Animal Farm by George Orwell | 1945 | Signet Classics | Paperback $ 6.99
A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned – a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.
This one is a re-read for me; I initially read it years and years ago as a requirement for a class in either middle or high school and never picked it up again, but for some reason kept a copy of the book around all this time. I figured it might be time to try it again with a new perspective, so it ended up on my list for Classics Club.
The story’s concept is fairly straightforward — animals take control of a farm, must figure out how to run it, and experience a series of sociopolitical upheavals. I really appreciated both the preface by Russell Baker and the introduction by Christopher Montague Woodhouse, which served to provide more context about both the author’s own life and viewpoints and the major world events of the time period in which the book was published.
The official public school takeaway for this book, in my memory, was essentially: Communism Is Bad, Kids. Reading it now as an adult with at least little more understanding of the way the world works, though, I was struck by the author’s empathetic treatment of the working-class animals and their root cause for the initial rebellion — cruel treatment by those in power, and highly inequitable distribution of the products of their own labors. Though the fable is clearly based on and pointedly aimed at Stalinist Soviet Russia, the overall theme of the story seems to me now to be less about the failures of that state in particular and more about the inevitable inequalities that any society is doomed to eventually develop, not matter how well-intentioned it may be from the start or how well-supported by an idealistic proletariat.
Links:
- Biography from the British Library
- The Orwell Foundation
- The Orwell Society
- George Orwell Archives at University College London
Publication information: Orwell, George. Animal farm. New York, NY: Signet Classics, 1956. Print.
Source: Personal library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
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