This morning, I finished Ayn Rand’s philosophical fiction novel Atlas Shrugged! Only took me 17 weeks…
Rand’s novel is set in America sometime in the future when businesses are struggling under increasingly restricting socialist laws. Railroad Vice-President Dagny Taggart, metal industrialist Hank Rearden and copper mine owner Francisco d’Anconia are among those suffering. They strive to fight the senseless collectivist regulations that are restricting their produce and demolishing the country’s economy. Eventually realising that nothing can be done to save America at this point, the country’s leading industrialists such as Dagny and Francisco decide to go on strike. They simply disappear, leaving the incompetent socialist government to support America without the help of the able and intelligent whom they had denounced for so long.
“I propose to show to the world who depends on whom, who supports whom, who is the source of wealth, who makes whose livelihood possible and what happens to whom when who walks out!”
Many people have criticised Atlas Shrugged for being too simplistic, in that the divide between politics is very blunt, with no middle ground: you are either communist, or you are capitalist, and that is it. Of course, reality is much less black-and-white, but I think that in this case, Rand was deliberately trying to paint a very black-and-white picture to show that at the end of the day, capitalism is far more effective than communism. If nothing else, Atlas Shrugged provides the very basic facts of the matter to someone like me who’s a bit of a beginner at this whole politics thing!
However I much I agreed with Rand’s point, and however absolutely entranced I was at the beginning of the novel, there were some things wrong with it. For a start, it’s 2000 pages long. That’s all very well and good if the book actually needed to be that long, but Atlas Shrugged didn’t. Rand could have at least halved the size of the book without changing any plot events. Her sentences are at least three times longer than they need to be, and packed with as many verbose terms and phrases as she can fit in so that by the end of the paragraph you can’t even remember what happened in the beginning of it.
On an FB group about the discussion of books that I’m on, I posted half-way through reading Rand’s novel about it, asking what everyone else thought. Aside from the occasional comment of general verbal abuse that I received due to liking Atlas Shrugged, the main message that I got was this: people really enjoyed it as a teenager, and then tried to read it again in adulthood and couldn’t get past the first fifty pages. Unfortunately enough, I think that I hit that point (the point of realising that this book wasn’t actually as amazing as I thought it was, and that Rand’s writing can actually be rather terrible in some places) at around 60%. That left with me another 800 pages to go of a book that I wasn’t so enamoured with!
I made a brief character analysis of this book a couple of months ago when I was halfway through it, but I want to quickly touch again on the characters in Atlas Shrugged. One of the main issues that I had with this book is that the characters are actually rather wooden and one-sided; Dagny, Francisco, John Galt, Rearden, and a few others were all essentially exactly the same person in terms of their personalities, and James Taggart, Dr Ferris, Wesley Mouch and all James’ other “Washington boys” pretty much had the same personality as each other, too. Perhaps this is why Cherryl, James Taggart’s wife, and Dr Robert Stadler were the most interesting characters to me: they had the most conflict in their lives, not knowing whose side they should be on, and having an even experience of both. However, these two characters are the only ones that stand out as having anything unique about their personalities that sets them apart from anyone else in the book.
There was, in fact, one other character who interested me, though not for his non-existent originality as a protagonist: James “Jim” Taggart, Dagny’s brother and president of the railroad. He was always completely hysterical, always in a frenzied state of confusion. Though he was the prime mover of the communist ideology that took over America in Atlas Shrugged, he seemed to be the only one who was truly aware that it wasn’t working – more than that; that it was wrong, morally wrong. He constantly looked to Dagny for reassurance that he was doing the right thing, while his Washington boys simply closed their eyes and pretended that Dagny didn’t exist.
“You have the privilege of strength, but I – I have the right of weakness! that’s a moral absolute! Don’t you know it? Don’t you? Don’t you?” – James Taggart to Dagny
I want to conclude this review with some quotes that perfectly sum up the underlying message of Atlas Shrugged: that self-interest, individualism, hard work and earning your living, not taking it because you need it and can’t be bothered to get it for yourself, are the highest moral standards a man can live for.
“I think that it’s a sin to sit down and let your life go, without making a try for it.”
[Dagny] thought suddenly of those modern college-infected parasites who assumed a sickening air of moral self-righteousness whenever they uttered the standard bromides about their concern for the welfare of others. The tramp’s last sentence was one of the most profoundly moral statements she had ever heard.
Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. … You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. … You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. … You, who’ve created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. … Have you stopped to ask them: by what right? – by what code? – by what standard?
This has brought us to a world where the more a man produces, the closer he comes to the loss of all his rights, until, if his ability is great enough, he becomes a rightless creature delivered as prey to any claimant – while in order to be placed above rights, above principles, above morality, placed where anything is permitted to him, even plunder and murder, all a man has to do is to be in need.
The looting crew [the socialists] needed [Dagny’s] sanction, not to reassure their victims, but to reassure themselves … With an awed contempt – awed by the enormity of the sight – she wondered what inner degradation those men had to reach in order to arrive at a level of self-deception where they would seek the extorted approval of an unwilling victim as the moral sanction they needed, they who thought that they were merely deceiving the world.