As a rule of thumb, great novelists either write a single masterpiece or fill an entire bookshelf. George Orwell occupies the curious position of having written two. There are great rewards in his earlier novels, essays, journalism and non-fiction, but it isn’t hard to see why Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm form the basis of his reputation. In recent years, however, the partnership has been uneven: ‘Orwellian’ means Airstrip One, not Manor Farm. Yet Animal Farm is arguably his most complete work, the book in which he tested his own ambition to ‘make political writing into an art’. As Animal Farm turns eighty it is worth asking what ‘Orwellian’ might mean if we valued the novel as much as its sibling.

The rise of Nineteen Eighty-Four was probably inevitable: there is something in the novel’s state of extremity (the fear, the hate, the paranoia) which mirrors the way many people feel about the contemporary moment. But the novel is an awkward allegory for democratic states, however draconian: there are no ‘alternative facts’ in Airstrip One, no ‘fake news’ for Big Brother to rail against (the Trump administration will never be able to make its enemies love it like Winston Smith loves Big Brother). Meanwhile, the surveillance state is, at least in part, something we now perform on ourselves.

The power of Animal Farm lies in its simplicity: there is no dystopia, only an allegory (and farm animals). That simplicity may be why it is so often overlooked. As one of Orwell’s friends observed, it is his ‘only happy book’. This may sound odd for a satire on the Soviet Revolution but it is true. This is a funny book. As Nathan Waddell notes in A Bright Cold Day the novella’s humour is often lost on modern readers, something Waddell attributes in part to the way it is taught in schools and discussed in the media. The stern figure conjured up by the word ‘Orwellian’ feels far removed from the author who could describe two cart-horses ‘walking very slowly and setting down their vast hairy hoofs with great care lest there should be some small animal concealed in the straw.’

The book’s warmth and humour owe something to Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, who read and commented on the book as he wrote it, and something to his time working as a producer at the BBC (which included, for instance, writing a radio play for ‘Little Red Riding Hood’). But perhaps most importantly, as Waddell puts it, Animal Farm is a novel about animals. Orwell’s lifelong engagement with the natural world is an increasingly central strand in the growing field of ‘Orwell studies’, from Waddell’s own A Bright Cold Day to Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses. That fascination began in the author’s childhood. Animal Farm, D. J. Taylor suggests, can be read as a ‘paean’ to the countryside of Orwell’s youth near Henley: Manor Farm is ‘more or less unmechanised’ and Farmer Jones and his wife keep a ‘lithograph of Queen Victoria’ above the mantelpiece.

Orwell was always trying to get back to nature: few writers have been so associated with London while also constantly trying to escape it. From 1936 to 1940, Orwell and Eileen took a cottage in Wallington, running a village store and smallholding, complete with a goat named Muriel: there is surely an echo here of Willingdon, the nearest town to Manor Farm. Once Animal Farm made him famous, and solvent, for the first time in his life, Orwell immediately moved to the Hebrides. His diaries there are filled with rapt but unsentimental observations of animals, often ending with him killing and eating them. Animal Farm would not convince so completely if it were not, at heart, a book about real animals and real farms.

The story itself is short but perfectly formed, the satire on the revolution wholly subsumed into the plot; you can trace the allegory, but the narrative has its own logic. Beyond the sharpness of presentation honed at the BBC, Orwell drew on a distinctly English tradition of animal fables, most notably Kipling’s Just So Stories and The Jungle Book (and even, Taylor suggests, Beatrix Potter). It was a tradition Orwell clearly felt at home in and one which he wanted to expand: Manor Farm was the first place his imagination went on his release from the BBC, having spent, in his own words ‘two wasted years’ itching to get back to writing fiction. As Douglas Kerr, author of Orwell and Empire, puts it: ‘The idea of writing seems to have been entangled for Orwell with the idea of human relations with the natural world.’ Animal Farm is the book in which Orwell is most himself.

None of which answers the question: why this story, now? Orwell had understood the reality of Stalin’s regime since his time in Spain but by 1943, when he began writing again, the Soviet Union was an ally in the war against Nazi Germany. At least three publishers rejected the manuscript for fear it was the ‘wrong time’ to criticise the Russians (one publisher’s reader was later revealed to be a Soviet agent). The experience produced some of Orwell’s most trenchant attacks on censorship. But even this doesn’t explain his strength of feeling. In his unpublished preface (the source of the quote ‘if liberty means anything at all…’) Orwell aims squarely at self-censorship on the Left but it wasn’t only the Left that turned Animal Farm down: even T. S. Eliot passed up the opportunity.

There was, as Orwell himself recognised, something compulsive in his political motivations. The year before, with the Wehrmacht advancing on Stalingrad, he wrote in his diary about ‘a newfound feeling of sympathy for the Russians’ and reflected on the evolution of his own attitudes: ‘Looking back I see that I was anti-Russian (or more exactly anti-Stalin) during the years when Russia appeared to be powerful… Before and after those dates I was pro-Russian. One could interpret this in several different ways.’ Counterintuitively, Animal Farm is a pro-Russian book: the animals’ triumph in ousting Farmer Jones is real (‘Yes, it was theirs – everything that they could see was theirs!’) and the novella’s moral centre is Boxer, the loyal but doomed worker who represents the Russian working-class.

Yet Orwell’s sympathies are far from simple. Most of the animals on the farm aren’t Boxer, Muriel, or wise old Benjamin, but sheep. Early on, the book’s horror lies not so much in the pigs’ lies (which are often, relayed via Squealer, very funny), but in how eagerly the others accept them. In this sense, as a vision of human society, Animal Farm is as pessimistic as Nineteen Eighty-Four. Language itself is part of the mechanism of control: no sooner is Mr Jones ousted but we learn that the pigs have been teaching themselves to read and write ‘from an old spelling book’ which belonged to his children. Forget Napoleon: the dice were loaded in favour of the ‘brain workers’ from the start.

The cynical side to Animal Farm is mirrored in another overlooked influence: The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells. In Wells’s nightmarish story, the narrator sails to a distant tropical island where the eponymous Doctor conducts macabre experiments on animals. He quickly flees Moreau’s compound for the jungle only to find the island populated by people who look like ‘swine’. More horrifying still, these creatures (Moreau’s early experiments) believe they are men and keep their faith by repeating a familiar-sounding chant: Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not men?

Four legs good, two legs bad. Wells’s beasts aspire to humanity, Orwell’s animals believe they are better. The principle is the same and in both cases the chant is a ‘mad litany’. The Island of Doctor Moreau is a savage satire on religion and civilisation, laced with horror at evolutionary science and no doubt some of Wells’s own anxieties about class and race. That horror shadows Animal Farm in its most important moments: when the pigs walk on two legs, they aren’t just putting the final nail in the revolution’s coffin, or satirising the Soviet elites, they are saying something about who the book thinks we really are.

In Orwell’s original subtitle, Animal Farm was a ‘fairy tale’. Like all the best fairy tales, it is also a horror story. The book delivers a cathartic jolt: it names the unnameable truth that we are all dupes and that every revolution fails (‘all revolutions are failures’, Orwell wrote later, ‘but not all the same failure’). Yet, it also gives the reader something tangible to hold on to, in the dignity of the oppressed and in our outrage at their exploitation. For critics like Eliot, the absence of a ‘positive of point of view’ made the book incoherent. But Animal Farm is working at a deeper level than politics: it is also an allegory about human nature. The tension the story maintains between Orwell’s sense of disgust, and his sense of decency, is the source of its abiding strength – and truly ‘Orwellian’.