Book review: Animal Farm by George Orwell | Fourth Dimension Club

Siddu Nirvana
Nov 11, 2018
2 min read

Updated: Aug 27, 2021

One of the best short novels ever written in history on our political systems and society in a satirical theme.

Author:

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic whose work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism and outspoken support of democratic socialism.

Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Review:

In this allegorical short novel, Orwell narrates the incidents around Russian revolution of 1917 where the animal characters in the book represent people during this time. This is a story about group of animals in a farm decides to rise and revolt against the evil human farmer who doesn't care about them much under the leadership of Old Major-pig. Old Major inspires the animals to form a union and revolt against Mr. Jones-farmer. They run the farm themselves and develop their own hierarchy being led by Snowball and Napoleon.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

The main theme Orwell wants to point is that Power always corrupts people. People should always find the truth by themselves, educate themselves, think by themselves and never depend on others. Many readers and young readers may not get the actual meaning of the book while reading for the first time. I couldn't stop laughing after reading the last page and the same time felt sad about the hardship we people faced because of the power greediness of a few people. Orwell used satire to narrate this serious story on power corruption and made it look funny and almost ridiculous. This is of course a widely used literary technique.