There are two ways to think about “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the great dystopian novel of totalitarianism that George Orwell wrote on the Scottish isle of Jura and published in 1949, six months before his death (at 46, of complications from tuberculosis). The first and most obvious way to think about it is as a midnight-dark tale of political oppression: the deprivation and bullying violence that dominate life in a ruthless authoritarian state. To a large degree, Orwell based the book on his