{"id":1195,"date":"2011-10-13T21:04:35","date_gmt":"2011-10-14T05:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1195"},"modified":"2011-10-13T21:04:35","modified_gmt":"2011-10-14T05:04:35","slug":"review-animal-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1195","title":{"rendered":"Review: Animal Farm"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>George Orwell&#8217;s <em>Animal Farm<\/em> is a classic fairy tale, and benefits from all the timelessness and iconography of the genre.\u00a0 Writing about pigs and horses means he can be pretty direct about the failings of men and women without blaming particular men and women.\u00a0 His story about animals that overthrow their farmer and adopt socialist dogma is a classic.<\/p>\n<p>Reading <em>Animal Farm<\/em> again, I was struck by how general his writing and themes were.\u00a0 In addition to using animals to stand for people, he gives each iconic rather than individualistic personalities.\u00a0 Rather than a group of memorable characters, I was left with the memory of a set of archetypes, which reinforces the universality of his ideas.\u00a0 Similarly, though the chronology and ideology are based on communist history and dogma, the animals&#8217; revolution seems less about a specific doctrine than a universal story arc.\u00a0 As with all fables, this gives it a moral rather than an outcome.<\/p>\n<p>While this generally works in favor of the piece, there are some moments when I felt a little distant from the proceedings.\u00a0 There is not really anyone to identify with or root for in the story.\u00a0 It is easy to follow the plot, but hard to be drawn in.<\/p>\n<p>That is a fairly minor nit to pick.\u00a0 <em>Animal Farm<\/em> is an excellent fable about the failings of men in pursuit of their ideals and the attraction of power.<\/p>\n<p>Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>George Orwell&#8217;s Animal Farm is a classic fairy tale, and benefits from all the timelessness and iconography of the genre.\u00a0 Writing about pigs and horses means he can be pretty direct about the failings of men and women without blaming particular men and women.\u00a0 His story about animals that overthrow their farmer and adopt socialist [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1195"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1198,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions\/1198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}