Facing incovenient facts

Partial transcript from https://youtu.be/W32BEjvU7QM?t=5m21s

(All Art Is Propaganda: Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell - George Packer Interview (2009))

I'd actually started on one of Mr Packer's books a couple years ago, and then forgotten about him. Seeing him speak to Hitchens makes me want to read his books again properly.

Packer: "For me Keep the Aspidistra Flying was a marvelous book. Burmese Days is the one that really lasts the longest. But you don't feel that Orwell's working in his most natural grain in those novels. You feel the essay is sort of pushing through the illusion of fiction all the time. He has something to say; he has an argument to make. He has something, a proposition about the world, all the time. He doesn't have the restraint and patience of an actual fiction writer."

Orwell was a great essayist, just as Terry Pratchett (an icon of mine, don't'chknow?) was a great novelist. They share a few things, one of them being the ability to get a point across without resorting to crudity.

Mostly. In Pratchett's later books when Alzheimers had taken away his ability to use a typewriter, he'd dictate to someone else, who may or may not have taken liberties with the transcription, but the one thing was clear that he had a proposition about the world that he wanted the reader to understand, and the narrative suffered as a result.

Orwell was a knurd, which according to Pratchett means someone who's the opposite of drunk, and sees the world exactly as it is without the softening, the smoothening out, the moulding that our minds enforce between retina and frontal cortex. The word says something about its inventor.

Orwell as Hitchens points out got the three biggest questions of the twentieth century right - imperialism, fascism and communism.

Hitchens was also a knurd, writing fearlessly about issues of his day - our day, in which his influence remains - about his friends on the Left and the Right, about Islam, Christianity, religion and culture in general.

But history would also place him among the cheerleaders of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, where a horrible dictatorship was snuffed out and replaced with something worse.

There is an assumption hidden in the word 'knurd' about the ability to see, if seeing includes knowing the consequences of our actions.

Speaking of Georges. Among the books I devoured as a kid was a series called The Famous Five, about five kids solving interesting mysteries, without any gratuitous sex, violence, or anything else the word 'gratuitous' could be used with. These were written for kids, so reading them didn't make me particularly precocious. All the five were nicely fleshed out, but the main character was called George, and she happened to be a girl. The character of George ran counter to the belief that girls do girly things, and I'm certain it influenced my young mind, which as I've mentioned was not particularly precocious. Having a sister pretty much buries the thought, but the books did their bit.