Book Review: Animal Farm is an allegory, a parable, a metaphor, a fable, a roman a clef ... a classic. Easily accepted as just a children's story about talking animals (I love stories with talking animals!). Yes, it's also a history: identifying which animals are the Czar (Mr. Jones, also Capitalism), Marx, Lenin (both Old Major), Stalin (Napoleon), Trotsky (Snowball), Molotov (Squealer), etc. is fun, but so not the point. Beyond the heart-breaking, tragic figure of the workhorse Boxer, is a simple and moral lesson, the propaganda wrapped up in Orwell's "Fairy Story." Contrary to conventional wisdom, Orwell is not condemning Socialism, which is actually presented quite sympathetically in Animal Farm. Instead, he shows how the rosy promises of Socialism are used as the sweet bait for the evil trap of Fascism (what he viewed as the true name for Stalin's Communism). The reader can't help but think that if only the new farm had been guided by moral leaders the farm's resources would've been more than enough for all the animals. But Orwell's cynicism may be shown by his failure to present a class of animals from which such leaders could be drawn. Even today we see resource-rich countries that devolve into misery and totalitarianism because of greedy, selfish, uncaring leaders (and other post-colonial issues). Human nature ... maybe. For Orwell the evil isn't socialism but fascism, and that lesson plays out repeatedly in our modern world. Reading Animal Farm, I saw not only a foreshadowing of his next novel, 1984, but elements in the news right now. [5★]
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