Brilliant book (Animal Farm - George Orwell)

Member Name: REALTRAVELLER

Product:	Animal Farm - George Orwell
Date:	28/08/09 (43 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great book

Disadvantages: None

Animal farm is a classic of the 20th Century. Its author is Geroge Orwell.

The most common way of reading the book is as a critic of the communism system, in particular the way communism was implemented in Russia. The farm in the book is nothing but a representation of any communist state as they were in the 40s and 50s. However, if this is surely the most common key to read the book, it can also be argued that the critic goes to any totalitariam system as such,

The attack to the system is very strong. The plot in itself is quite straightforward. There is a farm, where the animals decide to throw the owner, they manage to do so, and they then set to set up a new system, and they are happy to give the pigs the power. This really falls one inch or less short of calling the communist in Russia what they were indeed, pigs!

The style is what I liked the more, particularly because the first time I read it was when I was 17 and I was not living in UK and English was my 3rd language. The book is easy to read, both because of the vocabulary used and because of the way sentences are constructed and also because of the way the plot unfolds itself.

The more I read it, the more I got a feeling of human failure (although here it is the animals who failed) I do not want to give away too much, but to me the message which lasted is that once the pigs are in command, as long as they depict themselves as faithful to the spirit of the "revolution" which brought down the old power, the other animals will not rebel against them, even if it is clear that the pigs are abusing the power and they do it in a very open way.

What really keeps together the animals is the fact that the new system in the farm is now based on 7 commandments, which will be bent by the pigs in the course of th story, to the point that even the last of those 7 points, that all animals are equal, needs to be readjusted to reality to allow a special role to the pigs, which somehow are accepted as being equal, but different from the rest of the animals.

The characters in the book are very well easy to follow, they mantain a degree of individuality from a novel perspective, but they are effectively a symbol or a representation of some ideal characters which the communist system had come to promote, for example Boxer is easily identified with Stakanov, the russian worker which became a symbol for Stakanovism, because he was a miner who worked harder than anybody else.

There is a lot of brainwashing going through the book in a very subtle way.

In conclusion, this is one of my favourite books, it is actually a very small one, around 100 pages long, it is funny to some extent, it can make you feel down and feel sorry too, particularly if you know the history of Russia in the days of Stalin.

Summary: Recommended