Snowball's Chance

Written in a period of a few weeks shortly after the September 11th attacks, Snowball's Chance reads like it was published more to seize the moment and benefit from the publicity it would receive from pissing off Orwell's estate (and his fans) than for its literary or critical value. There's not much point in reading it now that the attacks are so far in the rear view mirror and the controversy over its publication has evaporated.

Snowball's Chance follows Animal Farm as the rule of Napoleon has ended, and Snowball has to returned to the farm having embraced capitalism and the market. Accompanied by a team of technocratic goats, he usurps power and transforms Animal Farm into Animal Fair–an ongoing carnival powered by the Twin Mills where the animals of the farm work for wages. Reed also introduces the animals of The Woodlands, representing radical Islam. Drawing from the United States' actual involvement with these groups–including the Taliban–in Afghanistan, it's not hard to read Snowball's Chance as another “America's chickens coming home to roost” perspective, in this case somewhat literally (though the terrorists are hedgehogs and beavers, not chickens).

The book touches on a wide array of themes in U.S. history when it's not specifically about 9/11. Reed tries cramming in as many references as possible, sacrificing any semblance of a plot in the name of creating Animal Farm parallels to real world events. Orwell's original was unsettling because it showed a steady creep toward a betrayal of Animal Farm's utopian ideal, ending with the powerful final scene of the animals seeing the pigs transformed, but Reed has no such purpose; he seems to hope the reader will be shocked, or will enjoy fantasizing about Lee Harvey Oswald as a badger. If he fails to succeed on either front–as he did with me–there isn't much left to enjoy.