I used to think that the allegory was a rather straightforward, narrow form: a simple, metaphorical story conceived to deliver a political or moral lesson. But, in fact, it is stretchier and more versatile than that.
Allegories, I’ve learned, can be used to persuade or to parody. They can be used to give a lesson, to draw equivalences, and to highlight hypocrisies. They can be used to crystallise the reader’s understanding of a situation, but also to blow smoke in her eyes. And an allegory can be understood as a moral act in itself. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is one such. This slim work of genius doesn’t so much impart a moral, as embody the attempt to live, and write, in line with a set of principles – no matter the opposition.
When I started writing Beasts of England – my sequel to Animal Farm – I was worried I might find the conventions imposed by the allegorical setting restrictive. In the end, I was struck by the space it offers the writer and reader, and the fun that can be had with it.
Below are 10 of my favourite allegories, from classics that defined the form (and our view of the world), to surreal and unsettling parables and contemporary masterpieces.
1. Aesop’s Fables
If we think of foxes as sly, asses as foolish, and tortoises as slow and steady, it’s in large part because of Aesop’s fables. For centuries they have formed part of the ethical education of readers, old and young, the world over. Most of the stories have a very clear moral, which is either spoken by one of the characters, or spelled out in a concluding sentence, depending on the translation, and many have given rise to expressions we use without a passing thought for attribution: “Pride comes before a fall”, “Look before you leap” and “Out of the frying pan, into the fire” all come from Aesop.
2. Plato’s cave
For those of us who grew up before The Matrix, encountering Plato’s allegory of the cave in A-level philosophy, was our very own “red pill” moment. Outlined in The Republic – by Socrates in conversation with Glaucon – we are asked to imagine a group of people imprisoned since childhood in a cave. They have no contact with the outside world and consider the shadows of people and objects they see thrown on to the wall by the light of a fire as reality. The precise meaning of the allegory is still debated two–and–a–half millennia after Plato set it down.
3. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
To borrow from Groucho Marx, if you don’t like one of the allegories in Gulliver’s Travels, well, Jonathan Swift has others … We all probably remember the diminutive Lilliputians, the giants of Brobdingnag, and perhaps even the intelligent and charismatic horses from the land of the Houyhnhnms. But until I recently reread the book I had completely forgotten about the floating island of Laputa, and Gulliver’s jaunt to Glubbdubdrib where he converses with the ghosts of Homer, Aristotle, Julius Caesar and René Descartes. Rooted in 18th-century politics and culture, the novel manages to transcend its topicality by speaking a timeless truth: that human beings are utterly useless and broadly very stupid.
4. La Grande Beuverie by René Daumal
Translated as A Night of Serious Drinking, although I prefer The Great Booze-Up – this begins in a smoky tavern with a debate about the “disintegrative” power of language. It quickly unravels into a mystical (or perhaps just sozzled) fable that that exposes the absurdities of artists, scientists, politicians and others with broad (yet broadly accurate) strokes of the pen. Visionary and fun, but not for readers who object to being, and remaining, confused.
5. Ice by Anna Kavan
Nuclear war has caused a huge ice shelf to start creeping across the surface of the Earth. Meanwhile two men – one, our nameless narrator, and another known simply as the warden – race to track down a frail and beautiful woman, also unnamed. It’s a surreal and hallucinatory read, and interpretations have ranged from the biographical to the allegorical, with those who subscribe to the latter approach undecided whether Kavan is writing about predatory men, addiction, mental illness or any combination of the three.
6. The Trial by Franz Kafka
The disconcerting and compelling thing about reading Kafka is that his stories feel like allegories, but one can never be entirely sure what they are allegories of. I could have selected any one of his novels here, but plumped for The Trial because it treats readers to a fable within an allegory. As we are struggling to fathom what might lie behind Josef K’s arrest and charge for an unknown crime, Kafka introduces his protagonist to a priest who recounts a story – previously published separately as the short story Before the Law – that is apparently intended to enlighten him (and us?) but instead just adds yet another torturous circle of doubt to K’s (and our!) psychological hell.
7. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Published in 2004, this novel was filed away by some critics as an interesting thought-experiment, riffing on a historical detail: that a number of Republican senators had wanted the antisemitic aviator Charles Lindbergh to run against FDR in the presidential election of 1940. Roth imagined what would have happened if Lindbergh had run, and won.
Come late 2016, and Roth’s concerns suddenly seemed somewhat less niche. As liberal America reeled from a new wave of populism, The Plot Against America rose up the bestseller charts, along with novels such as Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. When asked by the New Yorker about parallels between his novel and contemporary events, the author’s response was typically Rothian: “It is easier,” he said, “to comprehend the election of an imaginary president like Charles Lindbergh than an actual president like Donald Trump.”
8. The Vegetarian by Han Kang
This novel grew out of Kang’s 1997 short story, The Fruit of My Woman, in which the protagonist literally turns into a plant. Much less directly allegorical than its source, The Vegetarian follows a Korean woman, Yeong-hye, who stops eating meat after dreaming of animal slaughter. Her decision leads to an increasing gulf between Yeong-hye and her husband, wider family and society in general. It has been read as a satire of the patriarchal Korean system, but it also functions more universally as a powerful allegory for the ultimate impossibility of human connection.
9. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
This Pulitzer-winning novel manages the near-impossible feat of combining a stark and powerful allegory with realistic characters that the reader takes to heart. Beginning with the premise that the Underground Railroad was literally that, a subterranean network of trains that spirited enslaved people to freedom, the story follows Cora, one such escapee, through “different states of America”, as Whitehead described them when I interviewed him in 2017. That evening he also spoke about the importance of striking the delicate balance between allegorising and historical reality: “Before I started deforming reality, I wanted to get it straight, to testify for my family members who went through it 100 years ago, and for other slaves. I wanted to get it straight before changing things around.”
10. Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
On its release, the shorthand for talking about the relentlessly funny, and often heartbreaking, Glory was to call it a Zimbabwean Animal Farm. It’s easy to see why: After 40 years at the head of the kingdom of Jidada, the despised “Old Horse” and his equally detested donkey bride, Marvellous, are ousted from power in a coup. The events that follow, observed by a goat called Destiny, bear striking similarities to the fall of Robert Mugabe. But it would be wrong to overstate the Orwell comparisons. African literature has a rich culture of political satire (Ahmadou Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, and Wole Soyinka’s Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth to name a few) as well as a wealth of animal folklore that dates back so far it is considered by some scholars to be the source of Aesop’s fables themselves.
• Beasts of England by Adam Biles is published by Galley Beggar (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
