Rating: 4/5
The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.
When the owners of Manor Farm are driven out by the animals, the neighbouring farms scoff at the idea of domestic beasts running their own ranch. At first, however, things seem to be rolling along quite well. Snowball, a boar who has naturally taken joint-leadership with another pig named Napoleon, has written out the “Seven Commandments” which run as follows:
1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal.
All the animals abide by these rules for a short time. But then Napoleon the pig drives out his co-leader Snowball by chasing him away with dogs, and soon enough even the stupidest of the animals are noticing changes in the aptly named Animal Farm. The pigs—including, of course, Napoleon—never work with the other animals; they receive large animals; and, what was once sworn to be evil and never to be done, they live in the previous owners’ farmhouse, sleeping in beds, wearing clothes, and drinking alcohol.
Certain that this was strictly forbidden within Snowball’s Commandments, the few animals that actually can read out the rules to the other beasts. They appear to have changed. But no, says one of the pigs to his fellow animals, they have not changed; you simply don’t remember them. The Commandments in question always ran thus:
No animal shall sleep in a bed
with sheets.
No animal shall drink alcohol
to excess.
Nothing was said about the clothes.
Napoleon, however, is still becoming worryingly less like a pig and more like a man. The creatures at Animal Farm are beginning to wish that Snowball was here again, and are wondering if their rations were always this small and their workload always this hard.
It is hard for old Muriel, the goat that can read the Commandments, to question whether they always read as above. But it is much more clear to her that they certainly were not one single Commandment like this, as they are a few weeks later:
1. All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
A very interesting and original book, Orwell narrates a time where totalitarianism and communism coincide at a place overrun by animals. Each of these beasts represent a real person in the communist Soviet Union; Napoleon, for example, is equivalent to Stalin, and Snowball to Trotsky. It was powerful and fascinating to read what on the outside appears to be a pleasant fairy story, but on the inside is a tale of real-life evil and destruction.
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.