As I said at the end of my last post, I never read Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) in high school. It has one of those universal reputations of 'everyone should/needs to read this book' though, so that is how it ended up on my list.
It was a fairly simple and straight-forward read and took me only a few days to read in amongst my other commitments. Frankly, despite what everyone told me about the book and the ideas and expectations I had going in, it was not at all what I thought it was going to be like.
There was a very quick pace to the story, and obviously it is not a very long book. The animals already had a lot more human traits right from the start than I was expecting. I thought there would be a lot more development in that area throughout the novel. For example, the pigs and some of the animals were literate, could write and use writing implements, use the farm equipment and other human items. There was no learning curve to any of it. It was strange. Like, they're animals. Yes, I realize its a book, but if it supposed to be based in real world, and not fantasy, then things didn't add up for me.
Of course, the over-arching themes are about power, corruption and failed-revolution. There are sections about propaganda, keeping the population under-educated, class division, labour relations, changing historical facts, brain-washing, and convincing all the animals that their memories are wrong. The commandments kept changing to suit the pigs, which rubbed me the wrong way. They kept using their superior cunning and intelligence to brain-wash some animals or spinning the truth and facts to confuse others into believing what ever they said.
I kept thinking of one of the most famous quotes about power and corruption the whole time I was reading:
"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."(1)
It was strange series of events that led to an even stranger ending. By the end, not all the original animals of the rebellion were around, and those that were had grown old and their minds having been twisted could no longer remember what had happened in the past. Even to the point that they could no longer tell the difference between pigs and humans, having been kept secluded on the farm for so long.
There are so many parallels I can draw to today's political climate and past ones. The Russian Revolution and Stalin, today's America and Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un and North Korea, Islamic extremists and the conflict in the Middle East. The list could go on.
In the end, I don't if I really liked Animal Farm or not. I am torn. On one hand it was engaging, on the other it was strange. I just don't know how I feel about it.
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Before I even started reading the book, my husband told me I needed to watch the Animal Farm movie, "the one with Patrick Stewart in it." There were two movies made, one it 1955 that was animated and a 'live-action' one in 1999. I use the term live-action loosely as it was animatronic animals. There is a large dispute online between the two movies, the 1999 one being panned horribly.
Needless to say, I didn't watch or want to watch either of the movies. Mostly because I'm undecided about how I feel about the book and I don't want to swing myself into a worse feeling about it by watching a creepy animated one or a creepy animatronic one. Just not really up for that at all.
Next on the docket is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
(1) John Dalberg-Acton. Letter to Mandell Creighton (5 April 1887), published in Historical Essays and Studies, by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1907), edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, Appendix, p. 504; also in Essays on Freedom and Power (1972)
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