An introduction which draws on the very considerable amount of criticism, debate and controversy that the work has incited and takes a fresh and independent look at its distinctiveness and fictional success. Explores the unsettling ways by which Orwell interweaves the story of its main characters with the book's political narrative through recurrent figures of emotional ambivalence, perversity and pliability, in the idiom of 'paranoid Gothic'. Detailed explanatory notes provide essential explanatory social and historical context.