Many of you
will know the story of the uprising at Manor Farm and how the animals’ revolt
usurps the farm’s owner, Mr Jones and that there is much rejoicing by those who
have taken control but what I had forgotten was just how accurate the author’s
prediction of the future was, that all those years ago – written in the
mid-1940s remember – he could have guessed that the situation the world finds
itself in now is so accurately depicted in this book.
I am of course referring
to those regimes that suppress the masses with fear and punish those who choose
to oppose with draconian measures but let us not forget ourselves, and this
goes for wherever you live, for we are all to some extent, taught to fear – why
else would the wealthy and selfish have cleared the supermarkets out at the
beginning of the pandemic, if not for fear, queued at petrol stations for hours
when they already had half a tank of petrol, gone diligently to their Covid
vaccinations (I include myself in that one by the way, for the record), if not for
fear - and it is fear and the subsequent suppression of the rights and freedoms of the animals that is the crux of this novel.
It starts in
jubilation, the animals having liberated Manor Farm and for a while, a short
while, there is harmony but not for long. Before long there are rules, rules
that the animals all agree on but then, the pigs begin to take charge, which
again is fine because most of the animals can’t read or write, can’t come up
with fancy ideas about how to feed themselves through the winter, and so the
pigs set the narrative.
The writing
here is simple but effective, not a word is wasted or unnecessary and so it is
a short book, more novella than novel, so you’ll speed through it, but the
power each of those words holds, the images they depict, the subtleties they
portray, are superb. You envisage the farm with ease, the windmill as it is built and then destroyed, the animals and their
traits: the cat sloping
off when work is mentioned, as any cat would, Boxer the Shire horse and Benjamin the donkey, who, due to his vast age has seen it all before, work hard and do virtually nothing in equal measure; the hens, who lay ever more eggs for them only to be sold for money - something all the animals at the beginning had agreed they would never deal with as it is a human vice and creates greed, and Napoleon, their self-appointed leader, surrounding himself with dogs and sowing fear through misinformation; everything that goes wrong apparently is down to the disgruntled and then banished pig, Snowball.
Napoleon and his clan continue to do less but take more, much, much more, and they gradually implement tighter controls on the others for ever greater reward, until Benjamin's doctrine of having seen it all before becomes reality again as Animal Farm becomes Manor Farm once more.
George Orwell
was a genius (or he had a time machine) because, after everything I have
discussed above and the war in Europe still raging, Animal Farm is as relevant
today as the day it was first published, which is kind of scary.
Four and a half
stars.
