Parody on Animal Farm

[Sled]

As an Orwell obsessive, I don't know what to think about this article in the New York Press.<br><br>Here was something else in Publisher's Weekly Daily.<br><br>Novelist John Reed, author of A Still Small Voice (Dell, $13.95) and the forthcoming volume, Snowball's Chance (Roof Books, $20), blames George Orwell for the September 11 attacks. Snowball's Chance parodies Orwell's Animal Farm, dragging it kicking and screaming into the 21st century.<br><br>In Reed's version, Snowball the pig returns to Animal Farm as a convert to 21st-century-style corporate capitalism, and quickly sets out to bring Napoleon's proto-Soviet farm in line with his own vision of a New Farm Order.<br><br>On Orwell's original farm, the saying was that all animals are equal,but some are more equal than others; in Reed's update, it becomes the very Republican-sounding "All animals are born equal--what they become is their own affair." Or, as the animals put it later, "The scope of what we can have is only limited by the scope of what we can want!" Instead of raising a single mill tower, as prescribed in Orwell's original, the animals raise a second mill--creating the, er...Twin Mills.<br><br>A group of beavers living in a nearby wood become religious fanatics and take offense at the two towers...the rest is, history, so to speak.<br>