Picked book cos missed the lecture on it at university. Meaty prose opposed to minimum expletives of shorter sentences in recent modern fiction. Follows inner workings of protagonist’s mind in a bonkas sadistic dystopian society & smacks of sinister warnings for the future. Author highlights things are often exact opposite to how they seem, betrayal & psychological torture is “bleak” but story layered by dark humour and dramatic irony. Banned originally it’s a read for those who want to contrast the prophecy of doom with today’s world .
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I saw this on stage when I lived in New York. Definitely a pessimistic but also realistic view of what the future could be.
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I recently read Down and Out in Paris and London, which I definitely recommend. All about Orwell struggling to get by in those cities during the Depression. For all that, we see a quite funny side of Orwell and his writing.
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Debbie Croysdale On that Note- If you look for similarities you can see this one is a current event.
Animal Farm G.Orwell is the Pen Name
Manor Farm is like any other English farm, expect for a drunken owner, Mr Jones, incompetent workers and oppressed animals. Fed up with the ignorance of their human masters, the animals rise up in rebellion and take over the farm. Led by intellectually superior pigs like Snowball and Napoleon, the animals how to take charge of their destiny and remove the inequities of their lives. But as time passes, the realize that things aren't happening quite as expected. Animal Farm is, one level, a simple story about barnyard animals. On a much deeper level, it is a savage political satire on corrupted ideals, misdirected revolutions and class conflict-themes as valid today as they were sixty years ago.
@Simon Thanks for info on Animal Farm. @Malcolm Thanks for info on Down and Out in Paris and London. I've got those two titles on my must read list!
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Great review, Debbie, I really enjoyed it. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were life-perspective changing books for me. Those, along with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451...
A great book. I read it when bed-ridden with a flu and I think it made my flu last longer.
Neither Animal Farm nor Brave New World are much more hopeful, but Fahrenheit 451 ends with a tinge of hope.