My biggest complaint was how thin the allegory was. Like, Orwell didn’t have to use animal farms at all, it read like a history lesson for most parts. I felt between chapter 3 to chapter 8 were mostly just boring and pigs Doing a power capture slowly. Did chapter 3 to 8 help create the impact of chapter 9 and 10? Absolutely. Could they have been done better? I think so, it didn’t have to be read like a history lesson.
All political allegories are alright but some are more alright than others.
What did you not enjoy? The content or style it was written? I didn’t get that part.
To me animal farm is still among the absolutely best books I have ever set my eyes on. Not for the reason it was written: communism, power. No, the very picture that it paints using animals: they are used and then discarded.
Looking at it at face value, this is happening in both communism and capitalism. It is a feature of how we organize our societies.
For me the book has never been a criticism of communism. But an eye opener how we use and abuse the world around us for our own benefit, no matter in which ideology we fall.
Has been a while, but IMO the animals work well because they abstract the history lesson away from any specific people. It shows how universal these patterns are. I didn’t like Animal Farm because it was so well written or had such an intriguing story arc. I liked it because draws a picture of behavior in societies and holds up a mirror to us humans.
Not trying to be bellicose at all but, to my taste, Orwell’s best fiction is in his early books. And I find “Animal Farm” and “1884” rather unsophisticated when compared to other dystopian novels like “We” or “Brave New World”.
