Silly Little Country

The Self-Satisfaction Keeps Feeding Itself

Yann Martel has not figured out what a pompous idiot he looks like and so it goes on. His next offering to our Prime Minister (who is not likely to need guidance in this area) is George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Animal Farm is a perfect exemplar of one of the things that literature can be: portable history. A reader who knows nothing about 20th-century history? Who has never heard of Joseph Stalin or Leon Trotsky or the October Revolution? Not a problem: Animal Farm will convey to that reader the essence of what happened to our neighbours across the Arctic. The perversion of an ideal, the corruption of power, the abuse of language, the wreckage of a nation—it’s all there, in a scant 120 pages. And having read those pages, the reader is made wise of the ways of the politically wicked. That too is what literature can be: an inoculation.

There is something goofy about a guy looking for state subsidies to his activities selecting this book, but this is clearly a man who lacks any major sense of irony.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 4:35 PM