When the world is going to the pigs

Adam Biles' new novel pushes George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' a bit further to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same

- Somak Ghoshal

History, as Karl Marx famously said, repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. But often, it simply repeats itself as a mirror image of its former self. The circumstances change but the actors remain the same, and so do their motivations.

English writer and translator Adam Biles' new novel, Beasts Of England, is a case in point. Conceived as a sequel to George Orwell's iconic allegorical novella Animal Farm, it is a response to Brexit and the attendant social and economic woes that afflict Britain in recent times. But if you zoom out a little, it also does have a resonance beyond this specific cultural and political context. As one of the hens in Biles' story bitterly says, "Whoever you Chooz," referring to "Choozin", a byword for democratic elections in the animal world, "you get a pig". By pig, she doesn't just refer to the category of animal alone, but the real lack of choice the rest of the animals have. No matter who they pick as their leader, they turn out to be a pig, who, by definition, are corrupt and self-serving.

Inspired by Biles' sharply ironic take, I re-read Orwell's original recently. Published in 1945, amid much controversy, it's a work that has aged remarkably well. Written in the last years of World War II, Animal Farm caused much consternation among British publishers, including Victor Gollancz, Orwell's publisher. As allies against Nazi Germany, Britain and the Soviet Union were yet to get into their Cold War kerfuffle. Orwell, on the other hand, already loathed Stalinism. He had witnessed the excesses of the Stalinist forces in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). As a democratic socialist, he was prescient about the evils Stalin would unleash in the coming years.