Julia

by Sandra Newman

Genres: Classics; Literary Fiction; Dystopian; Science Fiction

Synopsis

A PEOPLE Magazine Must-Read Book for Fall 2023

An Esquire Best Book of Fall 2023

A Guardian Biggest New Book of 2023

A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2023

An imaginative, feminist, and brilliantly relevant-to-today retelling of Orwell’s 1984, from the point of view of Winston Smith’s lover, Julia, by critically acclaimed novelist Sandra Newman.

Julia Worthing is a mechanic, working in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. It’s 1984, and Britain (now called Airstrip One) has long been absorbed into the larger trans-Atlantic nation of Oceania. Oceania has been at war for as long as anyone can remember, and is ruled by an ultra-totalitarian Party, whose leader is a quasi-mythical figure called Big Brother. In short, everything about this world is as it is in Orwell’s 1984.

All her life, Julia has known only Oceania, and, until she meets Winston Smith, she has never imagined anything else. She is an ideal citizen: cheerfully cynical, always ready with a bribe, piously repeating every political slogan while believing in nothing. She routinely breaks the rules, but also collaborates with the regime when necessary. Everyone likes Julia.

Then one day she finds herself walking toward Winston Smith in a corridor and impulsively slips him a note, setting in motion the devastating, unforgettable events of the classic story. Julia takes us on a surprising journey through Orwell’s now-iconic dystopia, with twists that reveal unexpected sides not only to Julia, but to other familiar figures in the 1984 universe. This unique perspective lays bare our own world in haunting and provocative ways, just as the original did almost seventy-five years ago.

Release date: October 24, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 304

Sample

1

IT WAS THE MAN FROM RECORDS WHO BEGAN IT, HIM all unknowing in his prim, grim way, his above-it-all, oldthink way. He was the one Syme called “Old Misery.”

He wasn’t truly new to Julia. Fiction, Records, and Research all took second meal at thirteen hundred, so you got to know everyone’s face. But up to then, he’d really just been Old Misery, the one who looked like he’d swallowed a fly, who coughed more than he spoke. Comrade Smith was his right name, though “Comrade” never suited him somehow. Of course, if you felt foolish calling someone “Comrade,” far better not to speak to them at all.

He was slight and very fair. Good-looking—or might have been, if he hadn’t always looked so sour. You never saw him smile, unless it was the false smirk of Party piety. Julia made the error of smiling at him once, and got back a look that would sour milk. People said he excelled at his job but couldn’t advance because his parents had been unpersons. One supposed that made him bitter.

Nonetheless, it was a shame how Syme tormented him. At the Ministry of Truth, Syme worked in Research, devising Newspeak words. These were meant to purify everyone’s mind but were mainly a pain in the arse to learn. Most folk muddled along, but Old Misery Smith couldn’t even say ungood without looking as if it scalded his mouth. Syme saw in this a reason to follow him around and act like his best friend, the better to pepper him with Newspeak terms and watch the fellow squirm. Smith also hadn’t the stomach for public executions, so Syme would talk about the hangings he’d witnessed, making the noises of the strangling men and saying how he enjoyed it when their tongues lolled out. Smith turned positively green. That was the sort of fun Syme liked.

Julia had spoken to the man just once, when they got stuck together at a table in the canteen. She’d still harbored hopes for him then. There were so few attractive men at Truth and she’d thought she could nurse a crush on Smith to while away a tedious day. So she’d chattered with more warmth than was warranted about the new Three-Year Plan, and how Fiction had luckily got new workers, all praise to Big Brother, and how was Records bearing up?

Instead of answering, he’d said, not meeting her eye, “So you work on one of the Fiction machines?”

She’d laughed. “I fix whatever breaks, comrade. It’s not just one machine. That would be a fine machine, one you had to fix all day!”

“I always see you with a spanner.” His eyes went to the red Junior Anti-Sex League sash at her waist, then darted away hastily, as if he’d had an electric shock. She’d seen the silly blighter was afraid of her. He thought she was about to report him for sexcrime—as if she could see whatever filthiness he had cooking in his head!

Well, there wasn’t much point after that. They had finished their meal in silence.

The day it changed was the morning O’Brien was in Fiction, a low April morning of evil winds, when all London rattled and moaned and seemed about to blow down around its own ankles. With O’Brien in, Fiction was a madhouse—everyone showing off how hard they could work—but Julia’s side dried up. She spent the whole morning up on the walkway, watching in vain for the yellow flags that meant someone needed a repair. Normally, they sprouted like weeds, and Julia was dashing about all day to a refrain of: “Comrade, it’s making a rattle . . . Oh, it’s not doing it now. Could you just check?” Most service requests were just an excuse to sneak out for a chat and a gin, and Julia always played her part, shutting down the machine and pretending to hunt for the source of the phantom problem.

Today, not a rattle in the house. Everyone was too afraid of being taken for a saboteur by O’Brien. Julia spent the morning pacing the walkway, gasping for a fag but knowing all it wanted was a cigarette

for her to look criminally idle.

Fiction was a vast and windowless factory floor that took up the first two basement stories of the Ministry of Truth. The space was dominated by the plot machinery, eight mammoth machines that looked like simple boxes of shining metal. When you opened them up, their guts were a bewildering array of sensors and gears. Only Julia and her colleague Essie knew how to crawl around inside without doing damage. The central mechanism was the kaleidoscope. It had sixteen sets of claws that selected and transported plot elements; hundreds of metal sorts that were grabbed and discarded until a group was found that fit together. This successful pattern was assembled—again by machinery—on a magnetized plate. The plate was dipped into a tray of ink, then swiveled out and was stamped onto a roll of paper. The printed length of paper was cut away. A production manager lifted it free.

The result was a gridded print, jocularly called a “bingo card,” that coded the elements of a story: genre, main characters, major scenes. A Rewrite man had once attempted to explain to Julia how these were interpreted, but to no avail. Even after five years on the floor, to her they might as well have been Eastasian picture-writing.

Now she watched as a production manager snatched a new print off the roll and waved it about to dry the ink. When he was satisfied, he rolled it, inserted it into a green cylinder, and shoved the cylinder into a pneumatic tube. From her vantage point, Julia could watch the cylinder’s flight through a tangle of translucent plastic hoses on the ceiling to plop into a bin at the southern end of the room. That was Rewrite, where men and women sat in long rows, muttering into speakwrites, turning bingo cards into novels and stories. But by that stage, no machines were involved and Julia’s interest was at an end.

She was perpetually fascinated by the plot machinery, how it worked and the ways it could go wrong. She knew how the inks were formulated, and loved to explain why the blue gave trouble. She knew how the paper was held steady, and what could make it bunch up or crease. She was excruciatingly aware of when a part would soon need replacing, and knew how to submit the order so it wouldn’t get knocked back by the Capital Goods Committee. But about the books that were the end result, she knew little and cared less.

Once a Rewrite chap told her he was the same, having formerly been a voracious reader. “People say if you love sausage, you should never see it being made. It disgusts you after that. That’s me and books.” For Julia, this dictum wasn’t true of sausage. She’d made and eaten sausage without a second thought. She’d even eaten sausage raw once to win a bet. But it was true of Revolution’s Victory: All for Big Brother or War Nurse VII: Larissa.

As she thought this, she realized she’d idly fallen into watching O’Brien. He was working his way around the floor, making impromptu speeches, asking questions, smiling genially at everyone. In the regions far from him, the workers kept their heads down and their faces blank. They were doing their best machine imitation,

 which in many cases was impressively good. Close to O’Brien, however, all faces turned to him, alive with timid hope, like flowers turning to the sun. Several people had been coaxed from their posts and were gathered by him, listening raptly to whatever he was saying. Of course, an Inner Party member’s chitchat always took precedence over your job.

From Julia’s vantage point on the walkway, what was most striking was the physical contrast between O’Brien and his listeners. O’Brien wore jet-black Inner Party overalls of thick American cotton that fit so well they must have been tailored. Everyone else was Outer Party and wore blue rayon overalls, either too tight or comically voluminous. After one wearing, the rayon bagged at the knees; after twenty, the knees grew thick with darning. The dye came out in the wash, so every pair was a slightly different blue, and blotchy where the color had faded unevenly. O’Brien was tall and powerfully built, while the Fiction people were either painfully scrawny or potbellied. They hunched in the permanent cringe of the meek, while O’Brien was a straight-backed, bull-like man. One kept fancying his big hands scarred across the knuckles and his snub nose broken, though in fact he had not a blemish. Then there was his charm: he treated every man like his particular friend, and made every girl feel as if she’d caught his eye. All sham, of course, yet you couldn’t help liking him.

He reminded Julia of a moving picture she’d seen where an Inner Party man got stranded in Second Agricultural Region and ended up saving the harvest. Only he could see that the trouble with the corn was a tiny insect devouring it from the inside. This thanks to his superior intellect, symbolized by the neat eyeglasses he wore on the end of his nose. When it came time to help with the reaping, though, he folded those eyeglasses, put them in his pocket, and his brute strength was the wonder of the peasants. Girls sighed over him, and the laborers roared with laughter at his down-to-earth jokes. O’Brien was just like that, down to the gold-rimmed specs and sighing girls. Even now, Margaret from Julia’s hostel had materialized beside him at Machine 4, laughing at whatever O’Brien had said, her cheeks pink, one hand in her sandy hair. Margaret didn’t even work in Fiction, and had no earthly cause to be here. And behind her were Syme and Ampleforth, both of whom worked with her on the tenth floor. All three must have been alerted to O’Brien’s presence and come running.

Julia looked away in irritation, for she herself should be chatting up O’Brien—not for love of his blue eyes, but to see if he wanted any home repairs. Most did: the Housing people took forever, and never had parts when they finally came. Julia did home repairs for the challenge—so she said—but almost everyone was kind enough to slip her fifty dollars. And with Inner Party members, it was well worth it, even if they paid nothing. Indeed, it could

be better if they paid nothing. That was treating you as a friend. Julia had heard of people getting jobs or flats thanks to friends of just this type.

O’Brien would make the ideal “friend.” Yet Julia remained on the walkway, her face a mask of dutiful alertness. The thought of approaching the man made her flesh crawl. O’Brien was from Love.

At that moment, all power was cut to the machines. They whirred and slowed with a groan like a great beast sighing ponderously and easing its huge bulk down to the ground. In the silence that followed—a funny-bone silence, a silence like the deafness after a bomb—the whistle blew for the Two Minutes Hate.

Fiction, along with a dozen other departments, had its Hate in Records. Records had the space; half the office had been cleared out in the Small Adjustment of ’79. It also made a nice break for Fiction, because they worked in the lightless depths, while Records was on Floor Ten, with banks of windows on all four walls. The catch was that they weren’t to use lifts—healthy exercise, comrades! To add insult to injury, there were three “ghost” floors, which had once contained bustling offices but now stood empty, so Floor Ten was really Floor Thirteen. This meant not only three extra flights but that you had to pass those floors-of-the-dead.

Every landing on the stairs was dominated by a telescreen. Syme and Ampleforth, who struggled with the climb, kept pausing to comment in apparent fascination on whatever the telescreen was saying, while panting and mopping the sweat from their brows. Julia had a habit of smiling at each telescreen as she passed, imagining some bored man in surveillance being cheered by her appearance. Stairs held no terrors for her. At twenty-six, she’d never been stronger, and certainly never so well fed. Today she was especially lively after the long, dull hours of idleness, and trotted up, chattering with everyone she met, pressing hands and laughing at jokes. Syme’s name for her was “Love-Me,” which sometimes gave her pause, but could have been far worse. Only at the end did she slow abruptly, when she saw she might overtake O’Brien. As a result, she was right on his heels when the group came pouring into Records.

The first thing she saw was Smith—Old Misery. He was moving chairs into rows and, absorbed in this chore, looked surprisingly likable. A lean man of roughly forty, very fair and gray-eyed, he resembled the man from the poster HONOR OUR INTELLECTUAL LABORERS, though of course without the telescope. He appeared to be dreaming of something cold but fine. Perhaps he was thinking of music. He moved with obvious pleasure, despite his slight limp; you could see he liked to have physical purpose.

But then he noticed Julia, and his mouth thinned with revulsion. It was startling how it changed him: hawk to reptile. Julia thought: Nothing wrong with you a good shag wouldn’t fix! This almost made her laugh, for of course it was true. His real trouble wasn’t that his parents had been unpersons, or that he couldn’t keep up with Party doctrine, or even his nasty cough. Old Misery had a bad case of Sex Gone Sour. And naturally the woman was

 to blame. Who else?

Without giving it much thought, when Smith sat down, Julia went to sit directly behind him. She justified it to herself because it was the seat right by the windows. But when he stiffened, uncomfortable with her presence, she was meanly pleased. Beside her was a low bookshelf with only one book: an old Newspeak dictionary from 1981, now lightly rimed with dust. She imagined running her finger through the dust and writing on his nape with the dirt—perhaps a J for Julia—though of course she never would.

The only trouble was, from here she could smell him. By all rights, he ought to smell like mildew, but he smelled like good male sweat. Then she noticed his hair, which was thick and fine and might be quite nice to touch. So unfair that the Party warped the good-looking ones. Let them take the Ampleforths and Symes, and leave the Smiths to her.

Then, wouldn’t you know, Margaret came to sit next to Smith, and O’Brien followed after and sat on Margaret’s other side. Margaret and Smith ignored each other. All the Records people were like that. It was a treacherous job, reading oldthink all day, and Records workers kept each other at arm’s length. But what troubled Julia now was the question of why O’Brien was tagging after Margaret. Surely he couldn’t enjoy plain Margaret simpering and sighing at him?

Julia looked away—always the safest option when anyone was doing something peculiar—and gazed out of the bank of windows. At that moment, a scrap of newspaper sailed past, hectically spinning in the air, before it abruptly spread itself and dived to the rooftops far below. From this height, you couldn’t tell prole neighborhoods from Party neighborhoods; that was always queer. It also took a moment to pick out the gaps where bombs had fallen; on the street, they were all around you, and London sometimes seemed more crater than city. There was a private-use fuel ban for daylight hours, and you could make out the rare wisps of smoke where the A1 dining centers were. Electricity cuts were in force as well, and the grubby, unlit windows of office buildings had the gloomy radiance of the sea.

A little chunk of the view was obstructed by the massive telescreen on the nearby Transport building, whose moving pictures created the illusion that the daylight kept flickering and subtly changing. The images repeated on a simple loop. First one saw a group of pink-cheeked children innocently playing in a playground. On the horizon, a shadowy group of perverts and Eurasians and capitalists grew, reaching toward the children with brutish hands. Then a cut-out of Big Brother rose and blotted the villains out, and a slogan appeared in the sky: THANK YOU, BIG BROTHER, FOR OUR SAFE CHILDHOOD! After this, the same children reappeared, now in the uniform of the children’s organization, the Spies: gray shorts, blue shirt, and red kerchief. The jolly Spies marched past with an Ingsoc flag, and the slogan in the sky became: JOIN THE SPIES! Then all faded, and the first image returned.

Weaving busily above this scene were helicopters. First you noticed the large ones,

whose passage was audible even behind thick windows. These were manned by a pilot and two gunners, and you sometimes saw a gunner sitting casually in the open door of a copter with his black rifle resting against his knee. Once you thought of copters, you started noticing the flocks of microcopters below; then the big ones looked like the little ones’ parents. The micros weren’t manned but operated by remote control. They were only for surveillance, and in Outer Party districts, you’d often glance up from a task to find a micro hovering by your window like a nosy bird.

But by far the most striking thing in the view was the Ministry of Love. It rose from the jumble of ruins and low houses like a white fin breaching turbid brown water. On its gleaming surface, you could make out the tiny figures of workmen, attached to a slender tracery of cables, scrubbing its eerily snow-white flank. Apart from the tiny detail of those workmen, the building was so white it gave the impression of being an absence: a portal to nothingness cut through the shabby city and the cloudy sky. Love had no windows at all, giving its austere beauty a suffocating effect. Julia had heard a story that the mice there had no eyes; with no light, they had no need. That was bollocks, of course. Even when there was a power cut, the four big Ministries always had electric light. Still, those mythic blind mice troubled her. They stood for the real terrors behind those walls, terrors one couldn’t see and must imagine in ignorance.

Beyond Love to the southwest was the more modest glass tower of the Ministry of Plenty, aglitter with light. Farther to the south, the Ministry of Peace was visible only as a glow in the mist. Beyond even that, Julia could see a faint green haze, which might be the fields at the very edge of London. She always thought of that haze as Kent—or Semi-Autonomous Zone 5, as it was properly called—where she’d grown up.

Most other Truth workers were born in the city, and passed the windows without a glance, but Julia could never get enough of London. She even loved how blasted and tumbledown it was, how wild, if you strayed from the Party neighborhoods. It was the greatest city of Airstrip One, the most populous city in all of Oceania, from the Shetland Semi-Autonomous Zone to the Argentine Economic Region. Julia never stopped feeling lucky to be here, born as she was in a SAZ, amid the cows and the camps.

While she was gazing out the window, the room had filled, and the Smith man’s scent had vanished in a general fug of dirty laundry, sour breath, and cheap soap. Some people’s faces were already indignant in preparation for the Hate. It was always queer to see them snarling and glaring rigidly at a blank telescreen. Julia was feeling her usual anxiety that this time it wouldn’t come off, that they would try to rage and give up in embarrassment or simply burst out laughing. Whenever she imagined this, she saw herself standing up and righteously scolding the mockers. In reality she would be the first to laugh.

Then it was starting. One felt it before one heard it: a vibration like thunder that resolved into a too-loud, grating voice. It seemed to buzz

 in the metal chairs themselves and make the lighting seethe with migraine. All cried out in anger as the telescreen filled with the familiar, loathsome face of Emmanuel Goldstein.

It was a lean, intellectual face with a kindliness that soon came to seem conniving and false. Behind the spectacles, the eyes were childish and lewd at once. The thick lips were always moist. They made you want to cross your legs. The bloom of woolly white hair around his head was sheeplike, as were his bulbous features. Even his voice had a bleating querulousness. As the clip began, he was making a speech that at first seemed much like any Party speech. In fact, for long stretches, it was Newspeak: sickthink overtaked plusgood of truefighters. You had to listen closely to hear it was a string of attacks on Oceania, the Party, and their way of life.

Emmanuel Goldstein had once been a hero of the revolution, who had fought at Big Brother’s side. Then he turned against the Party, and now devoted his considerable cunning and energy to the destruction of Oceania and its people. No one was safe from his malice. If he couldn’t turn citizens against the Party, he would poison the water supply. If he couldn’t pervert little children, he would bomb their schools. He detested anything chaste or brave, because he lacked these qualities, and, for this reason, he hated Big Brother with all his warped, parasitical heart. Though his speeches were always full of obvious lies and meaningless jargon like “free speech” and “human rights,” he still managed to gull some people. His acolytes were responsible for everything that went wrong in Oceania, from the sabotage that meant no one had enough food to the undermining of soldiers’ morale that kept Oceania from winning the war.

Of course, one knew this couldn’t all be true. There were so many stories of Goldstein’s crimes, they would have taken him a thousand years to commit. London was meant to be crawling with his terrorists, but no one had ever seen one in the flesh. The tales of Goldstein’s escapes from justice were particularly far-fetched, always involving thrilling feats of courage by our Boys in Black, and a humiliating episode in which Goldstein fell on his backside or sniveled, begging for his life, only to be rescued at the last minute by some villain—usually a Party higher-up who’d fallen out of favor the day before.

Today, Goldstein was talking against the war, in the most puerile and offensive way, as if the war were all Oceania’s fault. He cared nothing for the people killed by bombs that morning. Just in case you were in danger of being won over, behind his head the screen showed ranks of marching Eurasian soldiers—an endless flood of massive, hard-faced men. The Hate was in full swing now, the whole room heaving and yelling. Margaret was prettily flushed, her mouth straining wide in sensual rage, and O’Brien had manfully risen to his feet as if to confront

 a hated enemy. Even Smith was roaring with surprising venom and kicking spasmodically against the rung of his chair. For a hazardous moment, Julia became detached, wondering clinically if Smith was shamming. Then a jolt of panic went through her. She’d forgotten to keep yelling. Now she felt a yawn coming on.

On impulse, she grabbed the old Newspeak dictionary from the shelf beside her. Taking a deep breath, she screamed, “Swine! Swine! Swine!” and hurled the heavy book over everyone’s heads. It flew end over end to slam into the screen with a resounding clang. All started, and, in that instant, Julia was struck by second thoughts. Her act could be seen as an attack on the screen. Telescreens were remarkably sturdy, and a book couldn’t really do one harm—but was O’Brien aware of that? Might he think her action was sabotage?

But O’Brien bellowed on, oblivious, and other people were now peppering the screen with whatever came to hand. One man threw a packet of cigarettes at it, another his own shoe. Julia was perspiring with fear, but it had come off. The treacherous yawn was gone.

Now the image on the screen began to change. Goldstein’s face turned into that of an actual sheep, while his voice became a long shrill baa. Just as people began to laugh and jeer, the sheep was replaced by a burly Eurasian soldier, leaping toward the viewer with a submachine gun. Some people in the front flinched back.

But this image immediately melted into the comforting face of Big Brother—the Party leader—a man of about forty-five with thick black hair and a black moustache. This Big Brother was both like and unlike the young, bare-armed Big Brother on army recruiting posters, or the child Big Brother who appeared on Spies badges. The mature leader was handsome and supremely masculine in a clean, reassuring way. He was a man who had fought for his people for decades, and survived to see his vision made real. Along the way, he’d been betrayed by countless men he’d thought of as true comrades, and had almost been murdered by the capitalists scores of times, but he still stood firm against the Flood. He understood the ordinary man and entered into all his problems. He was great but also good. You didn’t have to be a fool to love Big Brother; whatever else, there was always that.

As Big Brother spoke, everybody shifted toward the screen, as if basking in its light. He said, “We stand as one. Ours is truth . . .” More grand, plain words followed that faded from Julia’s mind as they were spoken. Margaret stretched forward over the back of the empty chair in front of her, murmuring, “My Savior!” and buried her face in her hands. Smith, too, strained forward, his fair head raised.

In the final seconds, Big Brother’s face faded and was replaced by the three core Party slogans, written in thick black letters on red: WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Then the telescreen blanked out and left the watchers facing their own dim reflections. They began the chant: “B-B! B-B! B-B!” It started out uncoordinated and messy, but soon settled into a slow, sure beat. Those who were still sitting rose to their feet; some stamped along or drummed on the backs of chairs. This part of the ritual was always a release. Everyone relaxed

and beamed. Another thought had been correctly thought, another feeling rightly felt. One saw how little the Party asked, after all. You needn’t know all the latest Newspeak words or struggle to believe contradictory things. If you hated the enemy, you could be loved. People smiled dopily at each other, and some eyes welled with tears. They had had a good Hate.

Now all that remained was the petty problem of knowing when to stop chanting. You wouldn’t want to be the first to quit, but being last was no good, either. Julia decided to take O’Brien as her cue—but as she thought it, he turned his head, and she was startled to see he’d already stopped. His face was also queer, expressing not joy but a humorous interest. At first glance, Julia saw this as sexual, and thought with surprise that homely Margaret had somehow really attracted him.

But O’Brien wasn’t looking at Margaret. Impossibly, he’d locked eyes with Smith. And Smith’s face was open, quiescent, bright with some enigmatic softness. He was like a meadow glowing in a bath of sunlight.

Instinctively Julia turned away, and in that moment, the chant had ended. She shut her mouth on a last superfluous “B!” and, when she glanced back, O’Brien and Smith were both facing forward again with somber faces. You’d never know they’d given each other a thought.

Immediately she was unsure of what she’d seen. People looked at each other. How was that significant? Smith’s loving expression hadn’t been that distinct from anyone else’s during the chant. And how was it surprising if O’Brien looked at Old Misery with detached amusement? It was no more than Syme did every day.

People now began to rise from their chairs. Ampleforth wandered up and began to talk obsequiously to O’Brien about the new poetry quotas. Nodding and making interested faces, O’Brien again radiated sincerity. When Smith starting gathering chairs again, he was pinched and sour, quite restored to himself.

No, nothing had happened after all. Julia put it from her mind and rose to start the long trip back to Fiction.

 

2

AFTER HATE, JULIA SIGNED HERSELF OUT FOR TWO hours on a Sickness: Menstrual. In actual fact, she was going to her hostel to deal with a stubbornly blocked toilet. It was a repair she should perhaps have postponed, with O’Brien nosing about, but the hostel only had two toilets, and, in Julia’s experience, it was inevitable that the other would be blocked by sundown. Anyhow, Sickness: Menstrual was a privilege all the girls used and abused. Any pretense that it corresponded to sickness, or even to any particular time of month, was a thing of memory. At the guardroom, no one even blinked at the fact that Julia also signed out a plumber’s auger. Of course, the guards were all blokes; perhaps they thought it was a necessary tool of menstruation.

At this hour, the bicycle bay was deserted. The only person there was a monitor drowsing on a chair, with a bottle of Victory gin between her feet. Hundreds of battered tomato-red bikes slouched on their kickstands beneath a line of BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU posters and a banner with the slogan BICYCLE FOR HEALTH! Most of the machines were unusable, of course, their chains chapped with rust, their spokes bowed. That morning, Julia had hidden a reliable Atlantic between two warped old machines, but someone must have spotted it and filched it nonetheless. She scanned the racks for ribbons and strings—markers people used to indicate a working bike. Not a hope. It took her ten minutes to find a sturdy old International she trusted to last the trip home.

As she left, the Ministry’s external telescreens were showing the second-meal musical program, with an image of crashing surf over which “Maid of Oceania” played. The walls of the other nearby buildings had ranks of B.B. posters: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. It was only those words and his grave, caring face, which filled the poster so it seemed to expand beyond its bounds and rush toward you. When Julia came to a crossroads, to left and right the posters covered every available space. She’d once seen a man do a card trick where all the cards turned into the king of spades. Then he riffled the deck so the faces all rushed by, uncannily the same. The posters were mesmerizing in just that way. All down the road, they passed her like marching soldiers, while the maudlin refrain of “Maid of Oceania” came from every open window, from bus stop telescreens, from the speakers mounted in trees in Martyrs of December Park. It was moving even to Julia, who liked to think of herself as a hardened cynic. Riding with the wind in her hair, the music swelling, and B.B. gazing from every direction made her feel like the lovely factory worker in the movie Airstrip One the Free, who renounced her true love to devote herself to the fight against Ingsoc’s enemies. The song and the fantasy only faded when she turned into the old legal district, where prole London began.

This was a world of bashed and crumbling houses shored up with higgledy-piggledy bits of wood. Some walls had been buttressed with sections of tree trunk trimmed to size with an axe. Not a window was whole; all were boarded up or replaced with government-issued blackout material, rimed with dirt. There was no electricity here. In the daytime, everyone in the district, and their furniture, was out in the street. People sat there drinking tea, playing cards, mending clothes under makeshift shelters cobbled together from blackout material, cardboard, and the ruins of bombed-out homes. Julia had to keep an eye out for errant children, drunks, wet armchairs, discarded bottles. It was nerve-racking, too, how the proles’ voices all died down as her bicycle approached, but no one looked up to watch her pass. Her Party overalls might as well have been a cloak of invisibility

Cutting through this bustling area were two dusty ravines where rocket bombs had flattened everything. In both, the road surface was gone, and Julia had to dismount and lift her bike over chunks of wreckage. The first bomb site was relatively new. Plaster dust still swirled in the air, and a family of ragpickers dug through the wreckage. Their prettiest daughter—a black-eyed waif of nine or ten in a velveteen frock twice her size—was stationed on a blanket at the side of the road to sell their meager finds to passersby: battered shoes, old nails and screws, a pair of scuffed eyeglasses.

The second site was of far longer standing, and had already filled with squatters’ huts. All about them, willow herb grew on the rubble. Some squatters were the people who’d lived in the shattered buildings, but there were also nomads who traveled from site to site, ...