"Reading Between the Thighs" - Secrets of the Inner Party within 'On Chestnut Tree Lane'

    “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.”

Gosh. What a ghastly way to imagine the future. Surely... surely you should imagine a woman grinding on a human face forever? 

When I set out to write 'On Chestnut Tree Lane,' it was mostly by mistake. Orwell is an absolute giant, and I love him, but 1984 has always depressed me so utterly, not because of what happens to Winston (though that is monstrous) but because of the vision of NewSpeak, the idea of language weaponised and designed to make disobedience linguistically impossible.

It is, more than anything else, the most miserable moment in fiction I can think of when Syme disappears. The Death of Little Nell has nothing on that moment when you realise that Syme, a man who truly believed in Ingsoc, has been vanished by Ingsoc because he understood far too well what they were doing.  

So, like Syme, I chose to see how the language could be twisted. I wanted to know what happened if you turned Ingsoc into a femdom "utopia," and as soon as I had that thought I found myself asking,  "If I was going to make disobedience impossible, would I want to do it linguistically... or just lingually?"

Now there's is a question that answers itself before it's even been pushed to its knees. 

I knew I'd be walking in the long, long shadow of George Orwell. There are other dystopias, of course, but there's only one Ur-Dystopia, only one that people gravitate to when they want to decry a political opponent or sell early microcomputers. And only one that really suits my... other interests.

Not just because of the surveillance-state unease or the rewriting of desire into doctrine, but because 1984 is, and always has been, a story about denial. The unbearable tension between what’s permitted and what’s longed for. The fragile, treacherous possibility of love.

Of course, my version is wetter. And considerably more erotic. But it’s still a love story ruined by power.

So for those of you paying attention, yes, you weren't completely imagining it, the book is littered with Orwell references. Some overt. Some hidden. Some filthy. Some, I hope, quietly devastating. (And some - perhaps if I'm very lucky - some that one day a future English professor might slowly and patiently take her seminar group through. I lost a whole afternoon's writing just imaging that; the way she'd smirk as the guys squirmed, the way some of the women might nudge each other and whisper as the poor student opposite them blushed furiously...)

So in case it does help someone poor aching student with their degree in future, here's some of my favourite little references that I had quietly buried in On Chestnut Tree Lane:

 

1. The Title Itself

The most obvious: Chestnut Tree Lane nods directly to the Chestnut Tree Café, the melancholy haunt from Orwell’s 1984, where broken men drink victory gin and watch each other betray their last illusions. My version? A polite, domestic house of state-sponsored denial,  but the emotional death is just as final.

 

 

2. The NVLA 
At one point in the late 20th Century, the UK media came under incessant fire from a woman called Mrs Mary Whitehouse, a self-appointed busybody guardian of public morality who looked at the world in the late 1970s and early 1980s and said "Everything that's wrong with society is the fault of naughty words and titties on the telly". 

As a result, she founded the National Viewers and Listeners' Association to generally do everything the Moral Minority normally does, i.e., insist both that they're the majority and also that nobody should have any fun. Or be gay. Or have sex before marriage. She probably didn't even know what the cowgirl position was, but I bet if she did she'd have hated it. Really, I don't think we'd have got on. 

I genuinely believe that any woman who chose to dedicate her time to insisting that - whatever else is going on in the world - the real problems facing society came down to sex and fun is absolutely begging to have her organisation repurposed into the autocratic regime of a femdom utopia (dystopia?) where men are mercilessly edged by faceless (and sometimes topless!) bureaucrats. 

So, yes, I lifted the acronym for her National Viewers and Listener's Association and turned it into the National Virtue & Living Authority which achieves - essentially - her wildest dreams (I will say, probably Whitehouse didn't realise the logical endpoint of her views, but that's so often the way with people who're convinced they know what's best for everyone else). 

One of the poor inmates of 100 Chestnut Tree Lane is being punished as a pornographer because he sold saucy postcards. 

You know, this kind of thing:

And indeed Mary Whitehouse's movement did inspire "Watch Committees" which reported on the sale of such dirty smutty postcards in seaside resorts.  

But also, I do have to say I love the concept of an autocratic government with the brass neck to describe itself as 'The Living Authority'!

 

 

3. Room 101, Inverted
In 1984, Room 101 contains your worst fear. In Chestnut Tree Lane, Scott’s worst fear becomes his deepest need: endless, inescapable arousal without release. It’s not rats  (thank god, I can't stand them either!). Instead I was so much kinder - to someone, anyway - and allowed him to be ruined by thighs. 

It’s not torture by terror, but torture by hope; I'm not sure that makes it any better.

 

 

4. The Photograph
One of the ways in which the male lead, Scott, finds himself tortured is with a single photo (which, admittedly, they make him stare at while he's trapped in an incredibly small cage, in a cellar, being teased out of his wits, but trust me, in context the photograph is worse!). 

It's a deliberate twist on how imagery can be weaponised for totalitarian ends: in 1984, Winston at one point stumbles on a photograph of some former leaders of the revolution (Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford), showing they could never have been guilty of the crimes they committed. He wonders at the damage it could do to the Party - and then he burns it, because it cannot exist in a world where the Party has declared the men guilty. 

Here, it's the Party that finds the photograph, and even though it proves Scott's guilt, it's used to amplify his punishment. In both cases, a single image dooms the man who clings to it - because, once you've got a totalitarian government, honestly it no longer matters whether a photo could destroy them or you. In a totalitarian system, the choice will never be yours. 

 

 

5. Julia Charrington and the Junk Shop
The founder of the NVLA in this universe is a lady called Julia Charrington; her son turns out to be called Eric Arthur Charrington.

You might remember the junk shop in 1984, the place where Winston buys his illegal diary, the place where he and Julia later hide and make a love nest and drink real coffee - the owner is an "old man" called Charrington, a member of the Thought Police. Julia, of course, is pretty obvious - this is a utopian matriarchy, after all; it's only natural she rose to the top in an alternate timeline where she and Winston never met. 

That junk shop is  back too - it's where I allowed Scott to buy the camera. Oh - and this one's fairly obvious, but "Eric Arthur" as first names, for a Prime Minister's son...? George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair. I felt after he created such a horrifying world he might at least deserve a namesake in a matriarchy.

 

 

6. The Loosestrife
I'll avoid spoilers but there's a radio broadcast that takes place right at the end of the story and as an "and finally" kind of message, the newsreader proudly announces that government scientists have bred a new variety of the loosestrife flower. She's lying. 

Of course she's lying - the government lies! But not only have they not cultivated the loosestrife; they found it in a quarry. It's the same flower Winston Smith once saw, wild and defiant and beautiful, when he went for a walk with his then-wife... Katherine. 

It's not wild any more: it’s state-owned, renamed, with its history rewritten. Perhaps almost no trace of memory left - but (and I hope by this point in the story it's obvious) - sometimes it's enough for just one person to remember...

 

 

7. Katherine Smith
And yes, that broadcast includes the line, "Here is the news, and this is Katherine Smith reading it." That's Katherine, Winston’s estranged wife in 1984, the one who called sex “our duty to the Party.” She's elevated herself, become the voice of the party, upholding orthodoxy and denying pleasure. I like to think she's happy.

 

 

8. And the one line that makes me cry
It does. Every time, ever since I wrote it. Even knowing it's coming, it breaks me - but I can't really explain why without ruining the story. Just... keep an eye out for Lucy. She is devastatingly intelligent, Scott was right to love her. 

Because Lucy, I think even more than Syme in 1984... Lucy understands how language has to work in a totalitarian hellstate. Lucy knows that if Newspeak can eradicate treason, truth, and even love... there can still be ways to speak the truth. 

I owe that one to Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet / Cahoot's Macbeth, but every time it hits me all the same.  

 

 

 

 

Anyway - having gone to the trouble to slip those in, I hope my sharing them might deepen your reading. Or unsettle it. Or - if you’re anything like me - perhaps it just makes it a little harder to sleep. 

Because in the end, the Party didn’t need to invent a new torture. 
They just had to imagine a tongue.
And keep it wet forever.

…and imagining that always makes it harder to sleep.
At least for a while.