Burning Down George Orwell's House

March 2, 2015
Ray Welter has had enough—enough of his job in advertising (main by-products: more SUVs sold, more harm to the climate, more money, more damage to Ray’s soul), of Chicago and his failing marriage, of grieving for his father. What he hasn’t had enough of is scotch or George Orwell, whose testimony to the power of language, 1984, is partly why Ray ended up writing ads. The two intersect on the isolated Scottish Island of Jura, where Ray rents the house Orwell once stayed in. Jura’s no idyll: it rains constantly, dead animals keep turning up on Ray’s doorstep, and there’s talk of a werewolf. The few locals are strange, hostile, and possibly violent, but the scotch is astonishingly good. The best thing on the island (and in the book) is 17-year-old Molly, who wants off Jura and away from her angry, xenophobic father, but her stay with Ray ends up being a useful time out rather than a real life change—rather like Ray’s entire sojourn in Scotland. Ervin excels at atmosphere and fish-out-of-water interactions.

March 1, 2015
Advertising, single-malt whisky, and a remote Scottish island feature prominently in this novel about a man paying homage to his love for Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ray Welter, a burned-out advertising executive with a failed marriage, decides to radically alter his life by going to Jura, an island in the Inner Hebrides, and renting Barnhill, the very house where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ray has been obsessed by the novel since college, and in flashbacks to his career as an adman, both he and the reader see the irony of his life-he's become a slave to Big Brother (in the guise of corporate America), using Newspeak to sell products that he doesn't believe in. On the island he finds an assortment of eccentrics-one of whom believes himself to be a werewolf-and at least one almost-certifiable sociopath, Gavin Pitcairn, whose 17-year-old daughter, Molly, desperately wants to leave Jura and go to art school. As one might expect, Ray finds Barnhill much different from the romanticized mental image he'd created, and those older islanders who remember Eric Blair (George Orwell's real name) have not-so-fond memories of him. The house had been abandoned for a good while, and it's in such a state of disrepair that it's almost unlivable, but Ray takes comfort in the abundant local Scotch whisky and in rereading his beloved first edition of the novel. When Molly takes refuge with Ray at Barnhill to escape her abusive father, she acts provocatively, though no romance develops. Still, Gavin assumes the worst, making Ray's hold on life much more tenuous than it had been. A dramatic, thoughtful, and at times comic revisiting of (and attempt to escape from) Orwell's world.

April 1, 2015

In his latest advertising campaign, Ray Welter uses his favorite Orwellian "newspeak" to make driving a gas-guzzling SUV appear to be a public service to America. That success, coupled with an impending divorce, makes Welter question his life and its meaning. Hoping to drop off the grid and remake himself, he sells everything he owns and retreats to Scotland's Isle of Jura, where he rents the house George Orwell lived in when he wrote 1984. Unfortunately, the residents of Jura don't actually take to strangers, despite their reputation for hospitality. As he unwinds this tale, Ervin (Extraordinary Renditions) writes with skill and a penchant for the absurd. Welter is everyman, caught up in a life he can't escape, searching for a way to come to terms with himself. The host of eccentric and sometimes sociopathic characters that surround him give this book the quality of a bad but very funny dream. VERDICT A black comedy that readers of general fiction and philosophers will enjoy.--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2015
American advertising man Ray Welter arrives on the Inner Hebrides island of Jura, where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, and somehow rents the very house in which that iconic novel was written. Ervin, author of Extraordinary Renditions (2010), captures the stark and chill atmosphere of the small island, on which strangers are unwelcome and apparently very good whiskey is consumed in copious quantities. Ray is absolutely gone on Orwell and believes Nineteen Eighty-Four the greatest English novel; it was reading Orwell that determined his career in advertising. Ervin alternates long chapters fraught with horror (guns, animal carcasses on his doorstep, possibly a werewolf) on the islandwhere Ray's nemesis, Gavin Pitcairn, still has it in for Orwell (known there by his real name of Eric Blair) and where Pitcairn's, yes, beautiful and artistic teenage daughter, Molly, befriends (and thus jeopardizes) Raywith satiric, often funny, even Orwellian chapters of Ray's marketing career, where his greatest success was to promote oil-guzzling SUVs to the anti-ecological market. Not everyone's cup of tea, perhaps, but a delight for Orwell fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)