Reviewed by Aline Soules
The Never End: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the origin of Animal Farm
by John Reed
Palgrave Macmillan
28 July 2023, Hardcover, 199 pages, ISBN-13: 978-9819907649
This work is aptly titled The Never End because discussion and controversy about Orwell’s works, particularly his political works, may never end. On the other hand, this collection related to Animal Farm over the last twenty years could easily be titled, John Reed Takes on George Orwell and anyone else related to the same political spectrum.
A primary strength of this book is Reed’s unabashed political view. He starts his introduction with anti-Queen Elizabeth lyrics from the Sex Pistols. After the queen’s death in 2022, Reed writes: “I have all kinds of thrilling delusions about the end of the global monarchy…it’s about time.” He follows this with, “As it is for George Orwell.”
The reader knows exactly where the author’s coming from. It also helps to know that Reed wrote Snowball’s Chance, a parody of Animal Farm (published in 2002). In that work, Snowball the pig returns to Manor Farm, bringing capitalism and its pitfalls with him. Reed references his work in the introduction, along with the Orwell estate’s threats to sue, his exchanges with Christopher Hitchens, and his own particular “history” with Animal Farm. A good reminder of how that novel has pervaded our Western culture. How many of us read that book in school? It also makes me (the author of this review) think back to how that book was presented in my class. Presumably, many teachers allowed their own politics to influence how they taught this work. Certainly, mine did.
The next forty-eight pages are devoted to the “Animal Farm Timelinell” which is invaluable. Told in the same irreverence tone as Reed’s introduction, the timeline is painstakingly researched and takes the reader through Orwell’s life, the question of parody, the timeline of Nikolai Kostomarov’s story, “Animal Riot,” and the politics of mid-twentieth-century Europe. What emerges, among other facts, are these: Orwell’s propaganda activities, his coining of the term “cold war,” the CIA optioning Animal Farm for film, and the revelation (in 1996) that Orwell, in 1949, “prepared a list of writers and others he considered unsuitable as possible writers for the anti-communist propaganda activities of the Information Research Department,” a secret organization under the British Foreign Office. [As a side note, Orwell’s list was published in The Guardian in 2003 and subsequently released by the Foreign Office.] Reed notes that the list carried an addendum of “racist, homophobic, and creepy remarks.”
The timeline is followed by articles dealing with issues raised in the timeline. The first is “George Orwell’s ‘Freedom of the Press,’ a Proposed Preface to Animal Farm, Expurgated and Footnoted (with a Bias).” Reed’s footnotes are more extensive than Orwell’s text. Reed is clear about what he “expurgated,” and goes into detail in his “Notes” about the complications of the digital world, his pursuit of the “origin” of Animal Farm (Kostomarov’s story), and parody and legality, including primary exchanges between Reed and several redacted individuals.
The next chapter deals with “Revisionist History: The Origin of Animal Farm…”, a discussion of Nikolai Kostomarov’s life and Orwell’s discovery of the Russian’s story, “Animal Riot.” Reed compares both stories in detail.
Subsequent chapters focus on the political views of Orwell, a return (yet again) to copyright, this time copyright extension, and the “politics of narrative.” This brings in Hitchens again (“The Grand Poohbah of the cult of Orwell”), but also other players, like Lawrence Lessig (“the champion of copyright reform”). I was a practicing academic research librarian then and testified before a committee of the Register of Copyright (Marybeth Peters) about the 1998 copyright laws, and can attest to sharing Reed’s views on copyright extension, which now makes me a biased reviewer.
Reed begins his article on “The Politics of Narrative”: “The first lie: money. The second: property (and borders). The third: government. The fourth: story.” A sample of the lie of story:
Popular entertainment is a helpless, writing, mega-maggot of selfish desire. Academia, outmoded and provincial, peddles geniuses and nihilists, ignoring contemporary writers of far more immediacy, relevancy, talent, and accomplishment. Education, a leading national industry, saddles promising poor and middle-class youth with onerous debt, thereby fashioning an executive and managerial class beholden to the children of the wealthy. Culture-at-large presumes that writing is torture, art is suffering, and artists are monstrous, or drug-addled, or sick, or disabled, or all that and more (the A&E biography)—in the service of denigrating creative living and creative thinking, which is the single alternative to a life of stultifying obedience.
A part of me agrees, and it’s great writing. A part of me also recognizes that I have spent a lifetime in academia, and I am a writer and, Reed is currently in academia (Director of the Creative Writing Program and Associate Professor of Writing Across Media in the New School in New York) and a writer.
Ironically, just below the quoted paragraph, Reed acknowledges that Shakespeare was “a man with the backing of the Queen.” A different Elizabeth, but nonetheless, the reader is taken back to the introduction and Reed’s belief that “it’s about time” the monarchy ended.
There are other chapters for the reader to explore, but it is important to note that Reed managed to include “Animal Riot” in translation. This enables readers to make their own comparisons to Animal Farm, should they choose to do so.
Once upon a time, authors’ lives were separate from their works. Readers took the written work from the page. Today, that is not the case. Life and art are inextricably entwined for public consumption. Often, I question the wisdom of this, but in Orwell’s case, it’s valid. Animal Farm is political, and it is reasonable to explore Orwell’s life in order to see the novel in context. Reed has done a masterful job of presenting that context and has been open about his own biases. I found this work fascinating. Reed closes his introduction: “The end of Orwell is not sudden, but a continuum of near repetition, a getting smaller and smaller. There will never be a full stop, just the diminishing, in perpetuity.” Only time will tell if he is right or if Orwell will endure beyond us both.
About the reviewer: Aline Soules’ work has appeared in such publications as the Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Galway Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her book reviews have been published by Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review, and others. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, Online: https://alinesoules.com