George Orwell began writing 1984 a year or so after C.S. Lewis published the third part of his SF trilogy, That Hideous Strength. I first read both of them long ago, but until I re-read Lewis' book this month, I never noticed the parallels.

Both men portray dystopias, though Lewis' spiritual combat unit is successful in defeating the darkness while Orwell, who was dying of TB when he wrote 1984 and admitted it would have been more optimistic if he had felt better, has the powers of darkness defeat his protagonist, Winston Smith. But both had just observed Britain at war in the 1940s, and after the 1930s had become the verbal playground of extremisms of left and right. Orwell's experiences in fighting for the Republican forces in Spain left him as disenchanted with the Left to the same degree that he already disliked Fascism and Nazism. Lewis was never as politically attuned as Orwell, his Christian mind seeing more a battle between goodness and evil.

Having witnessed the official duplicities practised in wartime, the two authors showed a level of disenchantment with the state that neither would have accepted in himself a decade earlier. Lewis was Irish, but he wrote as an Englishman. His novels and non-fiction works reflect a cosy hearthside-and-BBC world where people, while acknowledged to be sinful in their depths, are nonetheless well bred and observe social niceties, and enjoy a cup of tea, or a beer in the pub. Orwell's Winston Smith is left to drink cups of poor quality Victory gin, yet he and his colleagues at the Ministry of Truth behave with a parodied, stalwart Britishness throughout. The Oceania of 1984 is a desperate caricature of the everyday England of Orwell's time, and the expressions of quiet optimism everyone in the Outer Party has to wear are a mimicry of English middle class respectability.

The real thing both men grasped, however, was the manipulation of language. Ransom and his small group of Christian partisans battle the forces working through the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, or N.I.C.E. Everyone who works there speaks the language of '”progress,” which involves rejection of tradition and decency, while in Oceania, the invented language of Newspeak redefines words to mean their exact opposite, or to restrict the possibility of expounding on illicit ideas. The Ministry of Truth deals in lies, the Ministry of Peace in war, and the Ministry of Plenty in maintaining shortages of consumer goods.

For decades after Orwell's death in 1949, 1984 and Newspeak were held up jointly as predictions of what happens when no-one questions bureaucratic authority. I don't know when things switched exactly, though the first time I recall noticing it was when one of Richard Nixon's statements, exposed as a lie, was declared to be '”inoperative.” Under George Bush, waterboarding, sleep deprivation and prolonged isolation have been deemed not to be torture, and prisoners of war have been re-phrased into “unlawful enemy combatants.” And so on, as is all too well known.

Orwell is less read now than he was 20 years ago, but Lewis has taken on a second or maybe third life. One of his Narnia stories, Prince Caspian is about to be released by the Disney studios. He is a favourite of certain segments of Christian believers, especially because books such as Mere Christianity or The Screwtape Letters use plain but well-rounded English to express faith and the psychological realities around it.

He falls outside the pale for the hard core of fundamentalists. Lewis liked his pipe and his glass of ale, and, far worse, never wholly rejected his Anglo-Irish pagan heritage. In That Hideous Strength, Merlin is brought back to life, and Ransom says in Chapter 10 that he is to be addressed thus: “Say that you come in the name of God and all angels and in the power of the planets from one who sits today in the seat of the Pendragon, and command him to come with you.”

Angels maybe, but the power of the planets? Well, Lewis himself admitted he had studied occultism when he was younger, and his good friend Charles Williams had belonged to A.E. Waite's Fellowship of the Rosy Cross for many years. I've not read that Lewis was initiated into such an order, but his easy facility with elves, goblins and mythical creatures in his Narnia books implies he might have looked deeply into Golden-Dawn style hermetic traditions.

But that's an aside, to be pursued later. The point is, he understood with Orwell the dire necessity of preserving language with its meanings intact. Whereas recent decades, in North America particularly, have seen a wholesale assault on exactness and honesty in written and spoken statements. Where such novels as the two I'm describing were taken as warnings, today they are manuals of guidance.

And, as I read the carefully phrased mean-spiritedness of fundamentalist Christians, I find they know how to use them so. Creationists and their ilk have learned exactly where to draw the line between intelligent questions and evasion of logical, scientific thinking. Others see phrases such as “My kingdom is not of this world” and continue to venerate their own country or countries as somehow blessed or holy when they are obviously serving only their own narrow ends

I have often noted that while I look for more or less conventional sacredness, I privately consider language itself to be a divine gift, or even an embodiment of divinity. In the same chapter of That Hideous Strength quoted above, Ransom observes, speaking of Maleldil (God's name in the trilogy), that “Language herself (had) first sprang at Maleldil's bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury.”

Thus, it takes on a sacramental character when used fairly and honestly. And it becomes a blasphemy and a desecration when it is used to purvey lies.