Book Report: February 2005
February 14, 2005
I’ve recently read three books in the past month that all, in varying degrees of satire, cynicism, pathos, lyricism and adventure, deal with revolution and change. The first of these novels is George Orwell’s biting 1945 classic “Animal Farm”, which tells the downside of the Russian Revolution as an allegory starring pigs, dogs, sheep, and least of all, boorish humans. One night, after a grueling day of fieldwork, the animals of Manor Farm gather in the barn to hear a deathbed speech by the great old boar, Old Major. Telling tales of animal injustice, Old Major, a mix between Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin, riles up the animals, suggesting a coup, with the slogan “Four legs good, two legs bad.” After the animals, led by two large pigs- Napoleon and Snowball- drive the drunken Mr. Jones away from Manor Farm, they raise their flag, learn to write, compose seven laws of Animalism, and rename the land Animal Farm, much to the consternation of their neighboring farms, who fight two unsuccessful wars to repopulate the farm with humans.
As was the case in Russia, greed and power overcome the original principals of revolution, and on Animal Farm, Napoleon, who has trained a pack of ravenous dogs to do his bidding, drives away Snowball and his Trotskyite ideas of permanent revolution, sets himself up as lord and dictator, enacts a brutal series of purges, and spreads the good word through a meek pig named Squealor, the propaganda machine. With spirits broken, the animals turn to their seven commandments, but find the laws have been whittled down to one overbearing axiom: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” As it turns out, revolution worsened an already bad situation, to the point where, finally, the line between Stalinist human, and Socialist pig, is totally blurred.
Orwell’s slim novel is arguably the most famous allegory of the 20th century, written less as an absurd fantasy than as a brutally satirical tract against communism and Russia under Stalin. In Napoleon, the dictator pig, Orwell fashions a character of ruthless venom and contempt; a character that seizes power through forceful means, gets it into his peasants’ heads that it was just to overthrow Snowball (Trotsky), and then steals his ideals for electricity and productivity. Orwell witnessed first hand the ills of communism while fighting in Spain (“Homage to Catalonia” is his famous non-fiction novel about the war), and to set his ideals inside the realm of allegory, children’s allegory at that, was a stroke of genius, allowing for a satire that is thinly veiled to a time and a place, yet universal just the same. Anywhere a revolution turns sour (Cuba, Congo, Zimbabwe), “Animal Farm” can be interpreted, and anywhere a good worker is suppressed by an overpowering government, “Animal Farm” is prescient. Orwell would get much darker, and even more political with “1984”, but for political and war allegory done with imagination and style, nothing quite compares to the revolution-gone-wrong on the bleak Manor Farm.
Next up, also from England, also anti-totalitarian, and also filled with animals, is the magical adventure “Watership Down”, by Richard Adams from 1972. This brilliant 475-page novel takes place within a three-mile radius of country land in Hampshire, England, where a pack of rabbits flee their home warren when man intervenes with his machines. Led by Hazel, the group of bunnies- Fiver, Hazel’s mystical, Jesus-like brother, Bigwig, the strong, Dandelion, the quick, and Blackberry, the smart- encounter numerous dangers and adventures before finding a perfect hill called Watership Down. The only hitch is that they are left without any does (female rabbits), and a warren without females means a warren without a future, so the key movement (of about five) comes with Hazel’s decision to find does, at any cost. This leads to one adventure after another, from a raid on a nearby farm to free hutch rabbits, to a frightening stay at a nasty anti-humanistic place called “The Warren of the Snares”. But the biggest adventure comes with the discovery of a huge warren called Efrafra, an overcrowded dictatorial environment run with an iron paw by General Woundwort, who lords over his land worse than Orwell’s Napoleon, and when Hazel’s clever plot involves infiltrating Efrafra to steal a pack of unhappy does, the novel becomes a parable of trickery, war, and above all, survival.
Just giving a broad sketch of the plot doesn’t do “Watership Down” much justice, for it’s a book filled with exciting stories, harrowing escapes, deep characters, myths, philosophies about nature and community, and sharp writing. Adams takes his time setting the stage for the huge Efrafra raid, as well as his ultimate damnation of fascism through General Woundwort’s tactical brutality, but the storytelling is so seamless and adventurous that getting to know over twenty main characters, as well as their Tolkien-esque Lapine language, is never a chore. Indeed, for a book nearly 500 pages long, it reads like a breeze, and the numerous tales spun by Dandelion about the rabbit folk hero, El-ahrairah, makes the story biblical in scope. If “Animal Farm” is an animal story told in satire, and more deeply focused on Stalin, than “Watership Down” is more naturalistic, leveling its critiques of fascism (Woundwort could very well by Hitler) against triumphant stories of our hero rabbits survival against impossible odds, with smarts, trickery, and lots of heart. “Watership Down” is more than just a rabbits-on-the-run children’s story; it’s a novel all about will, struggle, and in the end, trust in your fellow man, or, as is the case, rabbit.
Finally, I come to the most stinging political novel I’ve ever read, Arthur Koestler’s 1940 instant-masterpiece “Darkness at Noon”. Koestler’s novel is more appropriately aligned with “Animal Farm”, with its very thinly veiled criticism of the ruthlessness with which Stalin turned on his political friends, and publicly, through much persuasion- mentally and physically- made them confess to conspiracies against the state. “Darkness at Noon” is a stream of conscious novel that takes place in a Russian prison cell, where former revolutionary hero Rubashov (think Trotsky, or Bukharin), awaits his public trials, and three private hearing, on counter-revolutionary activity he didn’t commit, after being denounced by Number 1 (Stalin) as a traitor. Much like the Great Purges and Moscow Show Trials of the ‘30’s- for which Koestler knew various victims- Rubashov has his will beaten to a sharp cracking point. The revolution, he realizes, has gone terribly sour, the country is in ruins, and even the symbol of a proud revolutionary father is lost on the power-corrupt dictator. “If the Party embodied the will of history,” he thinks in a priceless bit of cynicism, “than history itself was defective.”
In roughly three weeks, through three philosophically absurd interrogations, a trial told through the eyes of an innocent peasant girl, and numerous flashbacks into Rubashov’s dealings as a high Party official, Koestler gives us a protagonist without a country- his has betrayed the cause, and all is defective as a result. The authenticity of prison life on death row is made more realistic because of Koestler’s own experiences in a Spanish internment camp under Franco, what lead to his denunciation of the communist party, and ultimately, to “Darkness at Noon”. “One cannot build paradise with concrete,” says Rubashov in his mind, and in the classic tradition of dystopian literature, he’s absolutely correct, for what is revolution but the planting of a new, fertile soil. Ranked as the 8th greatest novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library, “Darkness at Noon” is, by all accounts, the thinking man’s anti-communistic monologue.
by Adam Suraf