Animal Farm is often one of the first ‘proper’ books encountered by secondary school students yet it was never taught on my curriculum. I think it was replaced, for me, by Lord of the Flies. Having read 1984 I was already familiar with the Orwellian themes of language as power and dystopian manipulation. In Animal Farm I found these ideas artistically entwined into a children’s story. Orwell tells the story of post revolution Stalinist Russia and localises it using the farm-yard animals to satirise the key figures.
Orwell uses elementary prose to deceive the reader and accentuate the atrocities of the animals on the farm. The animals, fed up with the totalitarian Mr Jones who “sets them to work, [he] gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving.” The animals overthrow his brutal command replacing it with “Animalism” and its doctrine of the seven commandments. Over the course of the story, it becomes clear that the equality set out in the commandments is flawed. Certain types of work and animals become more equal than others. The revolution by the animals becomes a futile endeavour which criticises human nature as being driven to excel and oppress.
The pigs, modelled on the leaders of the revolution: Major as a mix of Karl Marx and Lenin, Napoleon as Stalin, Snowball as Trotsky are controversial and comical comparisons to make. The manipulative pigs use a myriad of suppressive techniques to subdue and crush the resistance of the other animals who are less intelligent than them. For example the sheep can only bleat “four legs good, two legs bad” rather than being able to evaluate the seven commandments. Orwell shows that intelligence and cunning are forces of oppression in the wrong hands.
The ignorance of the animals, unable to comprehend their victimisation is doled out by their own kind is haunting. The way they work themselves to death in a false collective comradeship is poignant and starkly sympathetic to the plight of the working people who soviet Russia supposedly stood for. A delightfully bleak read, Orwell’s animals highlight the propensity for evil in originally well-meaning pursuits of liberation.
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