Various reviewers have compared my novel
Mister to George Orwell's
Ninety Eighty-Four and Jean Raspail's
Camp of the Saints; two (Edmund Connelly and Martin Lichtmesz, view
Mister as a more baroque blend of the two). I had never previously read either of those novels (although I had meant to for a long time), so I decided to investigate why the comparisons have occurred. I am nearly finished with
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
I can see it: Orwell creates a paranoid world of labyrinthine speculation and uncertainty, and that is certainly present in
Mister. However, he is not as arcane as I tend to be, and he does not choke his narrative with revolting detail, as I tend to do. Another important difference is the tone: Orwell is serious, whereas I am sarcastic.
Orwell was uniquely prescient and it is easy to see why his novel is so often referenced in daily parlance. This is a significant achievement, considering that what we tend to regard as everlasting tends, often, to be much more transitory than is evident from within a system. Much of what he predicted has come to pass in the West, despite the collapse of communism in the East.
Orwell also managed to craft a page-turner: his novel is easy to read, and, because of this, was able to reach a wide audience. My appeal is to a very specific and narrowly-defined audience, as not only are my views considered heretical today, but my literary approach is akin to that of Alexander Theroux, and the latter's unapologetic elitism has confined him to obscurity (not that he cares anyway).
Yet, as is the case with a most dystopian novels, there is little that anchors Orwell's future to the present world that we know, except at the rather abstract level of legal praxis. I hope I have been more successful in delivering a recognisable future, as that was one of my principal technical aims.
Interestingly, Orwell's Ninety Eighty-Four predicts the supra-national state, but fails to predict the multicultural society. Britain in his 1984 is still a racially homogeneous: it belongs to one of three huge blocks, but these appear to have fiercely defended borders, to operate like fortresses; whereas this is not the case today, since our borders, thanks to globalism, have made borders porous. The fractures we have in our society today occupy multiple dimensions: Orwell's dystopia consisted of a society divided by classes of people, and resembles the Soviet reality; our society is divided by class, by race, by religion, and by gender. The result is much more chaotic, much more volatile.
Then again, what the academic, political, and media oligarchy have attempted to do after World War II, the kind of universal society they have attempted to create, was an experiment. Alexander the Great encouraged intermarriage as a means to cement his conquests, and the Roman Empire eventually became a multicultural entity, but theirs was a much less mobile, less conneted world; their multiculturalism was also very different in character (an pragmatic adaptation, rather than a utopian aim) and wherever they went, Rome was the idealised paradigm - the Romans Romanised and, even as they grew weak, they were never wracked by guilt, or paralysed by an intellectual belief in their own evil.
Predicting the future is difficult, even with access to a superabundance of historical records and analysis, and it becomes exponentially more difficult the further into the future one attempts to see. The variables are too numerous, and they constantly interact and modify one another in highly complex ways. Orwell did remarkably well, considering the means available to him at the time.
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