Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [595]

The rat had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counter-attack. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 595

Note

Paradise qualified by vermin — the bugs’ ‘massing for the counter-attack’ neatly converting domestic squalor into battlefield comedy. Orwell refuses to romanticise the lovers’ hideout; the room’s paradise-status is asserted against, not despite, its misery.