The great test of prose is to read it out loud. If it works, well and good. If not, it will be leaden on the page and in the mind. This is why Dickens still has such power to move, long after other 19th-century writers have become monuments or subjects for academic study. It is also why his amazingly long sentences work, even though they look as if they won’t. It is why the King James Bible continues to haunt written and spoken English long after it was madly abandoned by the Church of England.
So I was filled with curiosity to see how things would work out when the Orwell Prize committee announced its plan to read the whole of Nineteen Eighty-Four from a public stage in one day. As it happened, it sent me into a reverie from which I have yet to recover.
