The first Canadian edition of George Orwell's 1984 has arrived in time for Halloween, and Rebel News has teamed up with a world-class artist to make it more accessible to the next generation. In this episode, we talk to the man who made the book come to life, Paul Revoche.
00:01:53.440We have taken the first Canadian edition of Orwell's 1984.
00:01:59.520We have laid the book out in a beautiful, breathable typeface to make it easier to read than the cramped text of the original from the 1940s.
00:02:09.580And most importantly, Paul Revoche, a world-class illustrator, has done 30 original drawings inspired by the book's story to make the thing come alive, to fire the imagination, and to get the next generation to read this.
00:02:29.140I first read 1984 when I was in high school.
00:02:41.440And for the course of the next 15 minutes, I'm delighted to be here in the studio with the man who made this book come alive, the artist Paul Revoche.
00:02:52.000You probably know this book as well as any Orwell scholar now because you've spent so much time with it, not just laying it out so beautifully, but then coming up with the list of 30 illustrations reflecting the book.
00:03:08.280But how has reacquainting yourself with the book 1984 changed your way of thinking?
00:03:14.940Well, it's given me great insight into the book.
00:03:18.160And like you, I read it initially in high school and it made a great impression on me.
00:03:25.180And I had reread it a couple of times through the years.
00:03:27.680But I guess I got the most out of it having to work on this project, which is in having to set up all the different illustrations, the spacing of them, choosing the moments to illustrate, I had to really kind of go through it with a fine tooth comb.
00:03:59.320But there's a very deep commentary on, which is the surface of that commentary is what people usually pick up on, in my opinion, the more dramatic elements, which are completely valid.
00:04:08.780But there's also a very much deeper analysis, which is still relevant for today.
00:04:14.340So in the book within the book, which, you know, it's in the story, the main character, Winston Smith, he's given a forbidden book, which is produced by the Brotherhood, which purports to explain the true story of the inside of this totalitarian world.
00:04:32.440So to round this out, when you read this carefully, you see that Orwell is not only explaining what might come, but in my opinion, what's already here.
00:04:42.940Even back when he wrote it in 1949, but much more so as we see revealed today, particularly with the last three years.
00:04:50.580There's so many things in that book written more than 70 years ago that he had a kind of prophecy, like in every home, a telescreen pumping out propaganda from the dictatorship, but at the same time, spying on it.
00:05:07.020And, you know, in the 40s and 50s, that must have sounded absurd.
00:05:10.500But what's that other than our own computers and our phones?
00:05:14.340Yeah, I mean, it's eerie the level to which Orwell predicted the world of today.
00:05:19.780Now, he didn't completely predict it, which is interesting.
00:05:21.960A lot of writers and people who analyze this stuff, they contrast it with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which was more sort of concentrated on biology and also a different approach.
00:05:33.380We could get into that, whereas Orwell was talking about more the rigid sort of Soviet totalitarianism.
00:05:39.620So in the book, it's kind of a little bit retro, although still very relevant.
00:05:47.340In other words, Orwell didn't predict digital things, nanotechnology, you know, biotechnology, computers, the Internet, all that stuff.
00:05:55.400So he has the protagonist, Winston Smith, who works in the Ministry of Truth, which is really the Ministry of Lies and Propaganda.
00:06:04.800He has him working on something called the Speak Right Machine.
00:06:08.100And it's a machine where he speaks into the microphone.
00:06:11.420We'll show it in one of the illustrations.
00:06:12.960And it instantly kind of copies down what he's saying.
00:06:17.660And what he's doing is, on the fly, they're altering the present and the past and even the future because he's re-editing newspapers.
00:06:26.540So the book is all based on sort of newspaper level from the past of delivering information.
00:06:32.100Having said that, everything else that he did, it's completely relevant to our digital age because we see the same things happening.
00:06:38.360Yeah, I mean, in the novel, his job, and what a crazy job, was to take newspaper articles from the archives.
00:06:46.720And if his country was at war with a new enemy, they would make it so it was always thus.
00:06:52.360So he would go back to old newspapers, cut out the story that was inconvenient, paste in the latest version, and then file it.
00:07:01.080And then maybe he would come back to it and do the reverse another day.
00:07:03.920And so, yes, there was the cutting and the gluing and the taping, but really, other than the technology, that's exactly what's being done now with deleting things on the internet, rewriting books.
00:07:15.600And so, although some of his technology, he couldn't have imagined it, the underlying concept of destroying the past so you control the present and you can shape the future.
00:07:27.260What is that other than tearing down our statues, cancelling historical figures, renaming edifices that were built after heroes of the past?
00:07:38.180Everything he said is happening more now than it even happened in the 1940s.
00:07:43.520And in the book, there's an underlying, it's very gripping, there's underlying sort of tension and fear.
00:07:49.480And you can see how that's produced in the story because people are unsure of their cultural ground.
00:07:57.180It's like the cultural common glue that held everybody together from the past, that everybody agreed upon, which even if they were left or right, Democrat, Republican, whatever, liberal, conservative in Canada, people had a common understanding.
00:08:09.560And you can see in the book, what they've done is, I should say, what they've shown is that this method of constantly erasing and re-editing the past, it undermines everybody's commonality and confidence.
00:08:23.200So nobody is going to deviate from the narrative.
00:08:26.540They're going to only stick to what's exactly on the page.
00:09:12.260And so you were, I mean, if you have good, ungood, double plus good, double plus ungood.
00:09:17.660So you just have the one root and then you just flip it back and forth and more or less.
00:09:21.840You've eliminated thousands of words and with it, the ability to think.
00:09:27.680And there's this wonderful passage where he says, you know, the Declaration of Independence or philosophical documents like that.
00:09:35.140You could not express them in newspeak.
00:09:37.840They would just be swallowed up by the word crime think.
00:09:40.900And we have thought crimes today, they're usually more feelings crimes, hate crimes.
00:09:47.760Unless it's by the state, the two minutes of hate.
00:09:49.860There's so many things in this book that are that almost had to wait for our age to be to be as relevant as they are.
00:09:58.700I want you to take us through your illustrations because I'll tell you, Paul, one of the things that was important to me here is how do I get my own kids to read this?
00:10:09.740How do I make it easier to read, more exciting to read in the age of Marvel movies and Netflix?
00:10:17.560How do we say stop for a second and read a book and read it?
00:10:21.940It's not the cramped first edition version, which 99% of the books are.
00:10:27.620And it's got some beautiful illustrations.
00:10:30.580I would like you to take me and our viewers through some of your illustrations.
00:10:37.380Talk a little bit about the illustration, what it meant in the book, and what you were trying to do through the image.
00:11:50.360In the story, he begins, this is without giving too much away, but he begins writing a private diary, which is completely forbidden in the world of 1984.
00:11:59.440So this is like his first act of rebellion.
00:12:03.820And he has kind of a nook in the corner of his apartment where the telescreen, which is a device that's constantly watching him, cannot see him.
00:12:17.960This is the illustration showing the two minute hate, which is a, as it said, it's two minutes where the workers in all the buildings are rallied to kind of have a mass orgy of hatred at the screen.
00:13:21.300So in the book, because it's a drama, it's a little more dramatic.
00:13:25.420And there's even, like I said, there's the two-minute hate.
00:13:28.100In part of the book, Winston is involved in something called Hate Week, which is an entire week of, like, relentless propaganda where everybody's urged to hate the enemy.
00:13:37.480I forget if it's Eurasia or East Asia.
00:13:40.100But in the book, it's posited that in the future, there would be three great super states, super totalitarian states that are constantly at war, fighting with each other, but no one ever triumphs.
00:13:51.280So I think it's Oceania, East Asia, and Eurasia.
00:14:06.620So it shows how it's dehumanizing for everybody, but even for the people involved.
00:14:10.720Because, for example, Winston is shown, working in his cubicle, and he's glancing over at another one of the workers who he suspects, as would routinely happen, is also working on re-editing the same article.
00:14:23.540So what Orwell is showing is that everybody's labor is basically wasted.
00:14:27.660But they're all lying, and they're all working on fabricating lies, but it might even never make it because it's ephemeral.
00:14:55.020And the whole thing you see is a kind of madness.
00:14:57.540But again, as you're saying, Ezra, how different is that than today, when people's lifetimes of work are suddenly canceled, erased, they're unpersoned, and they have no longer a voice.
00:15:08.580And how many so-called academic disciplines are just fake BS, ephemeral, that really has no meaning, and it'll be politically incorrect in the generation anyways.
00:15:18.040Take us through some more of your images, because that's, I think, really the special thing here.
00:15:22.540And the reason why Rebel News is publishing this, again, as you said, it's word for word, letter for letter, down to the punctuation marks, an exact replica of the first edition.
00:15:35.000And that's important for copyright reasons, because Orwell's book is in the public domain only if you use the exact way it was published more than 70 years ago.
00:15:42.780So we have the legal authority to publish this.
00:15:45.880What we've done is we've made it beautiful.
00:15:48.760When I say we've done that, I mean, you've done that.
00:15:51.240Not just with the cover, but the 30 articles, and even laying the thing out to make it readable.
00:15:56.040The purpose of this book, to me, I mean, I know you have your own artistic motivations.
00:16:02.420The Bible, Shakespeare, the works of Kipling.
00:16:05.620There are some beautiful things that everyone in the world should read, of course.
00:16:10.320But this is such a powerful political lesson, commentary, warning that is so relevant, has never been more relevant ever.
00:16:22.320And we must get people to read it again.
00:16:24.880And the whole purpose here is to make this more accessible than it's ever been, and to have a new generation of people read it before it is swept away.
00:16:36.560I mean, and my goal was, as you're talking about, was to augment the book.
00:16:40.500And they're kind of like punctuation marks that should entice you to keep reading and give you a visual idea of what's happening.
00:16:46.620So, for example, here is an image where Winston has gone for lunch.
00:16:50.900It says, deep in an underground canteen, there's lots of mist.
00:16:54.620And it's very, it's very kind of, you know, totalitarian, somewhat oppressive.
00:16:59.700In the next illustration, I show him, he's eating lunch with his co-worker.
00:17:05.240There's the omnipresent telescreen announcing news of the latest great victory in the non-ending, ever-present war.
00:17:12.060So, I think it gives you an atmosphere of what's going on in the book.
00:17:17.120I'll show you the next one, which is, he's going down a street, and suddenly there's a rocket bomb that falls.
00:17:24.680And it's kind of alarming, but it's one of the more sort of action moments in the book.
00:17:31.820And here's Winston crouching as this rocket bomb explodes somewhere randomly.
00:17:36.760So, what Orwell talks about is that, this is very interesting for the political commentary, it's still relevant for today, which is that these rocket bombs launched purportedly by the enemy would occasionally just randomly explode in London, in the cities he's in.
00:17:50.760I think he's in London, in Airstrip One, which is like a state of Oceania.
00:17:55.540So, these rocket bombs randomly explode, but Orwell in his narration says, there was a great suspicion that it was all fake, and that in fact, they were doing it to themselves.
00:18:07.300Like, that these bombs are not launched by an enemy, they're just launched to keep everybody, that's actually in this book, that they're launched to keep everybody in a state of fancy.
00:18:19.240There's so much in this book like that, if you read it carefully, and pay attention to all these details.
00:18:24.300And that gets into what he talks about later in the book, within the book, which is the purpose of constant war, which is again relevant to today, that many wars, in the book he's claiming that the war is entirely fake, that no one is meant to triumph, and that the purpose of it is to absorb excess labor.
00:18:44.060So, he talks about, and this is the book within the book, the author talks about how the purpose of war is to keep people absorbed in producing goods, which would be then used up, and purposely destroyed, and it's like an endless vicious circle of futility.
00:19:03.120You know, Eisenhower called that the military-industrial complex a few years later.
00:19:07.060And the idea was to keep people down, so that otherwise, if they got too luxurious and got too rich individually, too many people, there would be no reason to have an elite.
00:19:50.380I mentioned how we're allowed to do this, because under copyright law, after 70 years after Orwell's death, the book is in the public domain in countries like Canada, the U.K., Australia.
00:20:02.640So, in the places where we can, it's for sale on Amazon.
00:20:05.780So, if you're a Canadian, go to Amazon.ca.
00:21:06.800And I think it's priced so it could be a great Christmas gift.
00:21:11.220I think the number one buyer of this book, in my mind, is going to be probably dads like me who want their kids to read it.
00:21:18.720Or grandparents who want their grandkids to read it.
00:21:21.560People who just haven't read it since high school.
00:21:25.140People who want to read it and relearn what's happening to them now in this dystopian time.
00:21:31.300And I think that with your artwork, the refreshed typography, and our distribution through Amazon and through Rebel News, I think we can get thousands and thousands and thousands of people to wake up again.
00:22:13.980All that is about trying to keep carved out your own personal sort of space or whatever you want to call it, of individuality.
00:22:22.560The whole struggle of the protagonist in this book is to maintain some sense of his own life.
00:22:29.740And in fact, in Newspeak, that's a forbidden thing.
00:22:32.800There's a term in Newspeak, the language in the book, called own life, which is a crime.
00:22:38.620If you have your own life, meaning individuality and freedom to speak and just do what you want, go where you want, that is a crime in this future.
00:22:47.760And we can see that rapidly arriving now.