1984 - George Orwell

A defining book for me that for a long time I held above any other. When I look back, it makes perfect sense that a teenage boy wanting to break free of an oppressive home and school life would identify with an everyman hero like Winston Smith, with his own all-too-human faults and weaknesses.
 
 I had never read a novel like this before. Its portrayal of one non-conformist’s resistance to a totalitarian regime’s culture of repression and virtual enslavement of citizens, surveillance and mind control, inversion of truth, rewriting of history and denial of joy became a guiding creed for one young man. The notion that the Party could render a person an Unperson I found especially chilling.
 
The dystopian novel worked for me where others might not for two crucial reasons.
 
However futuristic the proposition was, it still placed the action and the reader in a recognizably real setting based on London, so that the horror was believable. On the opening page, you find the smell of boiled cabbage (and if that ain’t real, what is?), and many citizens live in flimsy shacks in bomb craters, not unlike what Orwell would have seen in the city at the end of World War II, when he wrote the book.  
 
And it is not a roman à these: one of those books which to want to force you into submission with their admirable intentions until you say, okay, you’re right, of course, I agree, just leave me alone, and are inevitably sanctimonious and wooden. Neither Winston and Julia are superheroes representing an ideal. They are ordinary people who harbour normal desires and don’t stand a chance and eventually, tragically, give in.
 
Power has always been about controlling the narrative and distorting words of truth, and the fight for basic freedoms is not about winning—more often than not you will lose—but about fighting. History has borne out Orwell’s vision. The control of citizens and information is tightened with every technological advance.
 
The authors of despotism, it seems, are reborn to the same nations. 1984 was fundamentally a critique of and warning against Stalinism and Big Brother was the image of Joseph Stalin, who tyrannized and murdered millions of his people. Purged by his own Soviet Union, Stalin is now being rehabilitated by another dictator, Vladimir Putin, who doesn’t mind either how many people die in the pursuit of his own conceit.