Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Signet
Rating: 5/5
Buy: Amazon | Bookshop.org

I’ll start by saying I probably should have read this years ago. Better late than never I guess.

Going in I knew the basics. Farm, pigs, allegory, Orwell. What I didn’t know was that I’d finish it feeling like I’d just scrolled through my news feed. This thing was written in 1945. Let that sink in.

Comrade Napoleon

I couldn’t help it. Every few pages my brain was pulling up current events and just… placing them next to what I was reading. Napoleon blaming Snowball for everything that goes wrong on the farm — driving him out and then using him as a punching bag for years after — I mean come on. You can’t read that and not think of how blame gets weaponized today. Bad economy? Not my fault. Policy blowing up in everyone’s face? Someone else did that. Point at the enemy, keep the animals looking the other way.

And Squealer. God, Squealer. The spin. The way he twists things just enough, just convincingly enough, that the animals start second guessing what they saw with their own eyes. That’s not a 1945 thing. That’s a Tuesday thing.

Then the commandments start changing. Not all at once — that would be too obvious. Just a word here, a phrase there. “No animal shall sleep in a bed” quietly becomes “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.” And the animals kind of remember it being different but they can’t quite prove it and Squealer tells them they’re remembering wrong so eventually they just… accept it. The erasure of history doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it just looks like that.

Boxer

This is the part that got me.

Boxer is the hardest worker on the farm. Huge, strong, completely devoted. Every time something goes wrong his answer is the same — I will work harder. I will work harder. It’s almost painful to read because you know where it’s going and you can’t stop it.

That’s the lie they’ve been selling forever isn’t it? Work hard enough and it’ll pay off. Keep your head down, believe in the system, your time is coming. And meanwhile who actually benefits from all that hard work? Sure as hell isn’t Boxer. The moment he’s used up they ship him off to the knacker and the pigs use the money to buy whiskey.

The rich know better. The politicians know what’s good for us. Just trust them and keep working. What a load of bullshit. Boxer is all of us and that’s a deeply uncomfortable thing to sit with.

A Ending That Understands the Story

The ending felt earned. It doesn’t try to out-shock or out-twist everything that came before. Instead, it stays true to what the book has really been about all along — friendship.

Underneath the possession, the horror, and the retro aesthetic, this is a story about loyalty, growing up, and what it means to stand by someone when things get hard… or strange… or terrifying.

And the book never loses sight of that.

Just Read It

I wish this book felt dated. I really do. I wish I could read it like some interesting artifact from a world we’d already figured out how to fix. But here we are.

It’s short. You can knock it out in a couple sittings. But I promise it’ll stick around longer than that. Orwell wrote it as a warning and it’s a little depressing how little has changed since he did.

Five stars. Not a feel good read by any stretch. But an important one. Maybe one of the most important ones.

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