In 1978, Burgess published what can best be described as a tribute to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, entitled 1985. This rather odd book is made up of a number of sections, including a dialogue between two aspects of Burgess himself. One section is fiction, an attempt by Burgess to update Orwell’s dystopian vision to the 1970s. In it, Britain is Tucland, a failing state dominated by heavyhanded union leaders and the infiltration of Arab money. It is, therefore, very much the vision of an expatriate who was not living and had not lived in Britain for quite some time, and was reliant upon newspaper reports for his perspective on the nation.
