This short old classic allegory is coming up for discussion in our book club. I have included the insightful 10 page Introduction by the late Christopher Hitchens in the pagination. This is a reread for me having first read it many years ago. I had forgotten how imaginative and brilliant it is. It is even more so since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its partial replacement by the lying Putin regime.
Set in Orwell’s Britain at an unspecified time, the animals rebel and establish an «Animal farm » where everyone is supposedly equal. Pigs are supposedly smarter than other animals and gradually take over complete control over all the others, who are worked to death and starved while being deceived by the pigs and dogs into believing patently false lies about farms run by humans. The increasingly ruthless pig named Napoleon, clearly modelled after Stalin, comes to live a life of luxury, while the hard-working, loyal, but not very bright horse, Boxer, works ever longer hours to make the farm a success only to be rewarded by being shipped off to the glue factory, when he could no longer work. The pigs and dogs claim that it was an animal hospital.
An enduring caution about being deceived by dictators, this book is perhaps more relevant now than when it was first published.
10/10
The Passionate Reader 