Animal Farm Review

You might be surprised that I’ve never read Animal Farm before, but Orwell’s 1984 seems the more popular instructional choice these days, and is arguably the better book: less polemical, more prescient, more enduringly relevant, more lasting impact, more developed characters.  In fact, comparing the two books side by side, you can justifiably question why you would bother reading Animal Farm if you’ve already read 1984.  After all, both are intended as warnings against collectivist ideologies, written by George Orwell, and there’s less to Animal Farm than 1984.  At the end of that questioning, though, I still think that Animal Farm is worth reading.

Communism and its related ideologies began as utopic academic theories, and even today enjoy significant popularity amongst academics, despite their atrocious records in the “real world.”  There is something about them that lends particularly well to dictatorial tendencies, and Orwell’s Animal Farm captures that trajectory perfectly.  Having read Stalin, Animal Farm seems almost a historical retelling of the Soviet Union’s trajectory from the time of the revolution to Stalin’s ascension to power, to the point that I do not know that I would have appreciated the book as much as I did without that background awareness.

On its surface, Animal Farm feels rather silly – the idea of animals, led by hyper-intelligent pigs, taking over a farm from humans who are entirely impotent to reclaim the small territory, is difficult to take seriously at times – but the reader must recall that Animal Farm is not so much a traditional novel as we think of the form as it is a fairy tale or a fable.  It is a moral tale, in other words, deliberately constructed as an analogy for the real world to show readers in an approachable way the dangerous course that communism tends to take.  Science fiction has been doing this almost since its inception, using aliens as mirrors and analogs for humanity and to enable the storyteller to call out flaws in the real world in a way that is less threatening and more thought-provoking than a direct attack.  All Orwell does is take the same concept and execute it with farm animals instead of silicon-based blobs on planet HC37b.

That does not mean that the story never speaks more directly to the reader, for the characters are not all caricatures.  Many are, but several of them stand out as distinctive individuals for whom I found myself hoping for a happy ending, or at least a satisfying one.  Boxer’s story in particular is tragic, and its conclusion, and the other animals’ responses, might be the lowest note in the book.  This is not a book with a happy ending, though, for it can’t be.  A happy ending would not merely undermine Orwell’s entire point in writing the book, but would also be unrealistic given the millions of deaths and nearly a century of global convulsions that can be, at least in part, laid at communism’s dictatorial door.

Setting aside the ideological and meaning components of the book for a moment, I will also observe that Orwell’s writing is remarkably clear, imaginative, and unique, befitting someone who wrote “Politics and the English Language.”  He really is an excellent writer, and Animal Farm’s appeal lies in that it is more than a polemic; it is a genuinely compelling and tragic story.

It would be nice to think that Animal Farm is losing its relevance, that its warning against the easy slide from idealistic, utopic collectivism into dark dictatorship is less needed after the Soviet Union’s fall and the revealed abuses of it and other major communist enterprises.  Alas, that dangerous dream seems to be having a resurgence as people forget, or never learn of, the tumultuous path in blood that communist and related ideologies forged through the twentieth century.  If 1984 is a warning of where we risk going, Animal Farm is a reminder of how it’s begun, in seeming innocence, before.