Graham Power 's Reviews > Animal Farm

Orwell’s best work of fiction by some distance. It has the light touch characteristic of his essays but otherwise absent from his novels. The narrative unfolds at a swift pace and with an organic inevitability. The characters are types, this is a fable after all, but Orwell uses his loyal carthorses, wise old donkeys and mindless sheep to moving effect. Animal Farm is short and brutal; unlike 1984, however, it leaves this reader feeling invigorated by Orwell’s artistry and clear-eyed vision, rather than bludgeoned into despair.

Is it about the tragedy inevitably brought by revolution? Or the tragedy of revolution betrayed? I think both interpretations are valid, though it would be an odd reader who concluded that the animals were wrong to rebel against Mr Jones. Despite his socialism there were strong elements of fatalism and pessimism in Orwell and they find clear expression here. It is also a book which could only have been written by someone with a profound, almost anarchistic, scepticism towards authority and ideology in all their forms.

Animal Farm was conceived with a specific polemical purpose. Orwell wrote it to ‘expose the Soviet myth’: not to make the world safe for capitalism but to clear the way for genuine socialism. His timely intervention produced a work of timeless and universal relevance. Ultimately it isn’t about Soviet Russia. It speaks powerfully to our eternal desire for liberation and how we are betrayed, not just by mendacious pigs, but our own misplaced trust in those who profess to lead us.