One of the most scathing satires ever written, this fantastic allegory of a downtrodden society of overworked, mistreated animals and their struggle to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality is still as shockingly relevant now as it was more than fifty years ago. In this write-up, we present you the Animal Farm Book Review.
As we watch the brutal rise and fall of the revolutionary animals, we start to see the germs of tyranny in even the most romantic of institutions and the souls of the most charismatic oppressors in our most charismatic leaders.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm beautifully illustrates the concepts of oppression, rebellion, and history repeating itself. Beginning with an ambitious children’s story, Animal Farm: Old Major, a 12-year-old pig, asks all of Manor Farm’s animals to gather in the large barn after the farm’s owner, Mr. Jones, passes out in a drunken stupor. Major makes a stirring political speech on the injustices their human captors have imposed upon them and the need for them to rebel against Man’s tyranny.
Soon, the revolution breaks out, and Jones and his men are expelled from the farm because they forgot to feed the animals. The Seven Commandments of Animalism are painted on the barn wall, the most significant being “All animals are created equal,” which is later altered to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Manor Farm is renamed Animal Farm. Orwell shows how easily political orthodoxy can be transformed into pliable propaganda by modifying the Ten Commandments.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There might be better choices than George Orwell’s Animal Farm for young readers! Some heavy items are present. Orwell claimed that the novel depicts events leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution and continuing into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. He thought that the Soviet Union had evolved into an oppressive dictatorship, one that was based on a cult of personality and maintained by a state of terror.
“I meant the moral to be that revolutions only affect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The story’s turning point was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves.”
The first book in which he strove, fully aware of what he was doing, “to meld political purpose and aesthetic purpose into one whole” was Animal Farm, according to his essay Why I Write (1946), he wrote. He did that with flying colors.
Orwell compares the animal uprising against Farmer Jones to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The allied invasion of Soviet Russia in 1918 is thought to be represented by the Battle of the Cowshed. As Napoleon became the only head of the farm, the pigs’ ascent to dominance mirrored the formation of a Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR. The pigs’ theft of milk and apples for their consumption is compared to the suppression of the left-wing Kronstadt uprising against the Bolsheviks in 1921, and the animals’ challenging construction of the windmill is compared to the different Five Year Plans.
“The only good human being is a dead one.”
Even though I could be more knowledgeable about the history and wasn’t familiar with all the historical occurrences in Animal Farm, Orwell’s story was still understandable because it could apply not just to the Russian Revolution but to revolutions and changes in leadership more generally. The story of humankind on this planet is told in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Repetition of historical events, money, and profit-driven people.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, which ends with the pigs and men engaging in a sort of reconciliation, was inspired by his perception of the Teheran Conference in 1943, which on the surface, appeared to establish “the best possible relations between the USSR and the West” but which Orwell foresaw would continue to deteriorate. When Napoleon and Pilkington, dubious, “played an ace of spades simultaneously,” it signaled a quarrel between the allies and the beginning of the Cold War. Naturally, only one of the two is technically cheating, but Orwell does not specify which one because such a fact is meaningless.
The idea that religion is the “opium of the masses” is another theme in George Orwell’s Animal Farm that also strikes a satirical note (as Karl Marx famously wrote). Many animals are first annoyed by Moses the raven’s discussions of Sugarcandy Mountain since Moses, renowned as a “speaker of tales,” appears to be an unreliable source. The animals reject Moses’ claims of another heaven because they still believe in a better future. The animals start to accept him as their circumstances worsen because “Their lives today, they reasoned, were hungry and arduous; was it not just and just that a better world should exist somewhere else?”
“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.”
In this instance, Orwell makes fun of people’s vain hopes for an improved world that prevents its existence. The pigs let Moses stay on the farm because they know that his tales of Sugarcandy Mountain will keep the animals submissive: as long as there is some better world somewhere, even after death, the animals will slog through this one. They even reward him with beer to keep him around. Accordingly, Orwell suggests that religious fervor, often regarded as a virtue, might cause one to have distorted views of life on earth.
In the end, George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a book that utterly moved me. A book that will stay with me for the rest of my life, one that I will continue to fear and eagerly pick up again and again.