Animal Farm [review]
 Author: George Orwell |
There's something deliciously lucid about Orwellian prose - an enormous contrast to, say, Proust, Joyce or Cervantes, who revel in dramatic protraction. Everything about Animal Farm moves, marches forward with controlled urgency. The prose is measured, exact. The plot unfolds with grim purposefulness. A small farm in a distinctly English countryside is taken over by a disaffected livestock community, who then proceed to turn it into the microcosm of a Utopian, egalitarian Communist state. Eventually, hierarchy, dictatorship and inequality reassert themselves, almost naturally, and Orwell's usual themes emerge: historical memory, the nature of war, leadership and truth - all swaddled in his characteristically dark, ironic humour. The result is a tour de force moment in literary history. Animal Farm is an incisive and relentless critique of Communism and the practical degeneration from the ideal - but allegory aside, it stands alone as a story, a fairytale that can capture the imagination of the eight-year-old me, who blithely read Animal Farm amidst a thicket of children's illustrations, without the slightest inkling of its political orientation. I read it approximately eight years later, and was bowled over by all I'd missed. Progressing from Peter and Jane to Dostoyevsky is one thing, but when one can become cognizant of one's own progress by reading the very same book - now that is something else altogether. |