“Some animals are more equal than others,” from Animal Farm is about as subtle as he got.

Whatever irony there is in the “Ministry of Truth” in Nineteen Eighty-Four is lost amid the chilling plausibility of a government department dedicated to the essentially human production of mistruths.

IRREVERSIBLY HEADING

The overall effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four is similarly frightening, and compelling – a vivid depiction of the dystopia to which we all imagine we are irreversibly heading.

Hardly a day goes by when someone somewhere doesn’t refer to Nineteen Eighty-Four as an instruction manual for modern politicians, against which we citizens are almost powerless to resist.

And therein lies an irony that Orwell himself probably never envisaged – that Big Brother would approve of the fear Nineteen Eighty-Four causes many of us to feel. Perhaps that’s why it hasn’t been banned yet.

The study of 21st century dystopia is generally considered a choice between two fictional prophesies: Nineteen Eighty-Four for those who think impotent compliance is society’s defining feature, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for those who think hedonism is.

Both are conspicuously devoid of amusement, which might be considered de rigueur for dystopias, but apparently it’s not.

As an uplifting message appropriate for this time of year, allow me to suggest a third, more entertaining and possibly more accurate dystopian novel to contemplate (and read over the Christmas break) instead: GK Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

Dystopian fiction almost always features tyrants and bureaucrats misusing new technology. As such, it is usually futuristic.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, written in 1904, is also set in the future but features no new technology at all.

Chesterton set it in the future merely so he could overlay on London, his home city, the book’s primary conceit, that selecting a monarch at random from the populace is no riskier, and potentially funnier, than handing the crown to the scion of a ruling dynasty.

The year he chose was 1984. Whether Orwell chose the same year for his bleakly contrary vision as a nod to Chesterton (who as the editor of a weekly publication published Orwell’s first essay in 1924) has been speculated but never proved.

DIVIDED

If anything, The Napoleon of Notting Hill is retro. Instead of being set in a grimly global monoculture, as most dystopias are, it involves a London physically divided by walls and guards into municipalities, like pre-technology villages.

A conflict over the building of a highway through a neighbouring municipality leads to a kind of civil war, using primitive swords and medieval halberts. [Yeah, I had to look them up too.]

One of Chesterton’s points seems to be that dystopia isn’t necessarily all bad, or even avoidable.

The King, Auberon Quin, is as stubborn as the next tyrant, but instead of being sadistic and brutal, he sees everything as a joke.

Where other writers might have used this as a vehicle for slapstick, Chesterton plays with paradoxes that hover between profound and absurd.

“Seriousness sends men mad,” says King Auberon. “You are mad, because you care for politics, as mad as a man who collects tram tickets. All men are mad but the humourist, who cares for nothing and possesses everything.”

Like all tyrants, the King stubbornly clings to his preposterous ideas, driving those beneath him crazy (and violent) with frustration.

He is eventually forced to admit, however, that life isn’t as funny as he hoped.

So, he reinvents himself as a war correspondent and in one of his dispatches from the quaintly comical but bloody battlefront reports: “Everything makes it worse than it need be.”

BLEAK

Call me presumptuous, but I think Orwell would have killed to write a line as bleak as that while still being funny.

In his Introduction, Chesterton says the book is not a prophesy, for two reasons: “wise men” who predict the future are always wrong; and besides, the London he depicts in The Napoleon of Notting Hill is occupied by the same types of people as those in the London in which he wrote it – people whose lives are physically and psychologically confined to the small area in which they live.

Even here is a paradox of sorts. Chesterton in 1904 had already noticed there was a growing consensus that the most sophisticated modern lives were the ones with the widest horizons, and was having none of it.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill is, if nothing else, a tribute to localism, to the richness of a life spent in a small community.

This might still have been possible in the London of 1984, but it’s not any more.

London’s ambition to become a world-leading multicultural city has ironically rendered it a bland conurbation of people who don’t belong there and are indifferent to the opportunities it once offered.

The recent installation in the London Underground of advertisements promoting the joys of assisted suicide perfectly symbolise how much the city has changed since Chesterton lived there, and which he was warning against.