Let's Bust a Recap : Animal Farm

On Monday, I shared my recap on Frankenstein, literature's definitive horror story. Today, I'm reaching back in the archives of my mind to finally recap Animal Farm, the other book I put on my 2025 book list specifically because of a new movie adaptation. Animal Farm turned 80 this year and I read it in June. As far as I'm concerned, it's far more horrific than Frankenstein, and after finally reading this slim classic, I have no desire to watch Andy Serkis' new adaptation, the release of which has been pushed to next May anyway.

If you're unfamiliar with George Orwell's Fairy Story about the anthropomorphised animals on Manor Farm, it's basically just Orwell crapping all over Stalin and the Soviet Union. 

"It's important political satire!" "It's an allegory!" "It's dystopian literature at its finest!"

It's about as subtle as a sledgehammer, is what it is, and I felt sick the entire time I was reading it. By the time the glue truck turned up to take Boxer away, I wanted to chuck the whole thing in a fire and watch it burn. 

I'm not one to go looking for the symbolism or deeper meaning in books that just isn't there. But Animal Farm is unapologetically political and if you have two brain cells to rub together, you can't escape what Orwell is writing about. Old Major is basically an amalgamation of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Napoleon (the most despicable character in the whole of the novella) is Joseph Stalin. Snowball is Leon Trotsky. And Squealer represents the Soviet nomenklatura and journalists, justifying every little thing Stalin says and does. Then you have the other animals who are worked to death under Napoleon's regime and the poor puppies who are stolen at birth and trained to be his terrifying security force. Orwell drives his point home hard at the end of the novella when the animals look in the window at the pigs' dinner party with the neighboring human farmers and they can no longer distinguish between the pigs and the men. 

Animal Farm is a searing portrait of how a revolution for equality is corrupted by power, leading to an even worse tyranny. The silencing of dissent, the manipulation, the utter betrayal of ideals all vividly portrayed by Orwell in his Fairy Story are important topics and things we absolutely must be attuned to recognize. The whole those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But reading Animal Farm is not a fun time, and I'd caution you against picking it up unless you're prepared to grapple with the boundless depths of human depravity—depicted by a bunch of literal pigs. It's rough sailing but I do think it's worth reading if you can stomach it.