, and the whole point was to make it a serious literary novel. It wasn’t like a Hollywood process at all.
There was only one thing, at a very early stage in the outline — I have a habit of writing a first draft of a book which has a really bonkers ending. And then everybody is terrified of how bad the ending is, and they make me change it.
Q: You could imagine ending “Julia” with a riff on the last line of “1984,” about learning to hate, but you chose to extend the story past that. Could you talk about why? And what was your original bonkers ending?
A: This book kind of promises you that you’ll get to see outside. It’s all the stuff that Orwell left on the table, which includes understanding how this world is seen from the outside, who Big Brother actually is, and what happens to Oceania and Airstrip One. So I think that had to happen.
As far as the other ending — I kind of love this ending, but it probably wouldn’t have worked. Julia gets to the Crystal Palace, where Big Brother is. He is decrepit and senile. What has happened is that for many years, he had a harem of women, young women that he would sleep with — but as he gradually declined, he stopped trusting anyone else. Then he became truly decrepit, so the women began to actually make the decisions. And so you learn that the entire society was run by these former concubines all along.
So it’s an interesting ending, but it’s a bit too different from the rest of the book, I think. It’s a bit of a leap into a different realm. But maybe it would have worked — I just don’t know. In the outline, it really sounded dumb.
Q: One thing that I found funny and daring about your novel is that Julia can be very dismissive of Winston, not only in the way he treats other people and the way he thinks about romance, but his obsession with the truth, which is really central to “1984.” How did you think about this character and her priorities?
A: Well, it just seemed true to the character as Orwell had written her — she is a person who falls asleep whenever Winston begins to talk about politics. Clearly, she doesn’t feel as he does. She doesn’t have those big emotions about big ideas. I also think that is how apolitical people think: If you’re just trying to live your life and have a good time, then when people begin to talk about truth, you have to defend yourself against it somehow. You have to find a way to say that it’s not important, and to ridicule it, and to find ways that they themselves are hypocritical. I tend to be perhaps too serious about politics, so I think that’s something that I have to grapple with — that there’s some truth in that common-sensical approach, too. The great hope for her is that she can be apolitical again, basically. That’s what she dreams of. In a way it’s true: You know that a government is good when you don’t have to think about it if you don’t want to.
Q: “1984” deals with the rewriting of the past, and it’s something you also engage with in “Julia,” when one of the characters, Syme, talks about the rewriting of poetry. Was that on your mind as you were doing this retelling — that Orwell disapproved of this impulse to politically correct things? And, as a result, did you feel that there was any irony to your project?
A: I think it’s two different things. What Orwell was objecting to was the erasure of history — not that somebody else comes and interprets history differently and is also speaking, but that your voice is erased, not only from the present but from the past. It’s also a big theme in Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism”: the idea that people who opposed the government not only would be killed but that everything that they did would be erased from history. There was a real fear at that time. Nobody knew that these governments would be eventually conquered or would fall apart so rapidly that that history could mostly be reconstituted.
There’s a lot in Orwell about erasure — there’s a really moving bit in his essay looking back on the Spanish War about the slave civilizations of history that lasted for thousands of years and how, of all of the people who were enslaved in the Roman Empire, he could only think of two people whose names had been preserved. That’s millions of people, just completely effaced from history. So that’s the fear, really — it’s not even about things like Roald Dahl being rewritten to be more respectful toward contemporary sensitivities. It’s about the fundamental erasure of entire civilizations and points of view and lives.
