RAG Demo

Tag: Allegory

  • Midnight’s Children

    Saleem Sinai is born in Bombay at the exact moment India becomes independent on 15 August 1947, and he comes to believe his life is chained to the fate of the nation. Writing his story in a pickle factory while he races against his own physical decline, he starts decades earlier with his grandfather, a Kashmiri doctor, and works forward through family secrets and swapped identities.

    Saleem learns that all 1,001 children born in the first hour of independence have magical gifts, and his own telepathy lets him convene them in his head. His fortunes track the country's: Partition aftershocks, the wars with Pakistan, the birth of Bangladesh and Indira Gandhi's Emergency. His rival Shiva, born at the same instant, embodies the violent counter-current to Saleem's hopes.

    Rushdie writes in an exuberant, digressive voice that mixes Indian oral storytelling with magic realism and Bombay slang. The novel won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was later named the Booker of Bookers and the Best of the Booker, and it changed what Indian writing in English felt free to attempt.

    Book details

    AuthorSalman Rushdie
    First published1981
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)647
    SettingKashmir, Amritsar, Agra, Bombay, Karachi and Dhaka, 1915 to 1977
    AwardsBooker Prize 1981, Booker of Bookers 1993, Best of the Booker 2008

    Themes

    • Partition
    • National identity
    • Memory and storytelling
    • Fate
    • The emergency

    Who should read it

    Readers ready for a dense, playful epic that retells modern South Asian history through one unreliable narrator.

  • Lord of the Flies

    During an unspecified war, an aircraft evacuating British schoolboys comes down on a remote tropical island with no adult survivors. The boys at first treat it as an adventure. Ralph, fair and likeable, is elected leader after he blows a conch shell to call an assembly, and the conch becomes the symbol of orderly debate. Piggy, clever and bespectacled, becomes his anxious adviser.

    Jack, head of a choir that becomes a band of hunters, resents Ralph's authority and is drawn to the thrill of hunting pigs. As the signal fire is neglected and rumours of a beast in the jungle spread among the younger children, the group splits between Ralph's insistence on rules and rescue and Jack's offer of meat, ritual and freedom from responsibility.

    Golding wrote the novel partly as a rebuttal to cheerful Victorian island adventures, using the boys to ask how thin the layer of civilisation really is. Its symbols, from the conch to Piggy's glasses, are among the most discussed in school curricula. The book remains a touchstone in debates about human nature, group psychology and the sources of cruelty.

    Book details

    AuthorWilliam Golding
    First published1954
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)224
    SettingAn uninhabited tropical island during a future war

    Themes

    • Human nature
    • Civilisation versus savagery
    • Power
    • Fear
    • Loss of innocence

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in allegory and in how groups behave when rules and adults disappear.

  • Animal Farm

    On Manor Farm in England, the elderly boar Old Major shares a dream with the other animals: a world in which they are free of human masters and keep the fruits of their own labour. Not long afterwards, neglected and hungry, the animals rise up and drive out the drunken farmer Mr Jones, rename their home Animal Farm, and paint seven commandments of equality on the barn wall.

    The cleverest animals, the pigs, take charge of planning. Two of them, Snowball and Napoleon, quarrel over the building of a windmill and the direction of the farm, while the persuasive Squealer explains every new decision to the others. The hardworking cart-horse Boxer, the cynical donkey Benjamin and the sheep with their slogans show how ordinary citizens respond as the rules quietly change.

    Written during the Second World War and published in 1945, the book is an allegory of the Russian Revolution and Stalinism, but its warning about how power corrupts ideals and how language is bent to justify it applies far more widely. Its simple style makes it a common school text.

    Book details

    AuthorGeorge Orwell
    First published1945
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)112
    SettingManor Farm, England

    Themes

    • Corruption of power
    • Revolution
    • Propaganda
    • Totalitarianism
    • Class

    Who should read it

    Readers of any age who want a short, sharp fable about how revolutions can betray their own ideals.