book-review

Two plus Two

I think I have admitted here before that I’ve never been very good at maths. Even so, I am pretty certain that I know what two plus two is. That never really seemed very important, but the film I watched yesterday afternoon with John revealed just how consequential it in fact is.

We went to see Orwell: 2+2=5, a 2025 film directed by Raoul Peck, and as I wheeled out of the Curzon cinema I honestly thought I had a new favourite film. I don’t think I have ever seen a more beautiful, intriguing filmic text. To just call it a film or even a biopic would be to over simplify it. It may be about George Orwell, but it is also about much, much more. Peck juxtapositions Orwell’s writing with contemporary politics, enabling it to speak to our world. The result is phenomenally powerful, as if a voice from eighty years ago was able to accurately predict and comment on what is happening today. Freedom has become slavery, war has become peace, and ignorance has indeed become strength in a way Orwell could never have imagined but predicted with chilling precision.

Riding the Lizzie Line home last night though, I began to wonder what I was going to say about this masterpiece. It is a very cinephiliac film: that is to say, it revels in the cinematic art, referencing countless other films and reminding me what cinema is for. It made me realise how little I know about George Orwell, and made me ravenous to know more. After all, he was a contemporary of Hemingway, Fleming and Tolkien, and just as influential as all three, but I have never really studied him. This will sound like a bit of a cop-out, but I honestly don’t think confining my thoughts to a blog entry would do the film justice: I now feel the urge to go far, far deeper, exploring a writer who was clearly one of the greatest of the twentieth century, yet who I know so little about. In a way, Peck’s film whetted my appetite and made me hungry for more. It really is an astonishingly great film which I would urge everyone to watch, saying so much about both Orwell and the present; but the cool part is, it was just the beginning. It feels like it has opened up a completely new realm for me to now dive into and explore.

We may well live in a world where two plus two might soon equal five, and where everything Orwell warned us against may soon become reality; but as long as films like this are being made, and as long as we remain aware of the threat posed by Big Brother, we should be all right.

Just Exchanging A Book

It amazes me what a numpty I can be sometimes. A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a James Bond-related video on Youtube, which concerned a biography of Ian Fleming which I thought sounded interesting. I have read a couple of good bios of Fleming in the past but not this one, so I determined to try to look it up. A day or so later, I set off for Waterstones in Lewisham, and put in an order for the book I was interested in. A few days after that, of course I went back to Lewisham, payed for the text and brought it home.

Truth be told I don’t read that much these days as I get too distracted by the internet, but I told myself to make the effort to read the book I had gone to that much effort to buy. It wasn’t until that point, however, that I glanced at my book shelf to see that a copy of the very same book had been there all along! At that moment I felt so infantile and stupid – I would have died of embarrassment, if anyone else had known what I had done.

Fortunately for me they didn’t, so today I was able to pop back to Lewisham and exchange the book for one I don’t have, on Hitchcock and Truffault. It’s not that I think this is particularly noteworthy or blogworthy – many people probably do similar things every day. Yet, on another level, in a way it’s pretty amazing: if I had been told as a ten or even fifteen year old that I would one day be trundling around South-East London, living independently, doing my own shopping, talking to strangers and even buying books I already had, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. Every once in a while, it stuns me how differently my life has turned out to the way I always assumed it would growing up, even down to the ability to go out on my own and buy my own things. That is why I think it’s so important that I help to encourage young people in similar positions to mine. When you have a disability which effects how you communicate, you often don’t realise that you can interact with society just like anyone else.