A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

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Soles-on-the-Ground Time

by Andrew Ervin

For years I was obsessed with a place I’ve never been to. Over a decade ago, on our honeymoon, my wife and I took a long walk along the coast of Islay in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. The rain is what I remember the most—there was no fighting it, no staying dry. Through the mist we could make out the next island over, the all but inaccessible Jura, which was where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The fact that he had to get so far from the seats of political power to write about Big Brother remains a source of fascination to me. We were unable to get a ferry across in the limited time we had so we continued our walk along the embankment. I can still smell the peat smoke and see those hills—the so-called Paps of Jura—across the sound.

The not-quite-getting-there sensation of being so close to Jura gnawed at me for years afterward. I began to imagine what life was like there. I would catch myself inventing the people—or cartoonish versions of them, at least—and the houses and the glens I never saw. Those thoughts eventually congealed into a novel, Burning Down George Orwell’s House, which will be published next year. The book begins right there, on that embankment at the ferry port. Like Orwell, my protagonist escaped the bustling city—Chicago, in this case—and got off the grid. Or attempted to. Continue reading →