Soon, I would stand at a window in the centuries-old farmhouse, gazing out upon a vista that greeted Orwell’s eyes whenever he happened to glance up from his desk.
Off in the distance, we saw a white stone farmhouse nestled in isolated splendor, in a lush valley that opens to a sweeping view of the blue sea between Jura and the Kintyre Peninsula. With our guides – descendants of the Fletcher family who had rented the country estate to Orwell – my wife and I rumbled in a Land Rover over the last miles of boggy track that led to the north end of Jura. I’d never been able to put my finger on how or why I felt this. I’d sensed a deeply buried subtext in 1984, a suggestion the world it described was not quite as bleak as it initially seemed. So, my trip to Barnhill on the isle of Jura was indeed pilgrimage, as well as a sort of literary investigation. I’ve always been greatly impressed by Orwell – his biography, his general oeuvre, and 1984 in particular – ever since I first became familiar with them. Orwell envisioned a grim earth shrouded in three totalitarian governments, all perpetually at war against each other, with their benighted populations held in subjugation by a ceaseless flood of disinformation, comprehensive political oppression, as well as grinding poverty. If you’ve not re-read 1984 recently, don’t worry! Present world news still invokes all its principal themes. Instead, I rambled into a scene of startling natural beauty, one providing some clues to messages of hope buried within Orwell’s dark and dystopic masterwork, 1984. But still worse, what if you gain zero insight – and the entire effort your trip required seems a waste?Ī trek I made to George Orwell’s final writing retreat, on the wild isle of Jura, off Scotland’s west coast, fortunately resulted in no such debacle. One might journey to a famed writer’s studio or home, only to make a utterly unwished discovery – something that will diminish an author or his (her) work. A literary pilgrimage can be rather fraught.
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