George Orwell: Animal Farm (1945)

Edition: Penguin
Review number: 209

Both of George Orwell's most famous books are about the nature of totalitarianism. Animal Farm is much simpler than 1984, being a retelling of the history of the Russian Revolution in the fairy-tale form of a group of animals taking over a farm by revolution from the humans that formerly ran it.

The treatment is allegorical, with many individual animals representing real people (Marx, Stalin and Trotsky) or groups of people (honest workers, the vain bourgeoisie) or ideas (religion and the church). Orwell's novel is not just an allegory, in the way that (say) Piers Plowman is; having a single consistent plot and realistic characters (I mean realistic as characters; obviously talking animals are not naturalistic) makes it a more involving experience than a display of images would be. Orwell has dramatised a part of human history in the same way that Bunyan dramatised part of human spirituality in The Pilgrim's Progress; and it is no accident that Animal Farm and Bunyan's work are easily the best-known allegories in English literature.

The fairy tale elements are matched by a simple prose style, a straightforward piece of story-telling, which makes Orwell's points - totalitarianism is not to be trusted, the communist revolution changed virtually nothing - even more telling. The language combines with the use of talking animals to make the story read as though it were intended for children (hence the subtitle, A Fairytale, but the themes of the novel are certainly aimed at adults.

George Orwell: 1984 (1949)

Edition: Penguin, 1970


Though it is the interrogation from 1984 which is the most memorable part of the novel, though there are phrases which have become part of the culture of the English-speaking world ("Big Brother is Watching You", "doublethink", "Room 101"), Orwell's book is principally about the way in which a totalitarian regime can succeed, the way that human beings can become subjugated to other human beings.

The interrogation itself takes up only a small portion of the novel; it is the briefly told story of Winston's "cure"; as O'Brien tells him, they do not torture him out of pleasure in inflicting pain or because they have anything to gain from his confession, but because they want everyone to love Big Brother. That is why he must believe that he hallucinated the evidence proving that the Party lies, that two and two make five when O'Brien tells him so (and despite what he wrote in his diary before his arrest, that freedom ultimately means the freedom to say that two and two are four). But intellectual belief is not enough for O'Brien; it is the emotions the party needs to control. That is why the final sentence of the novel, simply, "He loved Big Brother", is so chilling. Orwell showed the triumph of the totalitarian state over the free will of the individual. All that is left to the reader is the rather empty comfort of the thought that it couldn't happen here.