The reputation of George Orwell the novelist — as opposed to George Orwell the journalist, essayist, and author of such classic works of long-form nonfiction as “Down and Out in Paris and London” and “Homage to Catalonia” — rests almost entirely on two books, “Animal Farm” (1945) and “1984” (1949). One can argue with the fairness of this judgment, and for the continued relevance of the novels that preceded them — particularly the anti-colonial “Burmese Days” (1934) and the Gissing-esque portrait of literary squalor, “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” (1936) — but nonetheless, the judgment remains: We remember Orwell the novelist chiefly due to the magnificently flawed prophecies of “1984,” and the disenchantment with revolutionary endeavor in “Animal Farm.”

The latter, a fable about a group of animals who seize a farm from their brutal human bosses and run it along communist lines, can be read profitably by both children and adults. It is a pitch-perfect satirical creation: imaginative, witty, moving, and devastating in its account of why and how revolutions usually fail. A near-allegory of the Russian revolution of 1917, it encapsulates dozens of others, and its most famous line, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” belongs to a rarefied class of imperishable sentences.

“1984,” Orwell’s best-known work, is a far more problematic warning of a future totalitarian state, and does not always compare well to Aldous Huxley’s earlier “Brave New World” — in which pleasure, not pain, is the instrument of social coercion. (Huxley had the advantage of writing his book in California, where the future tends to start.) From a Western perspective, Orwell got much of his totalitarianism wrong; it would probably have made more sense to an Iraqi living under Saddam Hussein, or to a current citizen of North Korea. From our viewpoint, the power wielded by the government of the fictional state of Oceania seems absurdly heavy-handed. A Briton might refer to the omnipresence of CCTV cameras as “Orwellian,” a term now deeply entrenched in our everyday vocabulary, but his heart wouldn’t really be in it. All of us have become accustomed to our daily actions being filmed, at least in major cities, but little seems to come of it — at least so far.

Many phrases from the book, such as “Thought Police,” carry a sharper edge. To some extent, we have all become the uniformed monitors of our thoughts, particularly if we plan to publish them, and fear disgrace for any phrase deemed politically insensitive. “The memory hole,” into which state journalists chuck any unwanted bit of history in order to rapidly rewrite it, also rings some bells. Wasn’t it just a few months ago that Bill Clinton was the hero of the Democratic Party, the Sage of Davos, and the vanquisher of the Ken Starrs of the world? Now he is routinely portrayed as a vaguely shameful, borderline racist political racketeer whom the better sort of person despises. Not quite the “memory hole,” perhaps, but not so far off it, either.

In the popular imagination, Orwell the icon, the tubercular truth-teller and counter-politician with the spindly mustache, is inseparable from Orwell the writer. Yet perhaps this has become a caricature, since his fiction resonates at least as much on a personal, individual level as it does on an ideological one. His novels are almost all about deeply estranged, lonely people who long to be part of a society they nonetheless despise. As “rebels,” they are as alien to the popular Hollywood version as one could imagine. Pickled in self-hatred, they loathe their own separatism, and believe that to live apart from the mainstream is a perversion and a form of willful sterility. This is one reason why Orwell always placed his hopes in the working classes, who maintained their own traditions and rituals and tended to stick together.

A characteristic example of the Orwellian rebel is Gordon Comstock, the middle-class protagonist of “Keep the Aspidistra Flying.” Driven by a masochistic desire to steep himself in poverty and the life of “the masses,” he quits his job at an ad agency to dedicate himself to poetry, yet remains uneasy in his conscience. “Most copywriters,” he reflects bitterly, “are novelists manqués; or is it the other way around?” Like Winston Smith, he too ends by embracing Big Brother, or at least his own knack for writing the advertising slogans that festoon 1930s London. Likewise, the pigs who lead the revolution against their human overlords in “Animal Farm” ultimately befriend their former enemies and become morally and visually indistinguishable from them.

Orwell’s radically disconnected heroes who long for connection loom more powerfully than ever because, thanks to new technologies, society increasingly aggregates itself in communities of the like-minded, leaving the non-joiners, the Groucho Marxists who “wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member,” out in the cold. Orwell the man was a joiner of a prickly sort, most famously by fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Yet his fiction expresses a profound fear both of belonging to the group and of keeping one’s distance from it.

Despite his reputation as a political writer, the rare happy moments in his novels tend to belong to couples rather than groups, and are usually romantic in nature. Think of the lovers’ trysts shared by Gordon and Rosemary in “Aspidistra,” or the mythic power of those between Winston and Julia in “1984.” Think, for that matter, of the beasts frolicking in the fields with sensual abandon as they celebrate the start of revolution in “Animal Farm.” Inside George Orwell, one sometimes suspects, a more urbane D.H. Lawrence, or even an apolitical voluptuary like Henry Miller, about whom he wrote with cautious appreciation, occasionally struggled to get out.

Read today, Orwell’s novels are like vaccines against bohemian romanticism, easy nostalgia, and false hopes. With major segments of American society in a restive mood, his dystopian fictions may have more to tell us now than they have in years. His novels are resolutely skeptical and tough-minded, and this is what keeps them vital and reminds us that the world is how it is and is not easily changed, even when it should be.

bbernhard@nysun.com