“We’ve come to see George Orwell as this prophet of dystopia, but that’s only one side”
HELEN LEWIS tells us about her new radio series, co-hosted with Ian Hislop, on the 20th-century novelists Franz Kafka and George Orwell
They’re both fascinating writers but why focus on George Orwell and Franz Kafka in particular?
This year marks 75 years since the publication of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the centenary of Kafka’s death. The thing that connects them, of course, is the fact that both of them gave us adjectives. That’s our way in: what does it mean to describe something as Orwellian or Kafkaesque?
We start with Ian Hislop talking to Alan Bates about whether his ordeal over the Horizon computer system failure [at the Post Office] was Orwellian or Kafkaesque. The case went through the courts in this labyrinthine, Kafkaesque way, but it was also Orwellian as some of the postmasters and postmistresses were threatened.
How true are these adjectives to how both would have seen their own work?
Orwell’s legacy is shaped by Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, [books about totalitarianism] that he wrote at the very end of his career. We’ve come to see him as this prophet of dystopia, but that’s only one side. Orwell also wrote journalism and socially aware realist novels.
Kafka wanted all of his writings to be burned after his early death from tuberculosis, but his friend Max Brod published them instead. The other thing Brod did was shape the image of Kafka as a kind of nervous, nebbish guy. And that’s partly true. But academics w
