Animal Farm

Written by George Orwell, Animal Farm is by the far the cleverest little piece of satiric fairytale that I’ve had the pleasure of reading. An immaculately easy read that can literally be consumed in a day, this book is fantastic and loveable from the very first chapter, indeed the very first page! 

An old white pig named Major tells his farm animal friends of a dream that he’s had of a Manor Farm and later an England that is rid of the mastery of man and all animals are free and equal through a rebellion. When the drunken and lazy farmer Jones forgets to feed his livestock, the animals rise against him and Major’s prophesised rebellion comes true with Manor Farm being taken over by the animals and renamed ‘Animal Farm’. Under the guidance of the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, the animals work the farm as well as any human, but soon Major’s ideals of the rebellion are corrupted and forgotten and something strange and unexpected starts to happen… 

The story of the animals that take over the farm and are then betrayed by their ‘leaders’ has become recognised as a frank but brutal myth of freedom for the post-WWII generation, but it was book’s purpose was to destroy another myth: that the Soviet Union was a ‘socialist’ state. As a result of the barefaced political ideas communicated in the book, Orwell had great difficulty in getting it published originally and of course it was banned in Soviet bloc countries, but somehow clandestinely managed to circulate. Orwell based Animal Farm on his own experience in the Spanish Civil War in which the left-wing militia for which he fought was eliminated for not being communist. The book is most famously recognised as a fairytale depiction of the Russian Revolution and creation of the Soviet Union with political figures being caricatured and represented by the animals: the old pig Major represents Karl Marx, Boxer the carthorse who is worked to death is the Soviet people, Snowball the pig later exiled is Trotsky, and Napoleon who gains control of the farm is Stalin. 

Animal Farm is a fantastic, ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC masterpiece that is balanced superbly throughout with irony, satire, drama, and horror. It very openly depicts the corrupting influence of power and indeed misinterpretation of statements, beliefs, and ideals or how such things can be twisted into something else entirely. At the same time as being a very dramatic and actually rather an emotional book, its simple writing and third person register as well as the fairytale story of talking animals make it a book that can be enjoyed and understood by a wider audience free of generational divides and the moral of the story will always win out. 

Filled with action, rebellion, drama, violence, and wonderfully dark comedy, Animal Farm is by far one of my favourite books right now, I honestly cannot believe it’s taken me this long to read it considering that I loved studying about Russia and the Revolution in high school so many years ago. IT’S ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!

"All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others."