Summary: Animal Farm

The GIST

Animal Farm by George Orwell is a short, sharp beast fable about a group of mistreated farm animals who drive out their drunken master, set out to build a society where every creature is equal, and then watch that dream get stolen from them one small step at a time. First published in England on 17 August 1945 with the subtitle "A Fairy Story", it reads like a children's tale and lands like a political thunderclap. Orwell himself called it a satirical tale against Stalin, modelled on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Soviet years that followed.

It matters because it is one of the clearest pictures ever drawn of how a revolution goes wrong: not in one dramatic betrayal, but through clever speeches, edited rules, frightened silence and short memories. Orwell, a democratic socialist who despised Moscow-directed Stalinism, said it was the first book in which he tried "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole." The result has been named one of Time magazine's 100 best English-language novels, sits at number 31 on the Modern Library's list of the best novels of the twentieth century, and was voted the United Kingdom's favourite book from school in a 2016 poll.

The Story

Manor Farm, near Willingdon in England, is a miserable place to be an animal. Its owner, Mr. Jones, is a heavy drinker who neglects his stock, and his farmhands loaf on the job. One night the animals gather in the barn to hear Old Major, an aged and much-respected prize boar. He tells them that their lives are short and hungry because humans take everything they produce, and that one day the animals must overthrow their masters. He teaches them a stirring revolutionary song, "Beasts of England", and the idea takes root.

Old Major dies soon afterwards, but his vision passes to two young boars, Snowball and Napoleon, who are very different creatures. Snowball is inventive, energetic and full of plans. Napoleon is intimidating and manipulative, a pig who says little and gets his way. With the persuasive little Squealer at their side, the pigs shape Old Major's teaching into a complete system of thought they call Animalism.

The uprising itself comes almost by accident. Jones goes on a drinking binge, comes back hungover the next day and neglects the animals completely. That is the last straw: they rise up and drive him off the property. Mrs. Jones throws a few things into a bag and flees. The farm is theirs, and they rename it Animal Farm.

On the side of the barn, in large letters, the pigs paint the Seven Commandments. Whatever goes on two legs is an enemy; whatever goes on four legs, or has wings, is a friend. No animal shall wear clothes, sleep in a bed, drink alcohol or kill any other animal. And the one that matters most: "All animals are equal." For the sheep and the others who cannot hold seven rules in their heads, the whole creed is boiled down to a single chant: "Four legs good, two legs bad."

At first, it works. Snowball raises a flag bearing a white hoof and horn, cut from Mrs. Jones's green tablecloth. He teaches the animals to read and write, with mixed results: the gentle mare Clover learns the whole alphabet but cannot put the letters together into words, while the old donkey Benjamin and the goat Muriel read as well as any pig. Food is plentiful and the farm runs smoothly. The heart of the labour is Boxer, an enormous, kind and tireless cart-horse who believes that any problem can be solved if he simply works harder. When Jones and his men return to take the farm back, the animals beat them in what they proudly name the Battle of the Cowshed.

But small things are already slipping. The pigs, being the cleverest, take over the leadership without anyone voting on it. The cows' milk, which they were promised for their own calves, is stirred into the pigs' mash every day, supposedly for the good of the pigs' health. And Napoleon quietly takes a litter of newborn puppies away from their mothers to educate them himself, out of sight of everyone else.

Not everyone is swept up in the new order. Mollie, a vain white mare who loves hair ribbons and sugar cubes, slips away to a farm where humans will pamper her. The cat vanishes whenever there is work to do and is forgiven because her excuses are so charming. Moses, a raven who was Jones's pet, tells tales of Sugarcandy Mountain, a happy land beyond the clouds where animals rest forever from their labours. And Benjamin, the oldest and most sceptical of them all, watches everything and commits to nothing. His most frequent remark is that "Life will go on as it has always gone on – that is, badly."

The quarrel between the two leading pigs comes to a head over a windmill. Snowball wants to build one to modernise the farm, and dreams aloud of stalls with electric light, heating and running water, and a three-day working week. Napoleon is against it. At the moment the argument is about to be settled, Napoleon's puppies reappear, now fully grown, fierce and loyal only to him. They chase Snowball off the farm, and Napoleon takes command.

From here the farm changes quickly. The open meetings are replaced by a committee of pigs. Old Major's skull is dug up and put on display. Squealer explains that the windmill was really Napoleon's idea all along, and the animals set to work building it on the promise of easier lives to come. Boxer adds a second personal motto to his first: "Napoleon is always right."

When a violent storm knocks the windmill down, the blame is laid on the absent Snowball, who becomes the cause of every misfortune. His part in the Battle of the Cowshed is rewritten until he is said to have been Jones's ally from the start, while Napoleon, who was not even there, becomes its hero. Animals accused of plotting with Snowball are denounced, and Napoleon's dogs enforce his will with real violence. The hens, told that their eggs must be sold after all, rebel and are starved into submission. "Beasts of England" is banned, and the poet-pig Minimus composes a hymn of praise called "Comrade Napoleon" instead.

All the while, the pigs drift toward the life of the humans they replaced. They trade with the outside world through a go-between named Mr. Whymper, and play the neighbouring farmers, the easy-going but crafty Mr. Pilkington of Foxwood and the tough Mr. Frederick of Pinchfield, against each other. And each time a pig breaks one of the Seven Commandments, the animals who go to the barn wall to check find that the words there are not quite what they remembered. Whenever they grumble, Squealer arrives with figures proving they are better off than they ever were under Jones, and the sheep drown out any doubt with their bleating.

How far the pigs will go, what becomes of loyal Boxer, and what the animals finally see when they look at their leaders are for the book to tell. Orwell's last pages are among the most famous in English fiction, and they deserve to be met fresh.

What It's Really About

On its surface, Animal Farm is a precise allegory of Soviet history, and Orwell's biographer Jeffrey Meyers has written that virtually every detail in it has political significance. Old Major blends Karl Marx and Lenin, right down to the remains put on reverent display. Napoleon is Joseph Stalin; Snowball is the exiled Leon Trotsky, turned into an image of evil once he is gone. Mr. Jones stands for Tsar Nicholas II. Squealer is the whole Soviet propaganda machine, able to justify every twist and turn of policy. Boxer recalls the model worker Alexey Stakhanov, the starved hens the victims of the famine in Ukraine, and Napoleon's dealings with Frederick the pact between Stalin and Hitler and the invasion that followed it.

But Orwell meant it to have what he called a wider application. He wrote in 1946 that this kind of revolution, violent, conspiratorial and led by people who are hungry for power without knowing it, can only lead to a change of masters, and that revolutions bring real improvement only when the masses are alert. That is the book's deepest warning. The pigs do not win because they are strong. They win because the other animals cannot read well, cannot remember clearly, and want to believe.

It is also a book about language. Orwell believed that words in politics were used to deceive and confuse, so he tells the story in the plainest possible voice. The honest animals say what they mean; the pigs bend words until they mean whatever is convenient. The slow rewriting of the commandments shows how easily a creed can be turned into propaganda. And each animal offers a different way of failing to resist: Boxer's blind loyalty, the sheep's mindless chanting, Mollie's vanity, Benjamin's clever refusal to get involved.

The story behind the book is nearly as striking. Orwell had seen Stalinist forces turn on their own side in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and learned, as he later put it, how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries. The image of the farm came from watching a small boy whip a huge carthorse along a narrow path, and thinking that if such animals ever became aware of their strength, humans would have no power over them. He wrote it between November 1943 and February 1944, when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union and Stalin was widely admired; his son Richard Blair has said that Orwell's wife Eileen helped plan it. The manuscript survived a German flying bomb that wrecked their London flat.

Then nobody would print it. Four publishers turned it down, among them Orwell's own, Victor Gollancz, and T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, who admired the writing but not the politics. Jonathan Cape accepted it and then backed out on the advice of a Ministry of Information official, later assumed to be a man unmasked as a Soviet agent. Secker & Warburg finally published it in August 1945, just as the wartime alliance was cooling into the Cold War, and it became a huge commercial success. The Guardian called it "a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few."

Readers love it because it does so much with so little. It is short, funny, and simple enough for a school classroom, yet it has been banned, challenged and censored in countries around the world, and during the 1950s the CIA floated copies by balloon into Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Few books are this easy to read and this hard to forget.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who wants to understand how power really works, and prefers a story to a lecture. It is ideal for readers coming to Orwell for the first time, for students of history and politics, for fans of Nineteen Eighty-Four who want its lighter, quicker cousin, and for anyone who has ever watched an organisation's fine founding principles get quietly edited. You can read it in an afternoon, and you will recognise its pigs for the rest of your life.

This has been a summary of Animal Farm by George Orwell, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.