Animal Farm E-Book und Hörbuch

George Orwell

• E-Book-Herausgeber: Polygon
  Hörbuch-Herausgeber: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 160

Beschreibung

Introduced by Alan Johnson. 'All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.' Mr Jones of Manor Farm is so lazy and drunken that one day he forgets to feed his livestock. The ensuing rebellion under the leadership of the pigs Napoleon and Snowball leads to the animals taking over the farm. Vowing to eliminate the terrible inequities of the farmyard, the renamed Animal Farm is organised to benefit all who walk on four legs. But as time passes, the ideals of the rebellion are corrupted, then forgotten. And something new and unexpected emerges . . . First published in 1945, Animal Farm – the history of a revolution that went wrong – is George Orwell's brilliant satire on the corrupting influence of power.

Leseprobe

ANIMAL FARM

GEORGE ORWELL

ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

Introduction by

ALAN JOHNSON

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2022by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Introduction © Alan Johnson, 2022

First published in 1945 by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd..

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 84697 606 3

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 486 3

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available onrequest from the British Library.

Typeset by 3btype

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

INTRODUCTION

The impact this little book had on my life was every bit as profound as its influence on society in general since its first publication. I read it almost twenty years later, at the insistence of our wonderful English teacher, Mr Carlen, at Sloane Grammar School. He had decided it was a book that we thirty-five boys in Form 4Y ought to be conversant with.

I was fourteen years old and had begun to take an interest in politics and the world around me. To paraphrase Larkin (very badly): ‘Political awareness began, / In nineteen sixty-three, / Between the Cuban missile crisis, / And the Beatles’ second LP’.

These were tumultuous times. With The Beatles was released on the very day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated – 22 November 1963. Those alive at the time can remember precisely where they were when they heard that JFK had been shot: I was in the Fulham basement refuge of a schoolfriend with two mini-skirted girls listening to the Fab Four.

Although Orwell (or Eric Blair) died four months before I was born, I tend to place him in the sixties, rather than the forties when his great satirical allegory was written. The man continues to be relevant to successive generations. When Trump was elected to be the 45th US President (Kennedy having been the 35th), sales of Orwell’s books surged to the top of the Amazon charts. The remark by Trump aide Kellyanne Conway about the size of the crowd at his inauguration being larger than the one at Obama’s being an ‘alternative fact’, rather than a lie, sent hundreds of thousands of Americans back to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s other powerful warning about the perils of totalitarianism. For them, Orwell’s writing was as contemporary in 2017 as it had been for me in the sixties.

It was 1964 (rather than 1984) when our new English teacher insisted that Form 4Y read Animal Farm together, passing the book between our hinge-lidded wooden desks, each student reading a couple of pages aloud before passing the book to the boy next to him.

None of our previous English teachers (it seemed to be a high-turnover position at our school) ever had us reading like this – as a communal exercise. Mr McLoughlin, who had a deep love of science fiction, read us stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury; more for his enjoyment than our own it seemed to me. Mr Smith, who struggled to hold our attention, insisted on reading chunks of the Bible in his hybrid English/Religious Education lessons. My abiding memory of poor Smithy, who had a very short temper, is of him hitting a boy over the head with a rolled-up newspaper yelling ‘Christ is love, you little bastard!’

Mr Carlen never had to raise his voice. He held us in his spell with a natural authority and never resorted to the cane – or even a rolled-up newspaper – to command our attention. He cut a rakish figure in his tweed jacket and corduroy trousers. His hair, a little longer than other teachers’, was combed into a fringe across his forehead in what could almost be described as a Beatles style (although for us teenagers then, as now, nobody beyond the age of seventeen could have the slightest credibility, so far as fashion was concerned). I remember him introducing us to poetry, chalking Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ onto the blackboard and explaining that ‘rifles’ rapid rattle’ was known as alliteration. The first time I ever went to the theatre was thanks to Mr Carlen, who took some of us boys to see Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence and Spike Milligan in Son of Oblomov.

But his major contribution to our education was not just introducing us to Animal Farm, but explaining its subtext.

On one level, the level that mattered, the book was a gripping story about the animals at Manor Farm rising against the inebriated farmer, Mr Jones, who’d allowed the farm to fall into disrepair and cared little for the welfare of its four-legged occupants.

It was Mr Carlen who explained that Mr Jones was an allegory for Tsar Nicholas II and that the two young pigs who’d led the struggle to take over the farm, Snowball and Napoleon, were Trotsky and Stalin; old Major was Karl Marx; Squealer was Vyacheslav Molotov. These were names as familiar to us as those of any British politicians.

I didn’t need this additional information to enjoy the story. I was hooked on the prose; horrified by the violence unleashed on the hens, annoyed by the bleating conformity of the sheep, charmed by the wisdom of Benjamin the donkey, repelled by the duplicity and treachery of the pigs. Most of all I grieved over Boxer, carried off to what the animals thought was a well-earned retirement until one of them read ALFRED SIMMONDS, HORSE SLAUGHTERER AND GLUE BOILER on the side of the van carrying the noble workhorse away.

Mr Carlen’s explanation that the book was an allegory for the Bolshevik Revolution was a revelation that had me, and many other boys, reading the book again and again, long after our communal effort.

I left school the following year, a month past my fifteenth birthday, going out into a world where a third of the population lived under communism. There were lots of communists around. As the great Russian composer Shostakovich – who only just escaped execution for writing a piece of music considered to be traitorous – said, when told that Pablo Picasso was a communist, ‘It’s easy to be a communist when you don’t live under communism.’ I knew that my political allegiance was on the left, but wasn’t sure precisely where. Communism and the concept of the Workers’ State held enormous attractions for youngsters like me for whom books and reading had been an escape from our impoverished upbringing.

But Orwell got to me before the Communist Party of Great Britain did. After Animal Farm, I read as much Orwell as my library tickets would allow: Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (although, curiously, not Nineteen Eighty-Four until almost the year of its title).

George Orwell was my adolescent hero just as much as Paul McCartney and the great Queens Park Rangers maestro, Rodney Marsh. There was a link between Orwell and football. Bernard Crick, his greatest biographer, observed that: ‘At times he was like those loyal and vociferous football supporters who are at their best when hurling complaint, sarcasm and abuse at their own long-suffering side.’

Orwell it seems, approved of socialism but disliked socialists. It was difficult to get your political bearings with his early writing. But I found it exhilarating to follow the thoughts of an Old Etonian as they transmuted from the self-declared Tory anarchist he’d been at school to the democratic socialist that he eventually became. He was a political thinker who was never afraid to adapt his thoughts to emerging developments rather than trying to reconcile those developments with the rigidity of his opinions.

His last two books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, represented the settled outcome of his thinking which emerged from the clash of ideologies in the thirties, culminating in the Second World War. When we boys of Form 4Y at Sloane read Animal Farm, Russia was our enemy in the undeclared Cold War, but Mr Carlen explained how different the relationship had been when the book was first published. Russia had been our ally in the eventual defeat of Hitler, and to publish such a savage critique was thought to be ‘bad form’ by many on the right of the British political spectrum. On the left, Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, rejected the manuscript as did many other British and American publishers, some apparently persuaded to reject it by a Soviet spy working in the Ministry of Information, which gave a deliciously ironic twist to the arguments Orwell was making.

When Mr Carlen revealed the full genius behind the book I was introduced to allegory and satire at its most skilful. The word ‘satire’ was in common usage back then thanks to That Was the Week That Was having brought the concept to our television screens in 1962. For me nothing could be so perfectly satirical as the alterations made to the ‘Seven Commandments of Animalism’, in particular the distortion of ‘All Animals Are Equal’ through the addition of ‘but Some Are More Equal Than Others’ – a line so brilliant I wonder at it still, having heard and read it thousands of times.

Orwell’s writing would, I’m sure, have warned me off communism under its own controlled power, as the author intended. But at Sloane School we encountered another persuader in the shape of our History and Economics teacher, Peter Pallai. Peter was the youngest teacher at Sloane. I’d say he was in his twenties. (Mr Carlen was in his early thirties.) He was Hungarian, escaping from Budapest as a teenager in 1956, just as the Russian tanks rolled in. He told us what it was like to live under a dictatorship; how the Hungarian Revolution against communism began with a delegation of students, not much older than us, entering a radio station to broadcast their ‘Sixteen Demands’ (not much different to the ‘Seven Commandments of Animalism’), and how police officers from the ironically named ‘State Protection Authority’ had shot several of these peaceful protesters dead. Mr Pallai was one of the estimated 200,000 Hungarians who sought political refuge abroad.

And here he was, in 1964, a living, breathing representative of everything Orwell had warned against. Mr Pallai was a Labour supporter, a devotee of Harold Wilson who became Prime Minister around the time we were reading Animal Farm. Peter Pallai was a scathing critic of those many student revolutionaries in Britain who at the time evangelised about a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, derided public opinion as ‘false consciousness’ and an elected Parliament as ‘bourgeois democracy’.

I remember asking Mr Pallai if he’d read Animal Farm at school when he was our age. No, he hadn’t. There was a list of proscribed books in Hungary that students were forbidden to read. At the top of the list was the Bible – second was Animal Farm.

Alan Johnson

– I –

Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the henhouses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs Jones was already snoring.

As soon as the light in the bedroom went out there was a stirring and a fluttering all through the farm buildings. Word had gone round during the day that old Major, the prize Middle White boar, had had a strange dream on the previous night and wished to communicate it to the other animals. It had been agreed that they should all meet in the big barn as soon as Mr Jones was safely out of the way. Old Major (so he was always called, though the name under which he had been exhibited was Willingdon Beauty) was so highly regarded on the farm that everyone was quite ready to lose an hour’s sleep in order to hear what he had to say.

At one end of the big barn, on a sort of raised platform, Major was already ensconced on his bed of straw, under a lantern which hung from a beam. He was twelve years old and had lately grown rather stout, but he was still a majestic-looking pig, with a wise and benevolent appearance in spite of the fact that his tushes had never been cut. Before long the other animals began to arrive and make themselves comfortable after their different fashions. First came the three dogs, Bluebell, Jessie, and Pincher, and then the pigs, who settled down in the straw immediately in front of the platform. The hens perched themselves on the windowsills, the pigeons fluttered up to the rafters, the sheep and cows lay down behind the pigs and began to chew the cud. The two cart-horses, Boxer and Clover, came in together, walking very slowly and setting down their vast hairy hoofs with great care lest there should be some small animal concealed in the straw. Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal. Boxer was an enormous beast, nearly eighteen hands high, and as strong as any two ordinary horses put together. A white stripe down his nose gave him a somewhat stupid appearance, and in fact he was not of first-rate intelligence, but he was universally respected for his steadiness of character and tremendous powers of work. After the horses came Muriel, the white goat, and Benjamin, the donkey. Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm, and the worst tempered. He seldom talked, and when he did, it was usually to make some cynical remark – for instance, he would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies. Alone among the animals on the farm he never laughed. If asked why, he would say that he saw nothing to laugh at. Nevertheless, without openly admitting it, he was devoted to Boxer; the two of them usually spent their Sundays together in the small paddock beyond the orchard, grazing side by side and never speaking.

The two horses had just lain down when a brood of ducklings, which had lost their mother, filed into the barn, cheeping feebly and wandering from side to side to find some place where they would not be trodden on. Clover made a sort of wall round them with her great foreleg, and the ducklings nestled down inside it and promptly fell asleep. At the last moment Mollie, the foolish, pretty white mare who drew Mr Jones’s trap, came mincing daintily in, chewing at a lump of sugar. She took a place near the front and began flirting her white mane, hoping to draw attention to the red ribbons it was plaited with. Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major’s speech without listening to a word of what he was saying.

All the animals were now present except Moses, the tame raven, who slept on a perch behind the back door. When Major saw that they had all made themselves comfortable and were waiting attentively, he cleared his throat and began:

‘Comrades, you have heard already about the strange dream that I had last night. But I will come to the dream later. I have something else to say first. I do not think, comrades, that I shall be with you for many months longer, and before I die, I feel it my duty to pass on to you such wisdom as I have acquired. I have had a long life, I have had much time for thought as I lay alone in my stall, and I think I may say that I understand the nature of life on this earth as well as any animal now living. It is about this that I wish to speak to you.

‘Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty. No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.

‘But is this simply part of the order of nature? Is it because this land of ours is so poor that it cannot afford a decent life to those who dwell upon it? No, comrades, a thousand times no! The soil of England is fertile, its climate is good, it is capable of affording food in abundance to an enormously greater number of animals than now inhabit it. This single farm of ours would support a dozen horses, twenty cows, hundreds of sheep – and all of them living in a comfort and a dignity that are now almost beyond our imagining. Why then do we continue in this miserable condition? Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labour is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word – Man. Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever.

‘Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum