Animal Farm : The Graphic Novel by Odyr

Animal Farm: The Graphic Novel by Odyr

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


There’s a part of me that can never quite cope with Animal Farm, having read it as a pony-loving child and immediately bonding with Boxer. For those of you who know the story, you’ll know now why I can’t quite cope with this book that promises one thing on the surface and gives you something quite different instead. It’s a lot to handle at an impressionable age. It’s a lot to handle at any age, I think, this book. It is rather, endlessly, brilliant.

(I also remember being marked down in a test about Animal Farm. We were asked how we knew Snowball was a pig – a reading comprehension passage – and I put “because I’ve read it”. And I got told off! The injustice! I suspect Orwell would have found it rather amusing though…)

But this isn’t the book, it’s a graphic novel adaptation of it and as such, there’s an almost separate story being told. It might be easier to refer to it as a translation, because that’s what you have to do. You have to find the heart of the story, those beats that echo, and you have to relocate them. Find space for them. Make them talk to art and make art that talks back and, in that conversation, deliver that indefinable thing that makes a graphic novel work. It is a dance, a spell, magic. And I am so in favour of people doing that with classic texts, because it does not matter how you find a story or what version of it you read. It matters that you find it. That’s it, that’s all.

And this is such a finding; Odyr’s work here is boundless, rich and there’s no frames throughout which is such clever work. Frames stop something. They capture it within a moment. They hold it. And this is a story that doesn’t need that – in fact, works actively against it. Moments bleed into moments, the message falls off the page, and – when it gets to those darker moments – there’s nothing to save you from them. Lines are powerful things, but the omission of them is equally so: a purge occurs and the pages are split with red, the moments fall off the page and into the world. Odyr’s loose, rich, emotional art seeks for the edge of that world and finds it. I found evocations here of JMW Turner, and that intrigued me. That pastoral edge turned dark. The ever-England turned black. The darkness in the light. Fascinating, powerful work.

I still couldn’t quite deal with what happens to Boxer.



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