George Orwell is indisputably the greatest didactic writer in the English language since Samuel Johnson. As an essayist, he is a nonpareil, and his insights — which he modestly characterized as "a power of facing unpleasant facts" — are remarkable, original, and biting. The scintillating force of his pen shines most brightly in his essays and his memoirs.

The very power of his personal prose that gives such force to his essays and memoirs, however, leaves his fiction curiously flat. For all his insight, he seems to lack the ability to free his characters to lead independent fictional lives. A person reading Orwell's novels for their characterization would shoot himself.

Such is the force, clarity, and originality of Orwell's ideas, however, and the freshness of his candor, that it is easy to forgive the flat characterization and intrusive narration of the novels. And while each generation seems to find some pundit who dismisses Orwell's dark vision in 1984 as passe, fresh revelations of the octopus-like stranglehold of the National Security Agency over the daily minutiae of the the lives of 300 million Americans gives proof daily of how prescient Orwell was. Big Brother is indeed watching.