For nearly eighty years George Orwell has been read as a prophet, which is a comfortable way of reading him, because prophecies are always about somebody else. This book reads him instead as an experiment that has now run its full course. The results are in, and they are worse than the prophecy.

The finding is not that Orwell was right. The finding is that being right changed nothing. His novel is taught in schools on four continents, his name has become an adjective known to millions who have never read a line of him, and the incidence of the disease he described has not measurably declined. No book in history has been more thoroughly administered to a population, and no vaccine has ever produced less immunity.

Starting from that failure, this book takes apart what Orwell actually built. Not a prophecy, but a procedure: the plain sentence as an instrument for finding out whether a statement is attached to anything at all. His famous rules of style turn out to be a list of the places where a responsible human being can hide. His invented language turns out to be less about shrinking the dictionary than about cutting the wire between a word and the thing it was supposed to name. And the memory hole and the modern flood of information, which look like opposites, turn out to be the same machine running in two directions.

The argument does not spare its own hero. Orwell was wrong about the mechanism, wrong about the pacifists, wrong in the private notebooks nobody likes to quote, and in 1949 he handed a government department a list of names. A book about the moral weight of the plain sentence is obliged to apply the plain sentence to the man who demanded it.

It also declines to hand out labels.