Lynskey focuses much of his book on the origins and the afterlife of “1984.” He devotes several early chapters to the rise of utopian and dystopian fiction, told through compressed portraits of figures like H. G. Wells (who “loomed over Orwell’s childhood like a planet”) and Yevgeny Zamyatin, the author of “We” — a sort of precursor to “1984.” And he documents the various political and cultural responses to the novel, which was a sensation from its first publication.

“1984” has inspired writers, artists and other creative types, from Margaret Atwood to David Bowie to Steve Jobs, whose commercial introducing Apple’s Macintosh computer famously paid homage to the novel. Its political fate, however, has been somewhat cloudier. What Orwell observed of Dickens, that he is “one of those writers who are well worth stealing,” has proved no less true of Orwell himself. Socialists, libertarians, liberals and conservatives alike have vied to remake him in their own image and claim his authority. Orwell’s contested legacy may be rooted partly in his self-divisions. He was a socialist intellectual who hated socialists and intellectuals; an alienated soul who “lionized the common man,” as Lynskey puts it. Still, the filial (and often proprietary) attachment that Orwell’s work tends to evoke in his admirers points to something else: the morally urgent yet highly companionable nature of his writing, which can leave one with the feeling of having been directly addressed by a mind worthy of emulation.

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Lynskey largely refrains from participating in the quarrel over Orwell’s and his novel’s true teachings and rightful heirs. If anything, “The Ministry of Truth” can seem too remote at times from its subject matter. For a “biography” of “1984,” it contains surprisingly little sustained discussion of the work itself, mostly referring to it in brief, though insightful, asides that are dispersed throughout. There could have been more in-depth analysis of the dynamics of power in Orwell’s totalitarian state, whose leaders, we are told, are the first to have dispensed with even the pretense of serving humanity. (They pursue power as an end in itself, not as a means to some alleged ideological goal, and exercise it by inflicting pain on others.)

Nor does Lynskey illuminate the literary or intellectual qualities that distinguish Orwell’s novel from its many predecessors and descendants in the dystopian genre. In short, while we learn a great deal about the evolution and influence of “1984” as a cultural phenomenon, we sometimes lose sight, in the thick of Lynskey’s historicizing, of the novel’s intrinsic virtues — of what makes it distinctive and accounts for its terror and fascination in the first place.