Animal Farm

I believe that literature is the highest form of art. A picture may say a thousand words, but a good book has a lot more than a thousand words. I'm no mathematician, but the way I calculate it: advantage - books.

Anyway, for the past few months I've been collecting antique literature in earnest. I was very pleased to acquire a first edition of George Orwell's Animal Farm, published in 1946. Reading a volume that was printed near in time to the author's first introduction of the work to the public really adds something to the experience for me. The pages seem livelier; their age creates the sensation in my mind that the author is talking presently. Recently I added a first edition Grapes of Wrath and an early edition of Ulysses by James Joyce.

I don't want to come off as flippant or sacreligious here, but does anyone else agree that Orwell's message in Animal Farm seems trite? I definitely understand why it was an instant classic; it practically defines Cold War propagandist thinking. I appreciate Orwell's craft for distilling the politics down to the pedantic. I think I understand his purpose and his method. All of it seems like it would have been quite useful back in the day. And by back in the day, I guess I should say that it was useful as recently as the first time I read the book in the mid-80's. This isn't a criticism of what the book was when it was first published or what it became as the politics of the Cold War evolved. The setting was a fine vehicle for taking the message out of the polemic and presenting it in the objective (however fabricated).

But I just can't see how the message is useful today. I turned page after page and the thought just kept coming that the message lacks a timelessness that all great literature possesses. Apples fall from trees. The earth orbits around the sun. Communism is a flawed civic philosophy. All useful ideas in their own time. But now we're on to other things.