Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Few novels have captured the moment and the progression of thought and fear as with as much intelligence and succinctness of expression as George Orwell’s 1984.
There are even fewer writer’s to whom their name exemplifies a movement, whose sense of style and pain can evoke a feeling within the mind that the world is very wrong, that freedom has been eroded, that our lives have been forever erased, altered, lied to over and over again to the point where at times we argue amongst ourselves about an act misremembered in the belief that one person’s truth is another’s lie.
Orwellian! This is the single word that carries a demand, that fires the warning shots in literature and in life that an act is to be considered unethical, immoral, that we are allowing, even accepting a turn of events that will leads to constant surveillance, to human misery, to the once unthinkable of all citizens being chipped to ensure compliance and submission to the system with no recourse to individuality or resistance.
To capture George Orwell’s genius in any other medium takes a sense of the absolute, the willingness to understand that in this current era we are but one small step, one innocent trip, to being stamped, addressed, categorised, indexed, as undesirables, as non-people, that freedom is an illusion that can at any time be removed. Such is the damnation of Winston Smith, the cruelty of O’ Brien, the fleeting glimpse of love typified in Julia is to accept dystopian fiction is fact, that all we embrace is further tarnished by ever conflicting thought and “newspeak”.
It is with gratitude and admiration that the reader will see Matyáš Namai’s extraordinary vision in his graphic novel adaptation of Orwell’s writing as observing with reverence the horror, the political dismay that we didn’t just sleepwalk into Orwell’s dark and foreboding future, we conveniently danced happily into it with our eyes wide open and hearts convinced Big Brother was right.
No matter when you first read the original novel, Matyáš Namai resurrects the fear the reader first felt as Smith’s thoughts became our own, the sense of power dynamics, the possibility…the actuality that has come to pass as cancel culture and denying free speech and thought have become the holy institutions designed to shackle, to chain, to bind us to a skeleton of former beauty and hope.
1984: The Graphic Novel is undeniable in its conviction, it is epic in its delivery, and polished in its artistic outlook. Matyáš Namai is an intellect honouring a genius; and the outcome has the capacity to offer us one last warning of the finality of our hubris.
Ian D. Hall