The Classics Club: Animal Farm, by George Orwell

Source

     The animals at the Manor Farm have overthrown their abusive masters and set up a socialist society; all animals are proclaimed equal, and each helps towards the community's benefit as a whole. But before long the utopia morphs into something far more sinister.  The pigs begin a shift in power, subjugating the other animals while moving into the humans' farmhouse and altering the new constitution of the Animal Farm item by item.  By the end, the farm is left even worse off than it was under farmer Jones, and the pigs have become just as tyrannical as the humans before them.

     Way back when, the self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" George Orwell sat down to write a satire of the Russian Revolution, and Stalin's resulting tyranny.  The result was this little novel that's expanded beyond the Russian issue, and remained a mainstay of literary education and communist discussion right on into the 21st century.

While reading Animal Farm, I was struck again and again by how remarkably well the farmyard setting captures the essence of that history, with each animal representing a subset of Russian society, and each event with its real life parallel.  It's starkly straightforward in its criticism of Russia's history and Stalin's blatant manipulation.  But even read apart from Russian history, the story still stands quite nicely on its own two feet (or hooves, as it were.)  Placing the events in a fictional farm, separate from any specific regime, really allows the reader to look more objectively at the pigs' tactics, and how easily that kind of fascist society can be abused.  I think it's because the story can be read with or without the Russian background, that it remains just as poignant today as it was sixty nine years ago.

Orwell's fabulous writing also keeps the story from going stale.  It's written in a super non-flowery, plainspoken manner - almost as if one of the farm animals themselves were recording the turns of events.  It's refreshingly concise, yet crammed with sarcasm and subtle hints to flavor the narrative.  It all just felt very, I don't know, British.  I couldn't wipe the silly smirk off my face the entire time, even though from all angles the story is really quite tragic.  I guess we can either laugh or cry about such things, and Orwell obviously chooses to highlight the disastrous absurdity of the whole thing.

Today, Animal Farm seems to be interpreted either as an anti-communist/socialist fable, or a horror story of corporate greed.  It's funny how readers can draw such drastically different conclusions from the same piece of literature, even when the author's own worldview and writing purpose is widely known.  But whichever political perspective we take, I think we can all recognize and endorse Orwell's frequent theme of the danger of letting any one individual, class, or party rule absolutely, as well as just how ridiculously easy it is for it to occur.  As the political tug-of-war has continued, that has been, and will always remain an invaluable thing to remember.