The past decade in world politics offers plenty of easy opportunities to invoke George Orwell. But writing a sequel to Animal Farm, a book that exemplifies Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic – that we don’t need to have read it to know it – is a riskier undertaking. In Beasts of England, Adam Biles has updated and retooled Animal Farm for today, and in this clever, resourceful and at times painful novel, the risk pays off.
Orwell’s 1945 fable was about totalitarianism in other countries and other political systems. Beasts of England is unmistakably about England now. It takes its title from Animal Farm’s revolutionary song – “Rings shall vanish from our noses / And the harness from our back” – before it was outlawed by a tyrannical regime. Though it evokes the original’s characters and backstory, Beasts of England is very much its own book. A thread that binds the two is Benjamin, the long-lived donkey who remembers the original revolution and its aftermath, and bridges the two eras as he bridges the two novels.
Beasts of England is an uncomfortable read, made all the more uncomfortable by the jauntiness of the prose and the matter-of-factness of the narration as it relates increasingly sinister events that, despite their cartoonish embodiments, map directly on to the here and now.
Manor Farm is now a petting zoo – a tidy satire on the coercive sentimentality that dominates our politics and media. The range of animals has expanded. It’s more of a menagerie than a farm now, with alpacas, geckos, magpies, but the principle is the same: a society corroded into dystopia by corruption, lies, suspicion and hatred of others. This society is conned – knowingly perhaps, and willingly – into destroying what held it together, making itself poorer and sicker and angrier. The water is polluted, the fodder infected, the animals malnourished. A mysterious illness – Wufflu – ravages the farm, while one of the ruling pigs goes out in a lorry with a mysterious cargo and returns drunk and loaded with cash. What is he selling? To whom? And what’s in the new animal feed?
A murmuration of starlings appears, spreading fake news and rumours, landing on shoulders and whispering in ears – Twitter’s avatars. One day a fox arrives, though foxes have been banned from the farm for years. The animals are told he is harmless, and when the chickens are massacred, the beasts disbelieve their own eyes even as the fox licks the blood from his paws. They’re told to blame outsiders, to disbelieve, as Orwell has it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the evidence of their own eyes. There’s an election presided over by the foxes – a “Choozin” – in which Jumbo the pig, a boosterist liar with a Churchillian swagger, several litters of piglets and a series of abandoned sows to his name, takes power. The animals are egged on to leave the WUF (Wealden Union of Farmers), which is blamed for everything that goes wrong. The segregation starts: animals born on the farm and “others”. Barriers go up (“Dig the Moat!”), beasts disappear, while most of the remainder are sick and stick-thin. The rulers dine finely and drink like humans – with humans. The “sunlit ploughlands” are always just out of reach. Even the windmill that generates electricity is not the renewable energy source it seems.
In other words, welcome to today …
Beasts of England is a state-of-the-nation farmyard novel, in which populism, sleaze, Partygate, Brexit, the refugee crisis, Covid, Johnson, Trump, Farage, the Murdoch press, targeted Facebook ads, the Daily Mail et al are allegorised in such detail that it takes on the air of a roman à clef. Biles has a lot of political and cultural dysfunction to pack in, and if there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that Beasts of England, at more than twice the length of Animal Farm, tries to cover too much of it. But the writing is lively and humorous, and the satire is only sharpened by the freshness and innocence of the characters (Martha the goose, Benjamin the donkey, Cassie the mule) who watch the darkness encroach. Biles knows that today’s post-truth world is very different from its 1940s incarnation – indeed, his ability to exploit similarities without implying false equivalences is part of what makes Beasts of England so historically and politically literate, as well as entertaining.
Readers will enjoy spotting this or that “real-life” outrage in its animalised fictional rendering, such as the Jumbo-inspired two-minute “Huzzah” to thank the heroes of Manor Farm. No species comes out of this novel with its reputation radically reframed: pigs are still clever and at the trough, foxes are cunning and can’t be trusted, while sheep follow the crowd and pigeons shit everywhere. But as the Conservative government continues to wage its war on everything that makes us human, this fine and timely novel reminds us that we still have a great deal to learn from the animals.
• Beasts of England by Adam Biles (Galley Beggar, £10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
