Review by Booklist Review
Dickensian. Kafkaesque. Orwellian. Each of these adjectives signifies a foundational experience of the human condition and, simultaneously, the power of story to communicate said shared experience. Born Eric Blair in British India, Orwell was raised in Oxfordshire, attended English prep schools, graduated from Eton, and joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Taylor expertly illuminates how these early influences provided Orwell with a keen interest in the power of language and the language of power. The subtitle of Taylor's authoritative account reflects newly available material but could just as accurately reflect the renewed life given to Orwell in our post-fact world. From fake news and ChatGPT, claims of stolen elections and insurrections, spy balloons and airborne toxic events, our world seems increasingly Orwellian. His novels Animal Farm and 1984 are firmly entrenched in the Western canon, and Orwell's journalism and essays are similarly revered and equally influential. Curiously, his uncanny prescience may be related to his self-mythologizing. As Taylor acknowledges, the life of Orwell is, "ultimately, a study of Orwell's personal myth, what might be called the difference between the kind of person he was and the kind of person he imagined himself to be." It is fitting, then, that a man given to perpetuating a myth became emblematic of the practice.
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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist and book critic Taylor (On 1984) delivers a sterling account of the life and works of George Orwell (1903--1950). Born Eric Blair in Motihari, India, Orwell moved with his family to Oxfordshire, England, while he was an infant. Following his schooling, he worked as a policeman in Burma before returning to England, where he began his career as a writer and adapted his pseudonym from Suffolk's River Orwell. Taylor digs into the creation of Orwell's most celebrated works, noting the acclaim that followed the 1945 publication of his Stalinism allegory, Animal Farm, despite having been rejected by multiple publishers because of the novel's criticism of the Soviet Union while the country was fighting alongside the U.K. in WWII. Orwell furthered his critique of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote while battling tuberculosis. He died from the disease at age 46, a year after the novel's publication. Taylor doesn't elide the less savory aspects of the author's character, noting that Orwell's "dislike of homosexuals follows him through his work like the clang of a medieval leper bell," and the meticulous research illuminates how Orwell's political commitments informed his fiction. This stands out in the crowded field of Orwell biographies. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In 2003, Taylor's biography of George Orwell (Orwell: The Life) was published to critical acclaim. Twenty years later, he has mined newly available material on Orwell to thoroughly update that earlier work. In 2012 and 2013, Orwell's diaries and letters were published, and Taylor uses those primary documents liberally. He also taps into new material by and about some of Orwell's contemporaries. There's a detailed account of Orwell's wedding to Sonia Brownell at the University College Hospital in London on October 13, 1949; Orwell was bedridden with tuberculosis and died 100 days later. Their wedding was only briefly mentioned near the end of Taylor's previous book. In this latest biography, there is a section called "Orwell and His World," which discusses Orwell's personal characteristics, ill health, and friendships, also drawing from new material. Missing, however, from this new version is the short appendix "Orwell and His Publisher," but Taylor writes meticulous notes on his sources, which include all of the significant works written about Orwell since 2003. This book ranks as the new definitive work on Orwell. VERDICT A useful introduction for readers new to Orwell and also illuminating for those who thought they knew everything about him.--Thomas Karel
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