OLD SWINE IN NEW BOTTLES

THE BROADER PICTURE

PERHAPS of all creatures on this earth only the pig is lower than man in its grossness of manners, its greed, its cunning - and in its love of rubbish. It will devour refuse - man's refuse - voraciously; and then we will devour the pig.

Its features remind us of our newborn babies; its pink flesh taunts us with an image of ourselves in middle age. For this unfortunate similarity some religions have banned it as a source of nourishment, casting the wretched creature in the role of a delicious temptation, one stop away from cannibalism. (New Gui-nea cannibals, incidentally, referred to white humans as "long pigs". ) Pigs' keen sense of smell occasionally inspires them to excavate truffles, but generally their life is one long round of torpor and gluttony. They support a wealth of vermin on their persons and suffer from a range of crippling alimentary disorders. I used to think that there the similarities ended; then it occurred to me that pigs also eat their young - whereas we merely turn millions of ours into starving refugees, or slaughter them for no good reason.

Perhaps that is why we use the word "pig" to describe the brutish, the despicable, the unsavoury - to distance ourselves from the fact that we and the pig are natural brothers. And perhaps it is for a similar reason that we sometimes use the word to describe the police - or any agents of those who seek to control societies with repressive measures.

Such were my thoughts when I began to draw the pigs for a new illustrated edition of George Orwell's Animal Farm, published by Secker & Warburg on Thursday on the 50th anniversary of the book's first publication; the more I immersed myself in the story, the more inspired Orwell's casting of pigs as its villains began to seem.

The germ of the book had occurred to Orwell during his fight against fascism in Spain. At the time, Stalinism was the great myth that seduced all good revolutionary comrades into believing that theirs alone was the good fight. Orwell realised that many of the same illusions had been manipulated with the same results inside the Third Reich. He had already proved that he was not afraid to be a political outcast. Animal Farm was an achievement of greater significance than anything he had written before. Orwell decided that the only way he could effectively fight a myth as powerful as Stalin's was with another myth - a simple and effective fairy-story, a non-partisan parable for the times. Remarkably, he succeeded: for millions, his fairy- story has proved a counter-myth potent enough to neutralise even the most seductive claims of the totalitarians.

Equally remarkably, the book was never illustrated. It cries out for the kind of visceral playfulness that might have been added by someone like David Low, who, like Orwell, saw Hitler and Stalin as two sides of the same coin. And the myth's simplicity lends itself perfectly to a parallel commentary in pictures.

This was the gap that I have attemp-ted to fill, and, in the process, I have re-joiced in the aptness of Orwell's characterisation of a variety of animals. If I have a favourite it is Boxer: the strength, the honest endeavour, and the soul of the revolution. My attempt to express the dignity of the great beast, even in death, crucified between the shafts of its chosen workload, is also an attempt to express the betrayal which is the hallmark, I believe, of all revolutions in the end.

Others were scarcely less rewarding to draw: Benjamin, the eternal sceptic; Molly, the vain and silly; Moses, the gossip-monger; the brainwashed puppydogs as police and executioners; and the mindless sheep, bleating broadcasters of cant; Muriel, the smart spry goat and unwitting upholder of the message, a fervent believer, clarifying all to a puzzled and slightly suspicious Clover; and the rest, each with a specific role but none overplayed in the order of things.

But the pigs are the main protagonists: the Stalin and the Trotsky, the dictator and the scapegoat planner. The other animals are defined by their relationship with them - and particularly by their pathetic trust in their management of the revolution. It is after all a pig who generates the original Marxist vision of a promised land. And it was the choice of pigs, I believe, that gave Animal Farm such impact when it was first published. The metaphor acted as a lightning-rod, infuriating those at both ends of the political spectrum and driving the floating masses into a turmoil of uncertainty. It unmasked the tyrants - of all extreme ideologies - and left the rest of us clutching at straws. Like Caliban raging at his reflection, we recognised ourselves in Orwell's swinish caricatures - and still do.

And, in our heart of hearts, we know that it will always be like this: that no matter how earnest our political intentions, sooner or later a rot will set in, as surreptitious revisionism eats away at the foundations of what we may fondly have thought we had established as a good thing for all time. !