Beasts of England review: Ingenious update of George Orwell’s Animal Farm for our times

The novel starts on Manor Farm, naturally enough, many years after the incidents recounted by Orwell. The site has been transformed into a petting zoo, and advertisements proclaim its charms: “Ride the mule cart! Meet the llamas! Feed the sheep! Gaze at the gravity-defying geckos!” It is now run by a Council of Animals headed by Buttercup, a pig who has been named First Beast after winning the elections known as the “Choozin”. The actions of the tyrannical Napoleon are but a distant memory, and the farm is now a proud member of an agricultural union, a clear reference to another continental union.

There are many more animals in residence, including alpacas, geese, magpies, foxes, and pigeons. Biles’s novel ranges over these creatures and their predicaments including, amusingly enough, a pair of stocky bull terriers named Dunning and Kruger. However, this leads to a density of characters and detail, making one wonder whether the satire would have been more pointed had the novel been more concentrated. (It’s roughly twice the size of Orwell’s work.)

The animals’ slogans and the way they were rewritten to suit vested interests went a long way in making Animal Farm memorable, and Biles undertakes the same exercise here. Famously, “all animals were equal” was modified to “…but some are more equal than others”. In Beasts of England, the new slogan is the devious “All animals are more equal than others,” which is an attempt to put the pigs in their place. Later, there is the masterful “Unity in Division”, which sums it up with the “raw, alchemical power” of those three words.

Many creatures vie for attention in these pages: some are simply trying to come to grips with events, while others are jockeying for power and pelf. The engine of the novel is the way that real-life events are transformed into analogies as it cycles through various episodes in the animals’ lives.
The pernicious effects of social media are recast as a murmuration of starlings who land on shoulders to whisper inimical thoughts and change the meanings of words. The nationalistic appeal to a golden past is transformed into rumours of a mythical Sugar Candy Mountain that needs to be unearthed. A moat is dug around the farm to keep out immigrants, sorry, outsiders. A mysterious disease called Wufflu is spreading among the animals, with some trying to profit from it. And a bit predictably, Brexit is mirrored in a populist decision to leave the region’s union of farmers. The calamitous results are hastily papered over.

The one creature that reappears from Animal Farm in Beasts of England is Benjamin the donkey, the long-lived mate of the noble, proletarian Boxer. Benjamin is less cynical and gloomy in Biles’s version, and it is his actions that create a glimmer of hope: a gradual awakening of the masses. In that dream of a golden future, as the anthem puts it: “Rings shall vanish from our noses / and the harness from our back / bit and spur shall rust forever, cruel whips shall no more crack.” In the meantime, we have to undergo versions of the novel’s Two-minute Huzzahs, an inversion of Nineteen-Eighty Four’s Two-minute Hate.

Orwell’s novel faced many hurdles before it saw the light of day, with one publisher famously turning it down on the grounds that animal stories did not sell well. Fortunately, the book managed to find a place not just in the public imagination but also in countless school curricula, making it “the predominant introduction to the concept of totalitarianism,” in Tea Obreht’s words. In a 1945 review, the Guardian described it as “a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few,” and since we are once again living through tumultuous, inequitable times, the same can well be said of Adam Biles’s novel.