Animal Farm
by George Orwell
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“I picked Animal Farm because it is an allegory about power and its seductive and corruptive influence on people regardless of their initial good intentions. As one moves up the ladder and accrues power, the tendency is to forget principles – instead the ends come to justify the means. Once principles are cast aside, however, it is a short way towards becoming exactly the thing one fought against.” Read more...
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Heather Brooke, Journalist
“Animal Farm sticks in everybody’s mind. ‘All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others’. Again, this is something read twice. I read it for the first time when I was 14 or 15 and it was a funny story about badly behaved animals, but then I read it again at college and someone pointed out to me that this was sharp social satire. I thought it was an animal story, a kids’ book, but when I took another look at it I realised what he was getting at. The Soviet leadership was pretty well represented there.” Read more...
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P. J. O’Rourke, Political Commentator
There is the extraordinary political impact of those two books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, actually releasing out of the barrel a number of highly unpleasant but necessary truths about the way oligarchy and authoritarianism works in the mid-20th century, at a time when a lot of people were determined that those things shouldn’t be said. When Orwell was trying to get Animal Farm published in the mid 1940s, it was rejected by at least one English publishing firm because they had been recommended to turn it down by the Ministry of Information on the grounds that it was politically inadvisable, given that the Soviet Union were our allies. And Peter Smollett, the man who’d advised that the book be rejected, was actually a Soviet spy. That just shows you how convoluted the situation was in Britain in the mid-1940s.
I remember when I was in Bulgaria during the takeover, and one of President Kolarov’s entourage asked, ‘Could you get me Orwell’s book?’. That meant his first book, Animal Farm. When I gave it to this party veteran and he read it, he said Orwell must have come from a Communist country. But of course Orwell didn’t – so it was possible to understand communism without having been there.
He wrote this book (1984) in 1948, when he was dying of tuberculosis, in a great burst of passionate determination, because he could see long before other people where totalitarianism and communism were heading. Animal Farm had told it as a kind of dark fairy-tale, but this was the culmination. The intellectual dishonesty of the Left, which refused to see how evil Stalin was, is despicable, and Orwell was brave enough to stand up to his friends as well as his enemies.
I could recommend you Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Orwell’s Animal Farm or Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, all of which clock in at around 100 pages in length. But perhaps these are too obvious, as they are often set texts in high school.
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