"Mr. Jones, of Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes."George Orwell is probably my favorite high school-required writer. I've read a lot of "great" novels over the course of high school and hated them, but when it comes to George Orwell, I don't think I've ever had that reaction. It's pretty clear to me why - Orwell doesn't waste my time.
Take this opening line from Animal Farm, for example. This sentence is unbelievably simple in structure - it tells you exactly what happened and why. Mr. Jones was drunk and forgot to shut the popholes. Got it, moving on. The rest of the novel is written in a similar way, and it never feels like it's dragging on. As a result, it is never boring.
Maybe this is an unconventional belief, but I don't think the point of literature is to be brilliant or masterfully written or whatever. People tell me the Great Gatsby is the Great American Novel, but I found it unbelievably boring, to the point where I just couldn't finish it. I don't care if it has some of the most brilliantly placed motifs in the universe or says so much about America in the 20s - it's just not particularly interesting or readable to me. Maybe if the story was adapted well it would be... but in its current form I can't take it. A novel with completely unsympathetic characters written in the most pretentious possible way isn't my idea of great literature.
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| I refuse to advocate any novel written by a man with this haircut. |
Animal Farm, on the other hand, is a similarly praised novel that I actually very much enjoyed. While there are a ton of factors at play here, I can't ignore the fact that the writing style of the story is extremely approachable. I shouldn't be surprised; after all, George Orwell wrote "Politics and the English Language", which completely destroys padded writing styles. It seems to me that Orwell knew what he was doing - his job as a writer was the stimulate thought in the reader and give them an engaging piece of work, and he accomplished this by writing a story that was not only interesting but also very easy to read. Personally, I don't think being easy to read is something that should be reserved to kids/teenager literature. A boring book is a bad book, plain and simple.
I agree that Orwell always followed his own rules when it came to his own writing. Have you read 1984? Wondered how you think it stacks up to Animal Farm...
ReplyDeleteI actually haven't read 1984 yet, but I'll probably read that next.
ReplyDeleteoh and if you like writers who do not waste time, then it is Hemingway.
ReplyDeleteI agree! I did like The Great Gatsby, but I like Animal Farm even more I think. It wasn’t that it was just more plot-driven, because there were lots of details and description, but they contributed to the storyline and the tone of the novel. When the conditions of the barn were described, you could imagine how much it had deteriorated, and then you understood how badly the new regime was affecting the animals. There wasn’t excessive and superfluous description like in some books, like in Gatsby or Swallows and Amazons, which was just painful – I don’t need to know the exact placement of every pot and kettle (though that is not even a book on the same literary level as Gatsby or Animal Farm, it is a great example of over-description). But I guess Gatsby’s description had importance, and I don’t know if it’s just that the symbolism wasn’t as clear as in Animal Farm, or that it was more obscurely related. In Animal Farm, it’s obvious who all the animals represent, but there are many more symbols that are less obvious. In Gatsby, all the references of Daisy in the yellow things, it didn’t seem to make sense to me why that had to be there. Plus, even though they are both set in significant eras in history, I found Animal Farm much more fascinating and intriguing. I liked learning about the 1920s, an era I love (if mostly for the fashion), but reading about the Russian Revolution of animals was so much more fascinating. I find that whole subject really interesting, just Russia and its history in general. I guess because it was about actual events, and not just some random people’s unimportant lives in some era, that Animal Farm was more captivating to me. Both are great books though I think, for different reasons, because they different types of novels. And I just realized this is all completely off-topic from your post, so sorry, here are my random thoughts.
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