‘Animal Farm’: A Revolution Betrayed
A review of ‘Animal Farm’, by George Orwell; 1945, Secker & Warburg.
I think it was Wilde who said that it was not worth reading a book that was not worth re-reading, and Animal Farm has the benefit of being short. It is amusing that T.S. Eliot, then director of the publishing-house Faber & Faber, rejected the manuscript on the ground that, as he wrote in July 1944, it was not ‘the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation’. One can sympathise a bit with him: there is something peculiar about exploring the Bolshevik Revolution by means of a tale about pigs and horses. But that is exactly the genius of Animal Farm. It is simple enough for a child to understand. Not for nothing was its first subtitle: A fairy story.
Its premise is simple. Old Major, an elderly and respected boar, gathers the animals of Manor Farm to tell them about a dream. He has dreamed of a world free of human oppression, a utopia where animals live freely, work fairly, and share equally in what the farm producers. Like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, he paints the human as a parasite and oppressor without whom animals would live in perfect equality. And so the animals mount a revolt, oust the farm’s neglectful owner, Mr. Jones, and set about creating an egalitarian society under the guidance of their new leaders, the pigs.
Old Major, an elderly and respected boar, gathers the animals of Manor Farm to tell them about a dream.
And it all goes pear-shaped, for that is that how these things go. Every promise is twisted to favour the powerful. The farm slides into corruption. The pigs, the cleverest and most charismatic animals, fall out over their contrasting visions for the farm. Soon, with the help of the dogs, Napoleon, brooding and calculating, has exiled Snowball, a dreamer with plans to build a windmill to mechanise work and improve his animals’ lives. The farm’s slide from socialism to dictatorship gathers speed. And the animals, caught in a mire of poverty, scarcity and fear, cling to the hope that their suffering has some noble purpose. They try to lift their spirits, repeating the animal-socialist slogan, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’. But even this chant is warped, as language itself becomes a tool of control. The propaganda machine gets going; trust is destroyed. The commandment ‘All animals are equal’ shifts, barely noticed, into ‘All animals are equal — but some animals are more equal than others’.
This is directed mainly by Squealer, the silver-tongued pig, who twists logic, facts, and language to ease the animals’ doubts and justify the pigs’ increasingly lavish lifestyles. He constantly revises the farm’s commandments and blatantly manipulates history, showing how, and how easily, propaganda can reshape reality. Squealer’s rhetoric is simultaneously skilful, absurd and familiar, reflecting Orwell’s disdain for the political propagandists of his time and the abuses of language, most famously set out in his 1949 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’.
Boxer, the draft horse, meanwhile, embodies a tragic loyalty and naivety that Orwell attacks. His blind allegiance to Napoleon, underpinned by his simplistic maxims ‘I will work harder’ and ‘Napoleon is always right’ reflects Orwell’s view of the working class under oppressive regimes: steadfast, and admirable for that reason, but exploited, driven by an almost religious faith in the righteousness of their leaders. Boxer’s eventual fate reminds us that in totalitarian systems, the worker is expendable. His death reverberates through the farm, but the other animals are quickly mollified by Squealer, Animal Farm’s one-pig propaganda machine:
‘It was the most affecting sight I have ever seen!’ said Squealer, lifting his trotter and wiping away a tear. ‘I was at his bedside at the very last. And at the end, almost too weak to speak, he whispered in my ear that his sole sorrow was to have passed on before the windmill was finished. ‘Forward, comrades!’
Boxer, the draft horse, meanwhile, embodies a tragic loyalty and naivety that Orwell attacks.
The simplicity of the story, with its obvious analogues (Old Major for Marx; Snowball for Trotsky; Napoleon for Stalin) belies the depth of its themes. Orwell, a democratic socialist, is not saying that socialism always slides into tyranny, as Hayek does (and as many would like to think), but that power can corrupt, that free speech is vital; that warped language warps thought (a theme he explores more plainly in 1984); and that an uneducated working class is always vulnerable to tyrants. To keep society free requires constant vigilance, and an extreme distrust of those in power. The story’s grim crescendo, and its bleak final line, hints that Orwell took a dim view of human (or, at any rate animal) nature and saw the line between oppressor and oppressed as very fine indeed.
Animal Farm, through allegory, dissects the frailty of ideals in the face of raw power. His prose is lucid, sparse, stripped of any sentimentality, while his characters, though animals, pulse with the real failings and weaknesses of the humanity they seek to overthrow. By portraying the rapid transformation from revolutionary fervour to unliveable tyranny, Orwell reveals the dark potential that lies dormant within all systems of governance.
