Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is my favourite novel, and my list of books read is awash with apocalyptic and dystopian titles. Given that backdrop, I was really keen to read this, and fully expected to love it. However, although I feel like a philistine for saying it, this has to be one of the most impenetrable and tedious reads I’ve ever attempted, and I didn’t like it at all.

I’m clearly going against prevailing opinion here, as this book is very highly-regarded, and was clearly a trailblazer for fictional depictions of totalitarianism. I can see that in many ways Orwell ripped this off quite blatantly, recycling many elements of the setting and plot for his own work, but despite how much I enjoyed Nineteen Eighty-Four, I couldn’t get into this at all.

I’m not sure how much of this is the writing style, and how much is the translation, but I found the poetic, flowery and highly literary language very frustrating, and it was very hard to distinguish between what was really going on, and what was symbolic or allegorical. As such, most of the time I had absolutely no idea what was happening, and the plot was extremely hard to follow. In terms of genre, it clearly belongs in the world of literary science-fiction, and I’ll be honest, I’ve never got on well with that at all. Ursula Le Guin was a big fan of this book, and despite several attempts to get into them, none of Le Guin’s works have left much of an impression on me at all. That probably says a lot.

There’s not much point in saying much else, really, just that this really, really didn’t work for me at all, and was a confusing, frustrating slog. I much prefer Orwell’s writing style, with its tight, efficient prose, and really detailed world-building that makes Nineteen Eighty-Four such a gripping and atmospheric read. While it’s becoming abundantly clear that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a lot less original than I thought it was, at least it actually makes sense.