Animal Farm (1945)

Animal Farm is George Orwell’s attempt to write a fairy tale, and what surprises me most about it is that it succeeds exactly on those terms. It always feels like an Aesop’s fable even when its anti-Soviet message is most thuddingly obvious. It’s also wickedly funny in places, for example the farm animals’ rallying song, “Beasts of England,” sung to the tune of “Clementine” (or maybe “La Cucaracha”). The very short novel, under 100 pages, was a staple of Cold War literature, taught in my high school in the early ‘70s. I read 1984 and saw the 1956 movie based on it around the same time but I don’t think it was for any class. I liked Orwell—he was dark, and mordant, and acid. But by the time I was in my 40s and doing a high school literature catch-up and reread (A Separate Peace, Hesse, Bradbury, Lord of the Flies, etc.) I was inclined to skip Orwell, who had become a darling by then of movement Republicans and other libertarians who like Ayn Rand too. I’m glad I got back to him—Animal Farm is a gem. I’ll know more when I get back to 1984, but I’m taking Orwell as less specifically anticommunist and more generally antitotalitarian. Totalitarianism can come from the right as well as the left—today’s GOP can fairly be called totalitarian, and Orwellian too, with their book-banning, speech controls, and increasingly invasive calls for body monitoring, all in the name of freedom. These days we accept active, constant, and close surveillance so deeply we walk around with the device enabling it everywhere we go. We think everyone should have a smartphone—I finally broke down and got one myself last year. Setting aside all the allegory issues, I think really what makes Animal Farm work is the fairy tale air and some great characters: notably Boxer and Clover, the horses, and Squealer, the propaganda pig. The pigs take over everything. The two main ones—Napoleon and Snowball—are obvious analogues of Stalin and Trotsky, respectively. I am stuck with an edition that has an introduction written by Christopher Hitchens in 2003, which turned out not to be as cringy as I feared. He makes an interesting point about how Stalin and Trotsky are part of the story, but not Lenin. Best of all about Animal Farm is that the story is often touching. The betrayals and ultimate fates of many of these characters are often sad. Very nice tale.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.