Bokrecension: Animalfarm av George Orwell

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Animal Farm is written by the author George Orwell (pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair).
Orwell was born in 1903 in India but he was taken back to England as a small child. His family was poor but in spite of that, he won a place at Eton, one of England’s leading private schools. So he grew up as a poor boy in a setting in which social class was very important and where the people looked down on poverty. During many years he chose to live a life of poverty and he also began to write about his experiences.
When the Spanish Civil War started Orwell decided to travel to Spain so that he could observe the situation and the write about it. The result of this was the book Homage to Catalonia. Orwell is however best known for his to last books, the dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four and the book which I have read; the animal fable Animal Farm, which realised 1945.

The story of Animal Farm takes place in an unknown time period and the reader can never date the action precisely. The story takes place at a farm in England. The reader goes through many years at the farm and experience all the seasons of the year.
The farm which is called Manor Farm is a quite poor farm with a farmer who mistreats the whole farm and its animals.
The book has no actual main character. Instead the story is build up with a few major characters and several minor characters. The book’s three major characters are:
Old Major – The prize-winning boar whose vision of an animal-paradise leads to the Rebellion. Old Major is wise but old and dies very early in the book.
Snowball – He is an intelligent pig and a very good speaker. He challenges Napoleon for control of Animal Farm after the Rebellion.
Napoleon – He is also an intelligent pig but not as secure as his counterpart. Napoleon becomes the leader of Animal Farm after the rebellion and his big power change his personality and his originally thoughts for Animal Farm

It all starts with that Old Major gathers all the other animals at Manor Farm for a meeting. He tells them of a dream that he has had. A dream where the animals were free from the humans. All the animals governed the farm together and all the animals were equal.
He teaches them a song called “beats of England” in which his dream vision is lyrically described. With this song and with Old Major’s words of this paradise the other animals spread the message of a farm where the human will not exist.
Only three days later Old Major dies and three younger pigs – Snowball, Napoleon and Squealer, formats a philosophy based on Old Major’s main principles, called Animalism. All the other animals face Animalism with great enthusiasm and one night they manage to defeat the farmer Mr. Jones in a battle, chasing him of the land. And so Manor Farm becomes Animal Farm, they regard themselves to have achieved Old Major’s dream.

The pigs, being the most intelligent animals in the group takes control over the planning. Everything starts good at first, Snowball teaches the animals to read and Napoleon educates a group of puppies in the principles of Animalism.
But the peaceable atmosphere doesn’t last for long. Snowball and Napoleon getting more and more disagree over the future of the farm and they begin to fight with each other for power and control among the other animals.
Snowball makes up a plan of building a windmill but Napoleon goes against this plan. At the meeting when the animals were supposed to vote about the windmill-question Napoleon suddenly sent a group of attack dogs chasing Snowball. The hunting was too hard for Snowball and he disappear from the farm. This is the climax of the story because from that point on Napoleon assume leadership of Animal Farm and declares that the pigs alone will make all of the decisions.
Slowly he starts to change things, among other things the seven commandments, he just add things to them so that every rule got an exception. The animals are blinded with pride of being able to take care of themselves and as time goes by the animals are getting more and more brainwashed. The ruling of Napoleon is signified of terror and executions. Napoleon is now the dictator of the farm and slowly all the pig starts to behave more like their enemies, the humans. The other animals are frightened and surprised but they convince themselves and each other that at least the conditions are better than before, when Mr. Jones was the leader of the farm.
Napoleon begins to rewrite the history to make Snowball a traitor. He brainwash the animals in to believing that Snowball always have been on the humans’ side. Napoleon also begins to act more and more like a human being—sleeping in a bed, drinking whisky, and engaging in trade with neighbouring farmers.
Years go by on Animal Farm and the pigs become more and more like human beings. In the end, the seven commandments which were inscribed on the side of the barn, become reduced to one single principle: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
When Napoleon and some of the other pigs are having a dinner with the neighbouring human beings and the other animals look inside the window they can no longer see a difference between animals and humans.

The story is really about the conditions in the Soviet Union. Old Major is based on both the German political economist Karl Marx and the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin.
Snowball is based on Leon Trotsky who was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union. Trotsky was like Snowball expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union.
Napoleon is based on Joseph Stalin, who was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union''''s Central Committee from 1922 until 1953.
The story tells us about the communism and about the corruption of the socialist ideals in the Soviet Union. The book takes up many important things, for example how strong the abuse of language as instrumental to the abuse of power can be. Also how easy it could be to brainwash people and made them forget things just by over and over again telling them what have “really” happened.
You can draw many parallels with the book’s story and how Russia’s people fulfilled Karl Marx dream during the rebellion and how the Soviet Union developed in to a big communist state.

My own personal opinion of the book is that I think it is a very good book. Orwell has with a funny and kind of comic way written a story about very serious things. At first when I started to read, the author didn’t manage to catch up my interest for the book but when I had read a few chapters and understood what the...