Dr. Peter Lowe

‘What would Orwell do?’ Or perhaps ‘What would Orwell think?’ has become a recurring question in recent years, in our world of rising populism, ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’.  Although Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here was arguably the more directly relevant work to America in 2016, when sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four rose exponentially in the months after Donald Trump’s taking office Orwell’s novel once again found itself invoked as a vision of how dark the future could prove to be.  Now Adam Biles takes us back to that other universally-known Orwellian text, Animal Farm, and uses its familiar location and storyline to recast the bleak ‘Fairy Story’ for a post-pandemic UK beset by economic gloom and political chaos.  One can imagine Orwell nodding sagely at this news, if he were around today to read this new extension to his canonical world.

Animal Farm’s story is, of course, one of perverted idealism: of an animal revolution hijacked by the pigs who took charge of it, and of a farmyard community that threw off its human tormenter (the drunken and violent farmer Jones) only to find the pigs installing themselves, literally, in his place.  Encouraged to think of themselves as equal, the novel ends with the animals being reminded by the frequently rewritten commandments of their society that whilst this remains true “some [animals] are more equal than others.”  The pigs are in the farmhouse and the lives of the other animals seem little changed, and arguably worse, compared to what they were before their revolution.  So much, Orwell says, with his eye particularly trained on the Soviet Union, but also taking in almost every revolution before or since, for the idealism of the revolutionary crowd.

Beasts of England opens some unspecified time after the close of its source text, on a farm where the events of the past are now the material of heavily reworked ‘history’ and new generations of animals inhabit the social and political order that has ossified over time without really questioning its effectiveness.  The electricity from the Farm’s windmill continues to bring in revenue, and a business sideline as a petting zoo enables the animals to make money from humans, albeit not without other problems.  When the pig Buttercup is again declared the winner of the annual electoral ‘Choozin’ at the start of the novel it seems further evidence of how the pigs’ grip on power changes only in so far as to allow a new generation to step into their predecessors’ places.

Things, however, are not as they seem on Manor Farm (we recall that the name ‘Animal Farm’ was discarded as part of Napoleon’s reconciliation with the humans at the end of Orwell’s novel) and the outward appearance of a democratic system only thinly masks the reality underneath.  Before long, amidst worsening economic news and allegations of corruption, Buttercup is ousted from power and flees as Jones once did.  In his place, Jumbo, having returned to the farm from a posting abroad with the WUF (Wealden Union of Farms) assumes temporary control while unleashing a campaign of disinformation that so blurs the lines between truth and illusion that the animals begin to see the most extreme options as the better ones, even when their own lives become manifestly worse as a result.

In such a text the urge to see each character as having a real-world counterpart becomes almost irresistible, just as Animal Farm invited the reader to ponder the Napoleon-Stalin and Snowball-Trotsky relationship and see it in its immediate Soviet context.  Certainly, there is much in Biles’ work to support a reading directly analogous to the UK of the past decade.  Who, we might ask, could be represented by the sow Traviata (now deceased) invoked as an ideological model by many of the next generation of pigs?  If Buttercup is Boris Johnson, does that make Jumbo Nigel Farage, or is Jumbo actually Johnson?  To read thus, however, is to miss the point, much as it was with Orwell’s novel.  The analogies are wider and more unsettling, particularly here as the arc of the narrative is a descent from a nominal if largely ineffective democracy to a totalitarian cult of power.  As the novel closes with the introduction of the ‘UNITY IN DIVISION’ slogan and the enforced observation of a Two-Minute Huzzah of gratitude for a state trying to take credit for tackling problems that it has itself created we move from the world of Animal Farm into the nightmare of life on Airstrip One from which Winston Smith tries unsuccessfully to extricate himself.

And yet, it would hard indeed not to read of the ‘Wufflu’ virus that sweeps through the farm animals, causing division in place of solidarity, or of the fanatical cries to ‘Dig the Moat!’ and isolate the farm from the wider world, or of the ways in which a flock of starlings serves to spread disinformation amongst the animals (birds spreading rumours? Still a problem, even if Elon Musk has changed the company’s logo) and to not think of more recent things.  The crises that beset the Farm bring to the fore its deep-seated flaws in the same way that recent trials have shown the UK itself to be woefully ill-equipped to face the challenges that seem to come up thick and fast.  One imagines Orwell looking on as yet another Etonian old boy (or product of a similar establishment) is allowed to fail upwards into a position of power and influence and shaking his head sadly at how repetitive much of the past British century has really been.

That, perhaps, is why Biles’ novel feels so timely.  After nearly eighty years a return to Manor Farm is also an opportunity to reflect on more contemporary issues and, perhaps, the future into which some of the forces unleashed in recent years might lead us.  What would Orwell do, if he were living in a Brexit-blighted country of privilege and poverty, a land of often barely suppressed rage where politicians toy with the rhetoric of extremism with barely a thought for the forces their words might unleash?  Perhaps, one feels, he would return to the topic of an earlier ‘fairy story’ and write this.

Beasts of England by Adam Biles is published by Galley Beggar Press, ISBN: 9781913111458