Atlas Shrugged [Paperback]

This novel hardly needs a review to encourage someone to buy it, when you consider one point alone: It is over 50 years old and people still read it and enjoy it. It is a classic and nothing I can say can detract from that.

But it is also a product of its time, espousing a philosophy that is only internally consistent if one makes rather more assumptions than the author admits to. The characters all speak with Ayn Rand's voice, in a manner that might be familiar to readers of Galileo perhaps, but not so much with readers of a good modern novel. The characters feel unreal. The whole setting is preposterously unreal, and here is a novel that would have been better set in an alternate universe of a science fiction writer, in the manner - say - of Philip Dick's "The Man in the High Castle". Perhaps that was her intent in fact, but she gives us no anchor into the world she is describing and the action of the novel dances across an empty stage.

For anyone seeking rich characterizations, realistic interactions, or a sense of place in the narrative, you will be disappointed in this novel. The novel is merely the platform for Rand's polemic, and jumps from unbelievable to the preposterous without apology.

This being said, it was still a jolly good read. The conflict in the novel is engrossing and draws you in quickly. The first time someone defeats a "looter government", you want to applaud. When Dagny (the protaganist) completes a railway line against all the odds you can feel her exhilieration - even if you wonder how she managed it! The concept of the plot is refreshingly original, and readers will want to finish the novel.

Given its length though, finishing can be tricky - especially where it comes to a 90 page speech espousing Rand's epistemology. Some aspects of the plot were also tiring, and one wonders whether the book could have achieved its purpose whilst being edited a little. Ok, the 90 page speech was probably why she wrote the book - but perhaps Rand forgets the maxim here: "show don't tell"

Ultimately though, the book's philosophy suffers for being the product of an age that does not exist any longer. Marxism is a target of Rand's polemic, but also social programmes that have clearly worked and brought tremendous benefit to the world (including the US), such as the Marshal plan. At the same time, she defends a world of producer industrialists that largely no longer exist now, and rather misses the point that invention in our modern world is hardly the preserve of big business (even if only businesses have the resources to patent their inventions). I could say more on this, but this is a review - not a critique, so I will stop!

I give the book 4 stars despite all this criticism, because I do not regret having read it. I enjoyed it, I thought about it, I disagree with a good deal of it, but I do not regret it. Neither will you.

Atlas Shrugged may be the most demanding work of literature I have read since university. It is certainly the only novel since then for which I have also bought a reader, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companionfiftieth anniversary collection of essays, and it is only now, having finished that, that I am turning to writing a review. At about 1,200 pages (always a bit hard to tell from a Kindle edition) it is also, give or take the occasional "space opera", the longest work I've read for a long time. So: was it worth it?

Arguably this is a work of fiction that is more germane today that it ever was. In a month where the government of one European state, Cyprus, exercised a "levy" thought to be over 40% on investors with over 100,000 on deposit, it's worth considering Rand's depiction of the causes and effects of state-backed "looting and mooching". While I find it surprising, 55 years on, that she could have seen the seeds of such statist decadence in the US of the 1940s and 1950s, the New Deal notwithstanding, there is no doubt that the European Union would have represented, to Rand, an (un)worthy successor to the Soviet Union as the archetype of a well meaning but ultimately corrupting and self-defeating super-state. Every day the news abounds with stories of government spending tax payers' money because they feel that "something must be done", or perhaps just that they feel that they ought to be seen to be doing something. Rand was clear: the best thing government can do is stick to maintaining freedom through the rule of law, and then by getting (the hell) out of individuals' way.

I doubt that anyone reads Atlas Shrugged today without knowing that they are reading a philosophical novel from a right wing, more or less libertarian perspective. There are those who claim that it is a great novel in its own right. While few would argue that works of fiction achieve greatness without giving us insights into some profound aspects of the human condition, few if any literary contenders focus so exclusively on the socio-economic and political facets. The narrative is interesting, it's exciting (although it could probably have been more exciting had it been shorter) and the imagery is arresting. Dagny Taggart is without doubt a compelling female role-model. My enjoyment may have been prejudiced a little by the knowledge that every character had been created to represent a particular viewpoint, and I may have spent too long trying to work out what they were, but I can't help thinking that the storyline suffers from all the characters being archetypes.

Characters tend to be either heroic or contemptuously villainous, and there's a distinct white hat/black hat feel to them, made all the more obvious by Rand's unsubtle use of physical attractiveness as a key to character. Perhaps this was the Hollywood screenwriter in her. The heroes are physically attractive while the baddies are ugly. Dagny's brother, James Taggart, the worst sort of pork barrel businessman, is first described as having "a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to a bald forehead". Dangy's three lovers, by contrast, Copper magnate Francisco D'Anconia, steel foundry owner Hank Reardon, and the inventor and philosopher John Galt, suffer only from being just too heroic, too near to godlike to make entirely believable characters. It's hard to develop empathy with an archetype, and I found only Dagny herself to be truly engaging.

Atlas Shrugged was the last work of fiction that Ayn Rand wrote. I suspect that after this book, and The Fountainhead that preceded it (by 14 years) she no longer needed to worry about money, and she devoted herself to developing her philosophy of "Objectivism" in non-fiction works. I can't say that I found it entirely easy to glean what objectivism was about from the novel alone (Younkins' reader has gone some way to plugging the gap since). Suffice to say that hers is a harsh and elitist philosophy, in which 99% of humanity could at best aspire to be the loyal "common man" represented by Dagny's right hand man, Eddie Willers.

John Galt's credo, and presumably therefore Rand's own, is "I swear by my life and for my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." While one may admire the entrepreneurialism, drive and personal responsibility of Rand's entrepreneurs, I do find her blanket condemnation of altruism misplaced. She appears to discourage personal altruism, not just state-backed, taxpayer-funded altruism. Does she condemn the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and now the Buffetts and the Gates for giving much of their fortunes to aid others? Is it not part of our role and our worth as human beings to look after other members of our "tribe"? Certainly, contemporary genetic theory from the likes of Steve Jones seems to suggest so. Credo: we should all be prepared to live a little of our lives for the sake of others.

As far as specifically ebook related comment on this Kindle edition, it's pretty good from what was probably a scan of a printed version, with a singular but oft repeated error that a small amount of proof reading would have fixed: every time the letter "a" follows a capital W, and some other letters too, it too was rendered as a capital. The frequently visited Wayne-Falkland hotel was rendered every time as the "WAy ne-Falkland". Amusing in a way, but distracting.

This is a book I feel sure that I will re-read again in the future, and I may yet read some of Rand's non-fiction. Great work that it is, however, this is not a book that I feel I can award 5 stars, but it's certainly worth reading - even if you don't fully understand, or feel you entirely like, all aspects of Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy.

Perhaps the most significant book in post-war American literature, one which has regained popularity since the start of the economic crisis, Altas Shrugged is the embodiment of an ideal society, the ultimate vehicle for Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism. Weighing in at over 1,000 pages of tightly-packed print, it's also one of the longest novels in English literature. Is it any good?

Well, as a novel, Atlas Shrugged unfortunately falls flat, in ways that Rand's first novel, We the Living (Penguin Modern Classics), didn't. There is foremost no humanity in the novel, the characters are dismembered, dessicated mouthpieces to Rand's philosophical diatribes, with everyone fitting neatly into 'good' and 'bad' camps. Rand herself claimed that using characters as symbols was never her intention: "My characters are persons in whom certain human attributes are focused more sharply and consistently than in average human beings." But what we are left with are flimsy apparitions, lobotomised automatons fulfilling the roles required of them to extol the virtues of her philosophy. Even this is taken to extremes, with one of the proponents delivering a 60-page long theoretical speech around which the rest of the novel might well be seen as scaffolding.

To complement this set of lifeless characters is a plot which similarly confounds understanding. In an America which technologically resembles the period in which Rand was writing, yet industrially feels set in an earlier period, and borrows heavily from the Great Depression, the main events and the decisions of the characters jar heavily with what the reader knows and expects from society. As another reviewer pointed out, what's missing is the overt understanding that the story takes place in a parallel world or a different timeframe, to create a genuine sense of credibility. True, there are some hints that push this novel into the realms of science fiction--a super metal alloy, power derived from static electricity, weapons based on sound waves etc.--but the world is definitely our own, even if the people and their decisions are alien. Key to the story is the gradual collapse of the economic system, and the disappearance of the champions of industry. What happens in Rand's universe when the creative minds of the world go on strike? Apparently, they settle down on the frontier and, working one month a year, create a fully-fledged miniature utopia. Personally, I imagine they'd starve.

A bad book can still be a good delivery vehicle for an interesting message. Yet this unwieldy book fails even to achieve the latter. For its mammoth length, Rand's message could have been relatively concise, but for the plot's repetitiveness. If you are interested in Rand's philosophy, there are plenty of other places to turn which will provide a far more succinct and detailed explanation, without the repetition or padding necessary for its delivery in novel form. Whether you find place for Rand's philosophy in your own, or like Gore Vidal consider it "nearly perfect in its immorality", there are simply better summaries available. For the converted, this is probably a wonderful book, but for anyone else it simply isn't worth risking the investment of time and energy.

No one can deny this book's enduring popularity. That alone gives rise to curiosity strong enough to keep it fresh in the public consciousness. But it is a far cry from a great piece of literature, and as an allegory, a philosophical harbinger, its ponderous and verbose nature should have the curious turn elsewhere. The novel opens with the question: "Who is John Galt?" A thousand pages of largely disappointing text will reveal the answer, but you'd be better served just reading the appendix.