Jura is an island off the west coast of Scotland, shaped like a raindrop splitting in two as it navigates the surface of a window. It has a population of roughly 200 (outnumbered about 25 to 1 by deer) and a single tarmacked road that stretches for less than half of its circumference. For the 25 miles or so that road lasts, you travel along the shattering beauty of the coastline, the trio of Paps mountains and scores of smaller undulations rolling away to the west, deer, sheep and cows regarding you indifferently as you pass. And then the public road ends, and you have to abandon your vehicle.
On you go, through patches of sideways rain, hitting hard and concentrated like icy gravel, and then cloud-splitting flourishes of sunshine which double the size of the sky, with Jura and the whole world twisting into different realities beneath. You may pass a handful of people, just as likely to be hardy off-road cyclists as to be traveling to the same destination as you. After four miles, towards the end of what locals call “the long road”, the ground to the east of the coiling track sheers away, and in the valley below, nestled between two banks of land and looking out to the sea, is Barnhill.
In 1946, Eric Blair, a recently widowed writer of middling acclaim (he’d just had his first hit, more than a decade into his career, with an allegory called Animal Farm) found that Barnhill, a small white house on the edge of the earth, was the most “un-get-at-able” place he could find. Blair was escaping the strictures of weekly journalism to finish his next book, which possibly takes inspiration from a poem his late wife Eileen had written called End of the Century, 1984. Over the next few years visitors would hear from the kitchen as he thumped away in the bedroom above on the work that would change how people think and talk about politics forever.
“A few years ago I realised I had five copies of 1984 that I had picked up at various secondhand shops, and I started to wonder why I’d kept picking it up,” artist Hans K. Clausen tells me. “So I re-read it and realised how formative it had been for me when I was younger, and how much I owed Orwell.” The idea of putting together a library consisting of that single book followed, as tribute and thanks, but also, Clausen says, “as an act of protest, of resistance to the way the world is going.”
The event takes place in the Jura town hall, corrugated iron on the outside, wood on the inside, very small. You enter behind a small desk holding a Remington and a paperweight, and reaching towards it in a capital A shape are three book shelves, loaded on both sides with copies of 1984, forming the Winston Smith Library of Truth and Victory, an art installation bringing 1984 back to its birthplace, launched on June 8, the 75th anniversary of the book’s publication.
Clausen is not an Orwell fanatic, you can tell, but plenty here are, the room bubbling with lots of knowing talk about his underrated skills as a prose stylist, and about how terribly important it is to undertake the trek to Barnhill.
“I’ve found Big Brother in Greek! I’m learning Greek, you see…“ an attendee smilingly tells me.
The politics of the event remain fairly broadly sketched — Clausen tells me he finds Elon Musk, with his ability to distort what currently passes for a public square, scarier than Donald Trump, and during his speech before the ribbon cutting his only reference to the current general election in the UK is that “we’d better get that one right”.
Clausen said he felt the emphasis on the physical was part of the protest, a public space filled with real things where people could meet and connect.
Walking through the exhibit, I thought about the first diary entry Winston Smith makes in 1984, a review of a “very good” film he’s gone to see, in which a boat full of refugees has a bomb dropped on it to the delight of the crowd. The first campaigndebate between Labour leader Keir Starmer and Conservative leader Rishi Sunak took place a few days earlier, with Starmer accusing Sunak of being the most “liberal” prime minister on immigration. Starmer unknowingly employed a homonym, given everything Sunak was pushing regarding “stopping the boats” comes directly from Australia’s Liberal party.
Flicking through book after book, I thought about Winston’s paperweight, the indestructible chunk of the history he carries around with him, the proof that it was not always like it is, and how these books are something similar. As with anything secondhand, particularly when the previous owner has left their mark on it, the life of these objects is deeply moving. Across the 1,984 copies there are scores of different publishers, with cover designs reflecting the fashions of every generation since Orwell’s. There’s an early American edition which gives the impression that the reader will be treated to a racy pulp science fiction; a 1960s purple and black cover with an abstract figure in chains; sparse and allusive modern covers; and copies in Hiragana and Cyrillic and Arabic scripts.
Some of the copies came from high schools around the UK and have been daubed with artwork by kids asked to interpret the book after they read it. Then there’s the notes left by the previous owners — most are entirely incidental. Some feature faded study notes, while others simple state whose copy it once was. Others have been actively left by the donors: one copy was picked up at a “wee secondhand shop” in Konstanz near the border of Germany and Switzerland. It was there a man called Johann Georg Elser was caught after his failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1939. Elser was caught 25 metres from the Swiss border fence, his bomb missed Hitler by 13 minutes, and he was executed less than a month before Germany’s surrender in 1945. “There ye go!” the note cheerily concludes.
Every era of publishing represented in this collection features a reference to the book’s ongoing prescience (“never been more relevant” insists the copy released to coincide with the movie released in 1984).
“I do worry at what’s coming down the pipe,” an older woman tells me. As we’re talking the early results in the European parliamentary elections are coming in, revealing a shift to the far right, particularly in France, Italy and Germany.
Making direct comparisons between Winston Smith’s reality and our own is usually melodramatic and trite — at least it is in the hands of the journalists in Australia and elsewhere who can’t seem to go five minutes without referencing his work. But it’s interesting to note where the dystopia of 1984 matches and differs from our own; Orwell’s text sees no place for the private sector which so dominates our time and is the major guarantee that we are (for the most part willingly, or at least indifferently) subject to a level of surveillance unimaginable to Winston and Julia, carrying around as we do little devices that track where we go, what we buy and what we read.
But of course, 1984 was intended not as a prediction, but as a warning. Another speaker at the event, Les Wilson, who wrote Orwell’s Island, concluded his speech in the same cheery, low-key tone as the rest of the event: “We have been warned.”
