Double Hitch

I just finished two vastly entertaining books by the irrepressible Christopher Hitchens: Why Orwell Matters and god is not Great. Of the two, the first was more instructive and the second more entertaining.

Why Orwell Matters tackles the question of why Orwell has worn so well when so many of his contemporaries are unreadable. Hitchens unflinchingly addresses both Orwell's legendary moral clarity and his moral lapses — mainly with respect to women and gays. Acknowledging the limitations of Orwell's early fictional efforts, in contrast to his lifelong mastery of the essay, Hitchens also shows how Orwell found his voice by the time he wrote Animal Farm and, in the shadow of impending death, 1984. Hitchens, a former Marxist, has a thorough mastery of the factional politics of Orwell's time on both the Right and the Left, and clearly delineates how Orwell, having been a forceful supporter of the war against Germany, made his name exposing the less apparent but equally monstrous evil of Stalinism at a time when many of his contemporaries were seeking to palliate it. On a minor note, I enjoyed the mention of Orwell's composing Coming Up for Air in Morocco, and the wicked skewering of French criticism and Claude Simon that comes as a coda to the book.

god is not Great, though it has a profounder subject, is in some ways a shallower book. A classic vituperative essay, it seeks not merely to show that religion is false but that it is wicked. Hitchens cites religion's laughable creation myths (and consequent enmity to science), its celebration of blood sacrifice, its genital mutilation, and its sexual repression as being among the qualities that have a poisonous influence on moral and civic life. In covering so much ground in several hundred pages, however, the book necessarily has a more general focus than, say, Hitchens' extended essay on Orwell.