For all intents and purposes, Animal Farm and 1984 are the same story. Orwell’s animals seem to be the stepping stone for his more polished, fleshed-out master stroke. Animal Farm is the lean morality play, stripped of language and subtlety. Both tales show the movement of supposed revolution toward supposed utopia. In Farm, we see the communist swath from start to finish, from noble idea to washed-out greed-fest. 1984 injects the human interest, the reaction to the story. Where 1984 muses on what it might be like to discover the authoritarian ruse and push against it, Animal Farm is the blunt punch in the face about how that authoritarian ruse comes to be. It is effective, but nothing more.

Orwell certainly held a creative touch for plotmaking and intricate detail. The momentum of the story from incident to incident is genius, but Orwell stops himself at that point. If you enjoy philosophical musings or wise ruminations, Animal Farm will leave you in a void. When viewed as a stepping stone toward 1984, however, the work’s existence is much more palatable.

When the final pages were turned, I found my experience with this book to be somewhere in the middle of my expectations. It was not the kid story I often conjured internally, nor was it on a level with the transcendence of 1984. In future, potential canons, seemingly Animal Farm will always take a back seat to its more muscular, sophisticated cousin, even if it came first.

mith rating: 7.6/10

Animal Farm was rated #31 on the Modern Library’s Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century. I read it as part of the Top Project.

At the core of Slaughterhouse-Five is the firebombing of Dresden during World War II. Or so the narrator tells us. Viewed from a distance, Dresden becomes a passer-by, a fleeting addition. In fact, war itself is absent more than present. On a conceptual level, this fact fits. The narrator opens the book describing the aborted attempts at writing the great World War II novel. He struggles with memory; he struggles with what parts of his experience matter; he struggles with making the pieces interlock. The crux of his dilemma comes from describing the ultimately indescribable. He wants to portray the damage he witnessed and experienced, but short of raw numbers, dates, or facts, he really cannot describe what he means at all. Hence the only way he can write his book is to construct a plot for the character outside of the war. He weaves a character withered by war, a character who talks about war, yet the story is not about war. Dresden occupies strikingly little of the narrative. In fact, most of the damage done to Billy Pilgrim’s psyche happens in war before the narrative. When we meet him, he seems nearly broken. The point to take here is the omnipresence of war, despite its absence. The effects are there, but the war really is not. This skirting of the issue paradoxically allows Vonnegut to address the issue.

Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens. He travels through time. He lives in a mental institution. He survives a plane crash. Along the way Vonnegut introduces the themes that pepper the book: fate, free will, meaning, time, human logic. One easily imagines Vonnegut pondered these themes during World War II or because of World War II. In the book, though, he can only overtly discuss them through these non-war constructs. The notions are, of course, in action during the war sections, but they must be implied by the reader. In terms of Vonnegut work, the plot constructs seem scattered and infrequent. The first third of the novel I found less intriguing than I did reading the book the first time. As the page numbers elevated, however, I started to sense the pattern and the reason for this scattered, infrequent characteristics. Slaughterhouse-Five could not exist in the same way as other Vonnegut works. It has to be the scattered book; it would work no other way. In fact, by the end of the book, the fact that it is scattered and the normal Vonnegutisms are infrequent was no longer something that distracted me or made me like the book less. Sure, I yearned for the biting humor, but that scenario would be alien here.

From a schematic view, Vonnegut subtly married the fractured elements of Billy Pilgrim’s life across time with the fractured elements of the narrator’s attempt and memory of World War II. Interestingly, the muted language is highly appropriate for the ineffable experience Vonnegut wants to describe. As always, the sporadic, tangential bits of life-insight that Vonnegut inserts heighten the reading experience. S-5 is not my favorite Vonnegut book, but I certainly understand its place in the canon.

mith rating: 9.0/10

Slaughterhouse-Five was rated #18 on the Modern Library’s Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century. I read it as part of the Top Project.

Rubashov is a founding member of a Communist revolution and party, who has been arrested by a newer generation of members due to his “anti-party” dealings and sentenced to death. This situation is meant to mirror the USSR of the Stalin era, who systematically removed all vestiges of the Bolshevik Revolution. After arrest, Rubashov dwells on several occasions in which he was the catalyst for the downfall of party members for similar reasons. At first Rubashov rebels against the imprisonment, bemoaning the new generation’s lack of regard for history. He comes to capitulation, however, ceding his life to the party-first logic he followed for 40 years. Under the political lens, the reader sees the complete machinery of totalitarian socialism (that is, socialism without care for the individual, an oxymoron of sorts). Rubashov has played his part and now, to the new order, he can do nothing but harm, so he is excised. Under this sort of Communist logic, Rubashov should accept his fate. But Koestler seems to ask, why does Rubashov accept this fate? This question is the heart of the political aspect, one which most people, including George Orwell, discuss as central to the novel.

Far more stirring, however, is the ebb and flow of Rubashov’s moral conscience. He waffles between a sense of falling in line and the “I” the party forbids. The moral equations Rubashav ponders effectively lead to his disillusionment with the system. How many lives are worth sacrificing for the good of the movement? When humans are vague numbers, he finds little guilt in the party’s progress. When the sacrifices start to become personal – his secratary-lover, old friends and colleagues – he starts to sense the logical dilemma at the core of totalitarianism. To the party elite, this realization makes Rubashov traitorous, weak, and dangerous. To Rubashov, it awakens the “grammatical fiction” in himself. He realizes there is an “I” lurking inside, one that wonders on the infinite, the beauty of nature and the heavens, memories from childhood, and even allows himself to dwell into psychological ecstasy. These insights are where the novel gains its true power:

“As a boy he had really meanty to study astronomy, and now for forty years he had been doing something else. Why had not the Public Prosecutor asked him: ‘Defendant Rubashov, what about the infinite?’ He would not have been able to answer – and there, there lay the real source of his guilt….Could there be a greater?”

Koestler’s novel is populated by largely unflowery, non-pedantic language, mosly fitting for the book’s political subject. Despite the simple diction, Koestler weaves a highly insightful, complete look at both the political and personal aspects of his narrator and Communism. Logic and totality are omnipresent, but never stifling. In fact, the injection of the more abstract personal ideas during Rubashov’s ruminations on the “grammatical fiction” serves to heighten the effect of those occasions. Similar to the base language of Eliot’s bar-room scene in The Waste Land, these moments stick out and they stick out for a purpose. This sort of interplay between style and effect is the key to Darkness at Noon’s achievement.

According to most critics, Koestler never duplicated the majesty of Darkness. Considering the different worlds and ideas blended in the novel, this conclusion seems nearly ineluctable. How could one really reproduce that success?

Mith Rating: 8.9/10

Darkness at Noon was rated #8 on the Modern Library’s Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century. I read it as part of The Top Project.