Orwell: the first man

Facing Unpleasant Facts

Narrative Essays

George Orwell

Compiled and with an Introduction by George Packer

Harcourt: 308 pp., $25

All Art Is Propaganda

Critical Essays

George Orwell

Compiled by George Packer and with an Introduction by Keith Gessen

Harcourt: 374 pp., $25

It's a source of no small irony to read George Orwell's essays in the closing days of this election season -- although not for the reasons one might expect. Sure, there have been plenty of Orwellian turns these last few months (a Washington insider running as an agent of change, political rallies reminiscent of the Two Minutes Hates from "1984"). But for all that, the presidential race remains less ideological than pragmatic as each candidate tries to lay claim to the center ground.

Even more, it oversimplifies Orwell to boil down his sensibilities to sound bites, to the allegorical starkness of "Animal Farm" or "1984." Nearly 59 years after his death of tuberculosis at age 46, Orwell's legacy now seems shackled by those novels, his restless intellect reduced to slogans: "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength," "Big Brother is watching you."

For Orwell, "Animal Farm" and "1984" were distillations; written late in his career, they represent a summing up. Far more fundamental is how he came to their perspective, how the worldview they portray arose. Like many of his books, they have roots in the pieces he contributed, beginning in the early 1930s, to newspapers, anthologies and journals -- essays, columns, criticism, observations, the efforts of a working writer, which, more than anything, is what he was.

"Orwell's writing began with essays, and his essays began with his experience," notes George Packer in his introduction to "Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays." "Before 'Burmese Days' there was 'A Hanging,' and before 'A Hanging' there were 'five boring years within the sound of bugles' as a colonial policeman in Burma. Before 'Down and Out in Paris and London' there was 'The Spike,' and before 'The Spike' there were months spent incognito as a dishwasher and tramp. In 'Why I Write' Orwell reports that he wanted to be a writer from 'perhaps the age of five or six,' but it was only in the hard, self-inflicted experiences of his twenties and thirties -- imperialism, poverty, coal mines and miners, the Spanish civil war -- that his power as a writer was forged."