Orwell: A Man of Our Time by Richard Bradford review – undone by its own premise

Two years ago, a former employee of a Russian misinformation factory reached for a literary classic in order to describe his dirty work. No prizes for guessing which one he chose. “I immediately felt like a character in the book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white,” he told the Washington Post, confident that every reader would get the gist. Resurgent authoritarianism and online misinformation have conspired to make Orwell’s work aggressively relevant in recent years, just in time for it to fall out of copyright on the 70th anniversary of his death.

Then again, when has Nineteen Eighty-Four not been relevant? No work of literary fiction has ever become such a fruitful stockpile of impactful, flexible and easily understood metaphors for the villainies of the modern world. As Anthony Burgess quipped in 1978: “American college students have said, ‘like Nineteen Eighty-Four, man’ when asked not to smoke pot in the classroom or advised gently to do a little reading.” This leaves Richard Bradford, an English professor at Ulster University, somewhat unsure about the case he’s making. “Orwell is a writer for our time because the issues he foregrounded and tackled in his work are timeless,” he says. So is Orwell a writer for our time specifically or for all times? Did he, as Bradford often claims, “foresee” the 21st century or simply describe, brilliantly, problems that are always with us?

The publisher’s claim that this is the first “major” biography since Orwell’s centenary in 2003 is itself rather Orwellian. Now that even Orwell’s most robust contemporaries are no longer around to share their memories, every biographer must walk a well-trodden path (Eton, Burma, Paris, Wigan, Spain, London, Jura) in the footsteps of earlier scholars, but there is not an ounce of unfamiliar material here and even the less obvious quotations and anecdotes appear to have been drawn from secondary sources. Vital context is missing. Bradford’s minimal interest in other writers of the period gives the false impression that Orwell was alone in, say, noticing that Stalin and Hitler had much in common, rather than one node in an informal international network of anti-totalitarian socialists. The bibliography is both thin and predictable.

Bradford, whose previous subjects include Larkin, Hemingway and two Amises, seems less enthused by the past than by the present and less interested in Orwell’s opinions than his own. Passages that might work in a polemical appreciation are ruinously distracting in a supposed biography. Whenever Orwell himself threatens to swim into focus, another disquisition on the stupidity of Brexit or the ghastliness of Jeremy Corbyn muddies the picture. The reader lurches from Burma to Ukip, and from Down and Out in Paris and London to Channel 4’s Benefits Street, as Bradford press-gangs poor old George into his war against an army of bugbears that includes Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Xi Jinping, Nicolás Maduro, Islamism, Twitter, Eton, Jacques Derrida, EL James, George Monbiot and that notorious Orwellian demagogue Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: “River Cottage is his oligarchy, something he has transformed and improved, and his prole-like neighbours appear suitably grateful.” Well, it’s certainly a fresh angle.

Orwell himself was fond of waspish lists, from the savage caricature of crank socialists in The Road to Wigan Pier to the tally of Soviet sympathisers he maintained towards the end of his life, but only in the service of the immense project that dominated his writing life: explaining and opposing totalitarianism. Without an equivalent purpose, Bradford’s book suffers from an acute failure of perspective. The New Statesman’s misquoting of Roger Scruton last year may have been unfortunate but it didn’t quite rise to the level of the Stalinist vilification of Orwell’s colleagues in the Spanish civil war.

Related: Nothing but the truth: the legacy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Overstatement walks hand in hand with anachronism. Though Orwell championed the notion of a united states of Europe, it is self-evidently meaningless to call him “a passionate Remainer long before the EU was conceived of”, because there was no entity in which to remain. Claiming that the “machine-produced trash” in Nineteen Eighty-Four “anticipates” Fifty Shades of Grey implies that pulpy erotic fiction didn’t exist in Orwell’s time, when that was exactly what Orwell was satirising. When Bradford writes, “I would not venture that Orwell anticipated #MeToo, not quite,” one is thankful for small mercies.

Bradford’s contrarianism is sometimes enlivening. He admires Orwell’s least popular novel (A Clergyman’s Daughter) and most problematic essay (Inside the Whale) while casting a sceptical eye over his celebrated pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn. For all Orwell’s memorable insights into the national character, Bradford is right to say that “up to his death he could never quite make up his mind about how he felt about England, except that he could not stop being part of it”. In a way, Bradford’s recognition of Orwell’s eccentricities and paradoxes makes matters worse. How can he then presume to know what this contradictory character would think 117 years after his birth? “One has to ask: if Orwell could rejoin us in 2020 what would he make of it?” I’m not sure one does but Bradford asks anyway. The answer is that he would agree with Richard Bradford.

This is a book undone by its own premise. The intent is to use Orwell’s life and work to illuminate the present. Instead, the klieg-light glare of the present reduces Orwell’s precise observations to banal truisms – politicians lie, groupthink is pernicious – and traps him in the second half of the 2010s. While Orwell’s best work may well be eternal, this peculiar book is already out of date.

Dorian Lynskey is the author of The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (Doubleday)

• Orwell: A Man of Our Time by Richard Bradford is published by Bloomsbury Caravel (£18). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15