The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Animal Farm is the most unsparing proof of that proverb in the English language, and its force rests on Orwell’s refusal to stack the deck. Old Major’s indictment of Man is sound. The animals produce everything and retain almost nothing. They are worked to the last atom of their strength and slaughtered the instant their usefulness expires. Nothing in the remaining hundred pages refutes a syllable of it.
The diagnosis was correct. The rebellion was warranted. And by the closing page the farm is governed by a figure in Mr Jones’s clothes, a pipe between his teeth and a whip in his supervisors’ hands.
The conventional reading is that power corrupted the pigs. True enough, and far too flattering to everybody else, since it consigns the entire failure to one species and leaves the rest of the farm blameless.
The more uncomfortable question is why the others acquiesced for the better part of a decade, and Orwell answers it without flinching. Near the end the animals remain hungry and worked to exhaustion, and they take genuine pride in the farm. The reason he offers is that whatever else was true, their master was not a human being. The exploiter was one of their own, and that single fact outweighed the food they were not being given.
Terror alone does not manufacture a weekly parade its victims come to relish. The dogs matter — nine animals were torn apart in a single afternoon to establish as much. But what sustains the arrangement is the conviction that this exploitation belongs to us, administered by one of us, and is therefore different in kind from the one it replaced.
It was not different in kind. It was worse. Jones was negligent and drunk; Napoleon was attentive. Jones appropriated the surplus; Napoleon appropriated the surplus, the eggs, the retirement field and finally Boxer. The hens who resisted were starved until nine of them died. Jones never achieved that.
Science, humility and a threat, in three sentences, delivered on the morning of the first harvest — before any pig has had occasion to be corrupted by anything. Squealer is the most accomplished figure in the book and the most consistently underrated. He does not prevail by being right. He prevails because nothing survives against which to measure him: no record, no figures the animals keep for themselves, and in time nobody old enough to recall what Jones actually felt like.
Not braver. The argument. Orwell locates the failure in language and memory rather than in nerve, which is the more desolate verdict, because nerve can be summoned and a vanished record cannot.
‘Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right argument.’
Boxer bears that cost. He never learned past the letter D, and his answer to every crisis was to work harder and to trust that Napoleon was always right. Benjamin could read throughout. He recognised each amendment to the commandments for exactly what it was, and said nothing until the van carrying Boxer had already cleared the gate. His scepticism cost the pigs precisely nothing.
Those amendments are the clock of the novel. Beds acquire the words with sheets. Killing acquires without cause. Drinking acquires to excess. Seven rules painted on the barn wall are revised one by one until the wall carries a single sentence:
“I dislike milk and apples myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. We are brainworkers. If we fail, Jones would come back.”
None of this remains on the farm, which is why the book has not dated. The sequence is familiar to any democracy that has unseated an incumbent: the promise of equality, the dismantling of the old order, and that order’s quiet reconstitution once its critics hold power. Acton’s line about absolute power has been quoted into softness. Orwell declines to assert the conclusion and stages the mechanism instead — the committee that supplants the vote, the absent enemy who accounts for every failure, the slogan drilled into the sheep before anyone has witnessed the thing it exists to justify.
This is not a light book, whatever the title and the talking animals imply. It offers no comic relief and no respite. It is short enough to finish in a day and severe enough that you will want to.
“ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN THE OTHERS.”
What it does better than almost anything else is prosecute a political argument without insulting a soul. Orwell names no party, no nation and no leader. He renders the mechanism precisely enough that readers across the spectrum have spent eighty years recognising their opponents in it — and, in an honest moment, themselves.
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