Non-fiction: Why Orwell Matters

Overview
Christopher Hitchens offers a vigorous, readable portrait of George Orwell, insisting that Orwell's life and writings continue to speak powerfully to contemporary moral and political dilemmas. The book traces the author's evolution from a young imperial policeman and working-class drifter to a novelist, essayist, and unflinching critic of totalitarianism. Hitchens positions Orwell as a moral exemplar whose devotion to truth, clarity, and decency provides a corrective to both fashionable relativism and manipulative power.

Orwell's Life and Writings
The narrative follows key episodes that shaped Orwell's sensibility: the early exposure to imperial Burma, the poverty of Paris and London, the experience of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and the decade that produced his most famous works. Hitchens gives particular attention to Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, reading them as born of concrete experiences of betrayal and political cruelty. Biographical detail serves not merely to humanize Orwell but to explain the moral urgency behind his fiction and essays.

Political and Moral Core
Central to Hitchens's reading is Orwell's uncompromising opposition to totalitarianism in all its forms and his insistence on democratic socialism as a humane alternative. Orwell's animus was not against ideology per se but against the substitution of power for truth, and against the intellectual deference that allowed monsters to flourish. Hitchens stresses that Orwell was as fierce with the abuses of the left as he was with those of the right; this evenhanded moralism is presented as the source of Orwell's continuing usefulness.

Language, Style, and Honesty
Hitchens emphasizes Orwell's conviction that language is both a tool and a weapon, and that dishonorable language corrodes thought. Essays like "Politics and the English Language" are read as practical manuals for intellectual clarity and political resistance. Hitchens admires Orwell's plainspoken style, his humor, and his refusal to treat rhetoric as a substitute for fact. For Hitchens, Orwellian lucidity is both ethical practice and literary achievement.

Controversies and Complexities
Hitchens does not shy away from Orwell's contradictions: an acute sense of class and occasional unsympathetic attitudes toward certain groups, or moments of private bitterness. These complexities are used to resist hagiography without allowing them to disqualify Orwell's central virtues. Hitchens engages past critics, those who label Orwell a reactionary or, conversely, a simplistic radical, and reclaims a more nuanced, historically grounded portrait.

Legacy and Relevance
The book concludes by arguing that Orwell matters because the temptations he fought, propaganda, bureaucratic cruelty, deliberate obfuscation, remain present. Hitchens presents Orwell as a resource for anyone concerned with integrity in public life: someone who models intellectual courage, moral clarity, and an insistence that language serve truth rather than camouflage power. The case is made not merely on nostalgic grounds but as a practical handbook for resisting contemporary abuses of language and authority.