Book Review: The Last Man in Europe
The Last Man in Europe by Dennis Glover is a novel that depends on its reader. For the casual page-flipper it is an historical recreation of the life of George Orwell. For the Orwell fan it’s is an indulgence, with enough winks to border on fan-fic. For the writer the book delves into the agony of writing - exquisitely detailing Orwell’s repeated, self-determined failures that paved the way to his ultimate success. For an academic, it represents the final collapse in the wall dividing fiction and non-fiction: a novel about a real-life writer, that fictionally recreates his lived experiences arranged such that they culminate into his most important work of fiction - 1984. The last interpretation is just the sort of art-imitating-life-imitating-art-imitating-life hall of mirrors that Orwell would have excoriated as irrelevant and self-indulgent. Thankfully exploring it does little to add to the understanding of The Last Man in Europe - so let’s move on.
More interesting is how deftly Glover arranges Orwell’s experiences so that by the final part you realise you have been reading a recipe for 1984 all along. Each ingredient is a scene from Orwell’s life that makes the creation of 1984 seem almost predetermined.
The book begins amongst dusty stacks and aisles at the Booklover’s corner in Hampstead London, where Orwell worked selling books so he could spend the rest of his time writing them. At the edge of despair and bitterness at failing to become a “real” writer, Orwell’s thoughts are interrupted when his future wife, the flirtatious and ‘free’ Eileen O'Shaughnessy enters the store. This chance encounter liberates Orwell from the boredom and failure of his life in inter-war London. The scene is reconstructed from the many Orwell biographies out there (the concluding author’s note indicates he has read them all). It echoes the moment that 1984’s Winston finds respite from his dehumanising life under a totalitarian regime through love with Julia in Charrington’s antique shop. It only works because somehow Glover is able to recreate the texture of grim dystopic 1984 within the perma-fog and bread and dripping of London.
It may seem like a bit of a stretch. Yet Glover achieves it with two indispensable techniques working in concert: to colour each scene with Orwell’s own restless, moral and prescient character and to locate each of his experiences in their historical moment. The latter is the most vital. It is easy to forget today, how precarious free-thought was for Britons living beside a continent beneath the boot of fascism, then in the throes of the Cold War. Yet it makes sense - because Orwell arrived at conclusions decades before other writers he discovered them through lived experience instead of finding them in a book. This makes Glover’s approach authentic.
Consider his fighting for the POUM Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War for example. The betrayal of the republican revolution by Soviet backed communists hit Orwell famously hard. The Last Man in Europe reconstructs this as no biography can. In it Orwell staggers through the streets of Barcelona, avoiding communists patrols, now hunted by members of the side on which he had fought, and been wounded for, only months earlier. Yet the deepest betrayal for Orwell is the betrayal of the truth - that members who had died for the revolution were now marked as traitors and those who had not fought hailed as heroes, shook Orwell to his core. Glover conjures up this moment and arranges it perfectly. That the fascists would lie to achieve their ends was a given but that the noble left would resort to the same techniques for political convenience lead Orwell to the apolitical heart of 1984.
Less obvious is where Glover locates another major theme for 1984 in Orwell’s life - how tyranny relies on the destruction of language. As bombs fall overhead on London during the blitz we see Orwell sequestered into the dusty halls of the BBC, forced to compile newscasts for a foreign audience that never tunes in. Glover’s Orwell comments that this task is meant to keep the restless minds in Britain busy. When Orwell is approached by coworker and literary critic William Epsom that we see Glover’s work sing as history and fiction. Epsom has created a Simplified English - a list of 1000 words that can be fit (in tiny font) onto a single sheet of paper. Epsom is proud but Orwell is horrified. For Orwell words matter. Language is the most potent tool against tyranny and the first that totalitarian powers attempt to co-opt. Glover brings what must have been a lifetime’s worth of rumination and consideration for Orwell out into a single credible scene - thoughts that found the loudest and clearest expression in 1984.
We live in an era of alt-facts, a term Orwellian in itself. It is also a time when everything Orwell valued, the truth, meaning, authenticity, civility, is up for grabs. We frequently see the ghost of Orwell kidnapped by both the left and right, and forced to mouth words he would never have uttered in life. The Last Man in Europe is vital right now because it returns Orwell’s ghost back to himself. In the man’s own words a big truth can be built on small lies. This was never intended as a license for dishonesty. Instead it was meant to describe how a work of fiction can be more authentic, more honest than a work built solely on facts. The Last Man in Europe is just such a work.