Review

Animal Farm

by George Orwell Imagine for a second that the inhabitants of our farms decided to take over, decided to rebel against us and take control of our society. George Orwell has captured this idea brilliantly in Animal Farm and of how power corrupts when an individual is in charge. The plot is based on the events of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and looks at the ideas of rebellion, freedom and power as one individual rises up and takes control, but in a rather interesting way.

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903, adopted this pen name and used it more often as his life and views changed profoundly, becoming a political writer and sharing his views on society within his books. This idea is very clearly shown in Animal Farm. George Orwell is famous still in the literary world and his most famous novels, Nineteen EightyFour and Animal Farm, are still read, studied and discussed in schools and colleges and by millions around the world. The story of Animal Farm begins one night in the cruel Farmer Jones’ Manor Farm when a spark of rebellion is born within the animal society when Old Major, the oldest boar on the farm, shares his dream of a society without human rule where animals could be free from tyranny. The animals react passionately to this idea and work together to kick Farmer Jones out of the farm and run it themselves.

The pigs begin to take charge, with the smartest two (Snowball and Napoleon) as the leaders, and they begin to lie and deceive the other animals to bend them to their will. Napoleon begins to turn on the animals as he demands more power and slowly becomes more and more like the humans that he used to despise.

He then turns the animals on the only thing that could challenge his superiority, Snowball, and casts all of the blame the animals feel due to his growing evil onto Snowball, who is harmless and kind. He uses words and excuses to trick the other animals into believing that life would have been worse under Farmer Jones’ rule as he slowly changes and manipulates the animals and their beliefs to his benefit. As the pigs become more human like, a sinister side starts to show itself in the farm and in its merciless dictator, as the rules that were once sacred to the animals slowly begin to be cast away and forgotten.

Animal Farm has a powerful but easy to understand plot that relays George Orwell’s views cleverly and clearly. It is a magnificent read that really gives an insight into the minds of rulers and it is written in such a way that it is fun to read and relevant still to this day and age.

George Orwell led a short and painful life. He served in the Indian Imperial Police, spent five years in Burma, only to ruin his health, and his next five years was spent in Paris as a beggar, then a teacher. He then settled down in London as a teacher and journalist, got married, then left in 1937 for six years in Spain as a Republican volunteer in the civil war. Here he nearly died due to being shot in the throat and spending a year with a life-threatening lung haemorrhage. Animal Farm was written shortly before George Orwell’s wife, Eileen, died of heart failure. He spent the last decade of his life in poor health while writing his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and in 1950 died of advanced tuberculosis at the early age of only 46.

I highly recommend Animal Farm to readers of all ages as I personally really enjoyed the story and I found it intriguing as well as intelligent. An overall great book. George Stanway aged 14 years

Precious Bane

by Mary Webb Mary Webb was born in Shropshire in 1881. During her formative years she observed the surrounding landscape, spending hours in quiet meditation which later infused her poetry and prose. In her early 20s, she developed a throat goitre; the resulting disfiguration she wove into this novel through the character of Prue Sarn who has a harelip, her own ‘precious bane’. The empathy Mary feels with the suffering of others, and her deep awareness of the emotional isolation of women is mirrored strongly in Prue Sarn, forming the powerful basis for the novel.

Set in Shropshire at the turn of the 19th century, this is an intensely compelling work for many reasons. Prue loves two things deeply, namely, the remote countryside of her birth and – apparently hopelessly – Kester Woodseaves, the weaver: “He stood in the doorway, and I rose up from my seat in the shadows at the back of the room, as if he was my own bidden guest. … for here was my lover and my lord, and behold, I was hare-shotten!” The rural poverty of the time and the prejudice of a largely illiterate community are woven through each page. Yet, it is the independent and steadfast Prue who really holds a reader’s attention.

Prue learns to read and write and she looks constantly for inner beauty in what she finds there. She is industrious and, having the constant hard manual labour of the farm, she is not seen as a normal woman but as the “barn-door savage of Sarn”. No amount of learning can raise Prue beyond her life among the superstitions of her fellow villagers yet she carries on regardless because she wants “to read for myself, and savour it”. Still they see her as “a woman out of a show sure to goodness … a wench that turns into a hare by night … her’ll put the evil eye on you. You’ll dwine away.” Only Kester sees past her precious bane. He sees “A wench with a figure like an appleblow fairy who is as lovely as a lily on the mere”.

In the chapter ‘Dragonflies’, Mary, through Prue, allows the reader to acknowledge the years of observing the surrounding nature. We experience her yearning for acceptance by the

world of her physical disability and her emotional starvation; finally achieving her freedom like a dragonfly through the “wrestling and travailing to get free … Just afore the end, it stayed a long while still, as if it was wondering whether it durst get free in a world all new”. This is the heart of the book. Kester acknowledges that “once out they’re out for good. It costs a deal to get free. But once free, they never fold their wings”. He looks past Prue’s disability and discerns what is truly contained within. He does not see “that if there was anything wrong with a person’s outward seeming, there must be summat wrong with their headpiece as well”. Nor does he follow the prejudice of the rest of his society – which can still exist today.

Clearly Precious Bane is a work about people’s perceptions of others based on their visible disabilities. I have many times wondered how rich and gentle and powerful this legacy of intensive creativity and natural mysticism would have been, had Mary written about a person who we today perceive as normal – but who has a hidden disability such as dyslexia, and is determined to break the bonds of their confining world. Mary writes, “for all they could’na read what I’d written any more than two butterflies in the hedge can read the mile stone”; such people with proper support will eventually like Prue Sarn be able to “read to myself, and savour it”.

Precious Bane is republished in the Virago Modern Classic imprint created to recover neglected women writers. It is also available as a Audio Book where the richness of the Shropshire colloquialisms shine through the narration and make this slightly abridged version an absolute delight. Catherine Pritchard

I Wrote it Anyway: An Anthology of Essays

Edited by Dal Kular & Caroline Donahue This is a collection of 29 essays brought together and published for good purpose. The essayists, writers diverse in age, experience, and country of origin are predominantly women, including the Cambridge based past contributor to this Magazine, Kate Swindlehurst. The dedication reads “to everyone who has ever wanted to write”. The financial beneficiaries are two charities associated with the editors – Arts Emergency in the UK and 826LA in the USA – which support young people who otherwise might not have the resources to write.

The benefiting charities provide writing workshops and courses to disadvantaged young people, and link young people with professionals as mentors working in a field identified by the young person. Both work together over a year to achieve the goals they have jointly set. The overall objective is to build confidence, develop personal statements and CVs, and so enable career identification and development.

The 29 essayists set out and explore the issues and challenges which prevented them personally from writing and detail how they confronted and overcame their difficulties. All of the barriers are of a general nature and are widely applicable to many individuals. Some as manifested, however, are deeply personal to these essayists. The editors’ hope is that struggling writers and young people will relate to and be encouraged by these personal accounts, and that all readers will also gain insight and benefit from the collection.

Although far from the first flush of youth myself, I read this volume and learned much. I was humbled by exposure to the sometimes great pain and travail of the creative writing process, particularly the whys and hows of writing as articulated by these 29 writers. The volume represents instructive content and beneficial lessons certainly for any struggling writer. More importantly, the volume for me makes an implicit ‘statement of claim’ as to why all such creative writers should be assisted to the greatest extent possible.

Also instructive for me was the differing approach of each of the 29 writers to the task allocated – the same task had been allocated to all. Some were autobiographical; some focussed on one overpowering event, experience, or relationship; some were deeply introspective; some open and outward looking; some detailing specific useful nuggets of advice; some were grounded and reassuring; some unsettling and perplexing. But all worth reading and absorbing.

One writer in particular, Valerie Griffen from Dorset, England reached out and found me. I had that day been watching the recent sombre and very poignant commemorations around D Day June 1945 and had listened to very elderly veterans recount their experience and plead ‘Never Again’. I heard them – to a man – imploring of us today that the sacrifice they and their like had made should not be in vain. And this, as before our very eyes war clouds swirl and threaten a hard won peace, and the international institutions we had collectively created to underpin that peace are attacked wantonly without regard to consequence. And all the while our own anti-European Brexit has strengthened rampant nationalism across Europe.

I read and took courage and hope from Valerie Griffen’s short but wonderful essay “Your Knockbacks Propelled Me Forwards”. It alone is worth the modest price of this small volume. She did two things only and did them both very well. She firstly outlined her own experience of writing stating the personal beliefs which underlie her approach and which helped her overcome the searing negativity she experienced. Then, as a coup de grace, she ended with a short story which had brought unforgivable negativity to her (from a tutor no less!) stating firmly: “The short story that triggered it all is below. See...I’m writing it anyway!” That story “Not A Good Year For Runner Beans” is set on an English farm and opens “At 6.08 am on 14 April 1942” and ends six months later with the arrival of a telegram and its consequences. As the D Day veterans who were present on those D Day beaches implored of each of us so eloquently: ‘Never Again’. Let each of us undertake and redouble personal efforts to disperse the war clouds on the horizon – and let ‘Runner Beans’ everywhere across Europe grow and thrive. Hugh Pollock