Book review: Animal Farm
While I was out traveling last week, I listened to the audiobook for Animal Farm (and finished up Hitch-22, but that will be a separate review). Animal Farm was short and engaging at only three hours. Hitch-22, by contrast, was 16. Animal Farm was written in 1945 by George Orwell and quickly became a classic tale of political horror. I’d never read it, but Christopher Hitchens referred to it several times in his memoir so I thought I really ought to check it out. Plus, the public library carried it on audiobook.
When I was a child, I remember asking the school librarian about it, thinking it was a story of talking animals living together on a farm, sort of like an expanded Charlotte’s Web. The librarian knew my tastes (as I spent a lot of time in the school library) and warned me away from it. I can’t say whether she was right or wrong in that. It might have served me well to read a political fairy tale about the realities of how power corrupts.
For those unfamiliar, the story follows the plight of a batch of animals on an English farm. They tire of working for the farmer and stage a rebellion, driving him away. Then they begin to self-govern. Initially this is democratic and cooperative, but soon the most ruthless and underhanded rise to the top. These happen to be the pigs, who are the most intelligent of the animals. Like boiling a frog or abusing a partner, the pigs slowly turn up the heat, getting away with what they can get away with, constantly establishing new norms that are more beneficial to them. They take more of the food for themselves, make the animals work harder, and establish stricter laws and more extreme punishments for breaking them. It turns into a dictatorship with the strongest pig in charge and a cohort of loyal dogs and manipulative lesser pigs below enforcing it. Eventually some human farmers come tour the place and congratulate the pigs on having rigged a system where the animals work even harder for less food and upkeep than they do on human farms. The pigs brag about how this is because they are self-governed and every animal wants things to be this way. The animals, for their part, are too frightened to speak up. At the end, the pigs transform into humans.
I mention the partner abuse angle even though Orwell was clearly making a case about revolutionaries and the dangers of overthrowing the existing system - the chaos creates a situation ripe for the establishment of something even worse. But I can’t help pondering it on a more individual level. Marriage, at least in our society, is an unmanaged chaos of tossing together two people and then leaving them to one another’s tender or not-so-tender mercies. They will be bound together by hormones, law, and social expectations, but there’s nothing that forces them to treat one another well, nothing that stops one party from abusing and taking advantage of the other. How to break this cycle is something I’ve been thinking about for some time. I don’t have any answers, aside from making it easier to divorce without requiring permission or cooperation from the other spouse, more definite punishments for abusive partners, greater education of society about the issue, and better support and social approval for those who walk away (plus censure for those who abuse).
Orwell is no help for any of that. His story does not proscribe a solution - it merely illustrates the problem. In that, the author shows wonderful restraint. The reader is provoked to think of how to fix this problem of human nature and how to prevent their own government from taking that slow slide into horror. It’s a good book, rousing and thought-provoking, easy to read and relate to. I’m very glad I read it.
When I was a child, I remember asking the school librarian about it, thinking it was a story of talking animals living together on a farm, sort of like an expanded Charlotte’s Web. The librarian knew my tastes (as I spent a lot of time in the school library) and warned me away from it. I can’t say whether she was right or wrong in that. It might have served me well to read a political fairy tale about the realities of how power corrupts.
For those unfamiliar, the story follows the plight of a batch of animals on an English farm. They tire of working for the farmer and stage a rebellion, driving him away. Then they begin to self-govern. Initially this is democratic and cooperative, but soon the most ruthless and underhanded rise to the top. These happen to be the pigs, who are the most intelligent of the animals. Like boiling a frog or abusing a partner, the pigs slowly turn up the heat, getting away with what they can get away with, constantly establishing new norms that are more beneficial to them. They take more of the food for themselves, make the animals work harder, and establish stricter laws and more extreme punishments for breaking them. It turns into a dictatorship with the strongest pig in charge and a cohort of loyal dogs and manipulative lesser pigs below enforcing it. Eventually some human farmers come tour the place and congratulate the pigs on having rigged a system where the animals work even harder for less food and upkeep than they do on human farms. The pigs brag about how this is because they are self-governed and every animal wants things to be this way. The animals, for their part, are too frightened to speak up. At the end, the pigs transform into humans.
I mention the partner abuse angle even though Orwell was clearly making a case about revolutionaries and the dangers of overthrowing the existing system - the chaos creates a situation ripe for the establishment of something even worse. But I can’t help pondering it on a more individual level. Marriage, at least in our society, is an unmanaged chaos of tossing together two people and then leaving them to one another’s tender or not-so-tender mercies. They will be bound together by hormones, law, and social expectations, but there’s nothing that forces them to treat one another well, nothing that stops one party from abusing and taking advantage of the other. How to break this cycle is something I’ve been thinking about for some time. I don’t have any answers, aside from making it easier to divorce without requiring permission or cooperation from the other spouse, more definite punishments for abusive partners, greater education of society about the issue, and better support and social approval for those who walk away (plus censure for those who abuse).
Orwell is no help for any of that. His story does not proscribe a solution - it merely illustrates the problem. In that, the author shows wonderful restraint. The reader is provoked to think of how to fix this problem of human nature and how to prevent their own government from taking that slow slide into horror. It’s a good book, rousing and thought-provoking, easy to read and relate to. I’m very glad I read it.