Summary: The Coder's Path to Wealth and Independence

The GIST

Animal Farm by George Orwell is a short, sharp fable about a group of mistreated farm animals who throw out their human master and set about building a society where everyone is equal. It was first published in England on 17 August 1945 with the subtitle A Fairy Story, and on the surface it reads like one: talking pigs, a loyal carthorse, a grumbling donkey, a song of freedom sung in a barn. Underneath, it is one of the most pointed political satires ever written. Orwell said the book was inspired by the events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Stalinist era that followed, and he described it to a French correspondent as a satirical tale against Stalin.

What makes it matter is who wrote it and why. Orwell was a democratic socialist, not an enemy of the left, and his anger was aimed at what he saw as the betrayal of socialist ideals by a dictatorship. He had watched Stalinist forces turn on their own allies during the Spanish Civil War, and he came home alarmed at how readily educated people in free countries swallowed totalitarian propaganda. In his essay "Why I Write" he called this the first book in which he tried, fully aware of what he was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. The result is a story a child can follow and an adult cannot shake: a step-by-step picture of how a revolution gets hijacked.

The Story

The setting is Manor Farm, near Willingdon in England, run badly by Mr. Jones, a farmer who drinks too much and neglects his animals. One night Old Major, an elderly prize boar the others revere, calls the animals together. He tells them that their misery has a cause, that humans take everything the animals produce, and that one day the animals must overthrow them. He teaches them a rousing revolutionary song, "Beasts of England", and then, not long after, he dies.

His dream outlives him. Two young boars step forward to lead: Snowball, inventive and full of plans, and Napoleon, an intimidating Berkshire boar who says less and schemes more. When Jones goes on a drinking binge and leaves the animals unfed, they rise up and drive him off the land. His wife throws a few things into a bag and flees. The farm is theirs, and they rename it Animal Farm.

The pigs, together with a small, plump, silver-tongued boar named Squealer, turn Old Major's teachings into a complete system of thought called Animalism, and they boil it down to Seven Commandments, painted in large letters on the side of the barn. 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 last and most important: "All animals are equal." For the animals who cannot hold seven rules in their heads, the whole creed is shrunk to a slogan the sheep adore: Four legs good, two legs bad.

At first it works. Snowball raises a flag made from Mrs. Jones's green tablecloth, marked with a white hoof and horn. He teaches the animals to read and write. Food is plentiful and the farm runs smoothly. But two quiet things happen in these happy early days. The pigs, who have taken the leadership as a matter of course, begin setting aside special food for themselves, the cows' milk stirred into their mash, supposedly for the sake of their health. And Napoleon takes a litter of puppies away from their mothers to educate them himself, out of sight of everyone else.

Around the pigs Orwell gathers a farmyard of unforgettable characters. Boxer, the enormous cart-horse, is kind, loyal and immensely strong, and he does a huge share of the physical work. He believes any problem can be solved if he simply works harder, and he comes to hold a second belief just as firmly: "Napoleon is always right." Clover, a gentle mare, worries over him and mothers the weak. Mollie, a vain white mare who loves hair ribbons and sugar cubes, has little use for a revolution that takes them away. Benjamin, the old donkey, is one of the few animals outside the pigs who can read properly, and he is unimpressed by everything; his favourite remark is Life will go on as it has always gone on – that is, badly. Moses, a raven and Jones's former pet, does no work at all but tells tales of Sugarcandy Mountain, a happy country beyond the clouds where animals rest forever from their labours. The cat disappears whenever there is work to do and, the one time she is known to vote, votes on both sides.

Jones and his neighbours try to take the farm back and are beaten off in a fight the animals proudly name the Battle of the Cowshed. Then the real struggle begins, and it is between the two pigs. Snowball announces a grand plan to modernise the farm by building a windmill, with visions of electric light, heated stalls, running water and a three-day working week. Napoleon opposes it. The argument comes to a head, and Napoleon answers it not with words but with the puppies he took away, now grown into fierce dogs. They chase Snowball off the farm, and Napoleon takes command.

From here the story tightens like a knot. The meetings where animals debated are replaced by a committee of pigs. Old Major's skull is dug up and put on display. Squealer explains that the windmill was Napoleon's idea all along. The animals labour harder than ever on the promise of an easier life to come, and when the windmill collapses in a storm because its walls were too thin, the blame falls on the absent Snowball, who becomes the hidden hand behind every misfortune. History itself starts to shift: Napoleon, who played no part in the Battle of the Cowshed, is gradually remade into its hero, while Snowball is recast as Jones's collaborator. "Beasts of England" is banned, and a pig poet named Minimus writes new verses in praise of "Comrade Napoleon." The hens, promised they would keep their eggs, find them taken to trade with the outside world through a human go-between, Mr. Whymper. And the animals who pause before the barn wall begin to feel, uneasily, that the commandments do not read quite the way they remember.

Beyond the hedges wait two neighbouring farmers, the tough Mr. Frederick of Pinchfield and the easy-going but crafty Mr. Pilkington of Foxwood, each wary of the other and both nervous about what an animal-run farm might mean for their own. Napoleon plays them against each other, and the consequences fall on the animals who trusted him. How far the pigs go, and what becomes of Boxer and the rest, is for the reader to discover.

What It's Really About

The book is an allegory, and nearly every detail carries a political meaning. Old Major blends Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, the thinker and the founder; his skull on display recalls Lenin's embalmed body in its mausoleum. Napoleon stands for Joseph Stalin, Snowball for the exiled Leon Trotsky, and Mr. Jones for Tsar Nicholas II. Squealer is a portrait of the Soviet press and officialdom, able to justify every twist in policy. The sheep, drowning out argument with their slogan, echo the crowds used to shout Trotsky down. Boxer has been compared to Alexey Stakhanov, the model worker held up for others to imitate. Moses the raven is Orwell's picture of organised religion promising rewards in the next life while serving whoever holds power in this one.

But Orwell said he meant the story to have a wider application, and that is why it has outlasted the Soviet Union. Its deepest subject is how language is used to seize and keep power. The Seven Commandments are meant to bind the animals together; the pigs treat them as words that can be quietly adjusted whenever they become inconvenient. Squealer always has figures to prove that life is better than it was under Jones. Orwell wrote the narration in deliberately plain, unbiased prose, and he lets the honest animals speak plainly while the corrupt ones twist their words, because he believed political language was routinely used to deceive. Writing in 1946, he said that a violent, conspiratorial revolution led by power-hungry people can only lead to a change of masters, and that revolutions bring real improvement only when the masses stay alert.

The story of how the book reached readers is almost a second fable. Orwell wrote it between November 1943 and February 1944, while Britain was allied with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany and Stalin was widely admired. The manuscript survived a German flying bomb that destroyed his London flat; he dug the crumpled pages out of the rubble. Four publishers turned it down. T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber praised the writing but not the argument, and Jonathan Cape withdrew after a warning from an official at the Ministry of Information who was later unmasked as a Soviet agent. Secker & Warburg finally brought it out in 1945, as the wartime alliance cooled into the Cold War, and it became a great commercial success. Orwell's son Richard Blair has said that Orwell's first wife, Eileen, helped plan the book.

The image that started it all was a simple one. Orwell recalled seeing a boy of about ten whipping a huge carthorse along a narrow path, and thinking that if such animals ever became aware of their strength, we would have no power over them. Readers love the book for the same reason: it is funny, quick and heartbreaking, and it makes an enormous idea feel as close as the animals in a barn. It has been named among Time magazine's 100 best English-language novels, won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996, and was voted the United Kingdom's favourite book from school in a 2016 poll. It has also been challenged, censored and banned in several countries, which is perhaps the best evidence that it still stings.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who wants to understand how freedom is lost, not in one dramatic stroke but in small, plausible steps, will find this book hard to forget. It suits readers who enjoy history and politics but want them told as a story, students meeting Orwell for the first time, admirers of Nineteen Eighty-Four looking for its shorter, warmer and in some ways crueller companion, and anyone who can spare an evening for a tale that will change how they hear a slogan.

This has been a summary of The Coder's Path to Wealth and Independence by Mark Beckner, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.