And it’s clever in more subtle ways, showing the seduction of belief among the “ordinary people” in a strongman (or strongpig) leader – think Lenin, Stalin or Trump. – Anna Funder on George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Trump and Lenin, really?
It makes you wonder if Anna Funder has read Animal Farm (I’m sure she has) let alone understood it. In Animal Farm Lenin is played by Old Major. Stalin is played by Napoleon. If you are looking for a Trump character, I would choose Boxer, but at least that character had integrity. Anna, ditch the comparison with Trump and et on with your point that Mrs Orwell was the driving force behind Animal Farm and not Eric Blair.
Napoleon is the central antagonist, a fierce and tyrannical Berkshire boar who symbolizes Joseph Stalin. He uses propaganda and terror, including a secret police force of dogs he raises, to seize power from Snowball (Trotsky), his rival, and rules Animal Farm through brute force and manipulation.
In contrast, Old Major is the wise, respected boar who dreams of a revolution and lays out the principles of Animalism to the other animals before he dies.
Trump, on the other hand, is a deranged populist with some connection with Epstein hanging over his head. Does Mossad have the Epstein file on Trump? Are they blackmailing Trump to support Netanyahu’s genocide of the Palestinians?
Anyway, here is Funder’s take on Orwell:
It’s 80 years this week since George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published. Orwell considered it his best book. It is certainly his most delightful, most acute about characters and their foibles and most perfectly structured. It’s also a masterful takedown of Stalinism and all corrupt and corrupting systems of power, especially those that start off populist, representing “ordinary people”, and then traduce them.
And it’s clever in more subtle ways, showing the seduction of belief among the “ordinary people” in a strongman (or strongpig) leader – think Lenin, Stalin or Trump. People want to believe in a man who will save them, when the truth is that anyone who had that kind of unchecked power would probably be corrupted by it. Animal Farm does for authoritarianism what 1984 does, in a much grimmer way, for surveillance tyranny – both such crucial books for today’s world of populist regimes and surveillance techno-authoritarianism.
When Orwell delivered Animal Farm to his publisher and friend Fredric Warburg, Warburg was completely gobsmacked. How this “writer of rather grey novels, with heroes embodying some aspect of his personal character, had suddenly taken wings and become – a poet”, Warburg could not fathom. “There was,” he thought, “after all, little in Orwell’s previous work to indicate that he was capable of this supreme effort”. Orwell’s closest friend and sometime editor Richard Rees was similarly mystified. He couldn’t understand how Orwell had discovered in himself a “new vein of fantasy, humour and tenderness”.
But Orwell hadn’t suddenly discovered anything new in himself. The fantasy, humour and tenderness came from his wife, the brilliant Oxford graduate, writer, and psychology major Eileen O’Shaughnessy. When you read Eileen’s letters, with their acute and hilarious character sketches, her deep insight into people (including herself), her irony and whimsy, you recognise her voice on every page of Animal Farm. Eileen knew and loved the animal fable form and had studied under JRR Tolkien at Oxford. Animal Farm was the last thing she worked on with Orwell, and he never produced anything with these characteristics again.
In fact, the form of the book itself – as fable, novel, satire – was Eileen’s idea. During WWII, Orwell wanted to write an essay critical of Stalin, even though Stalin was an ally against Hitler. Eileen told him such an essay would never be published. She was in a position to know, having been working at the censorship department in the Ministry of Information.
And she knew a lot about Stalinism, including how it felt to be surveilled and pursued by Stalinist operatives. During the Spanish Civil War, Eileen worked at the headquarters of the International Labour Party in Barcelona, an office riddled with Stalinist spies. They’d targeted her for both “romance” and intelligence. She resisted and outwitted them, but in the end, during their murderous purges, Stalin’s people issued an arrest warrant for her and George. Eileen did her best to protect him, but their escape from Spain was such a close call that Orwell remained terrified all his life that a Stalinist killer might still come for him.
So, with this lived experience and nous, Eileen steered Orwell away from writing a critical essay on Stalin. Each day she went to work at the office, shopped at lunchtime for whatever rations she could find, then came home and cooked for him and whoever else turned up – bombed-out friends, visiting nephews or people just looking for company. Then, after dinner, the two of them would get into bed together to stay warm (they couldn’t afford heat) and work on the novel. In Animal Farm, her psychological depth and sympathy met his political insights and made a masterpiece.
The strenuous way Orwell tried to bury Eileen’s involvement is perhaps the most powerful testament to it. Eileen, he told a friend after her death, “even helped in the planning of” the book. This is a cheap trick: thanking someone for a minimal contribution while erasing a much greater one.
There are some Orwell superfans who are disturbed by aspects of Orwell’s life and character – his sadism, his use and abuse of women, his homosexuality and extreme (even for his day) homophobia, his paranoia, his unconcern for human life (his own, and others’). But such a well-adjusted fellow could never have written 1984. A writer’s gift involves mining our flaws; no vanilla creature could give us that scarifying insight into darkness. And alone, Orwell could never have written Animal Farm. Nothing is taken away from Animal Farm by knowing how much Eileen influenced it; in fact, it makes it a richer experience. The only thing to suffer is the myth of the male superhero artist, which is uncannily like the myth of the male superhero political saviour – precisely what Animal Farm sets out to debunk.
It’s impossible to know which of Eileen or George came up with the famous line: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. What’s certain is that it was meant as a criticism of inequality. That this wonderful, biting insight into power is also an insight into the situation of women in patriarchy – professed equality but actual inequality – is the hallmark of a great novel.
Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life was a New York Times Notable Book, a Sunday Times Bestseller and won France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger 2024.