For those (such as myself) religiously inclined, Rand comes even more highly recommended, for I have found that reason and faith are not mutually exclusive concepts, and reconciling the two has led me at least to a more complete philosophy of life, where morality is guided by my own reason and principles, not by faith or the opinions of others. Perhaps this book will start you down the same road and the journey for you will be similarly rewarding.

And if for no other reason, read it so you understand greedy capitalists :)


The lungs on these people!   February 10, 2002
 209 out of 382 found this review helpful

You will be tempted, after a while, to skim-read the nine-page monologues. My advice is to yield to temptation. When George Orwell inserted long chapters of a fictional political treatise into "1984" ... well, he wrote better, for one thing; for another, Orwell's slabs of text have an internal structure, and don't merely repeat themselves. When Rand launches one of her characters into a rant you can sleep easy in the knowledge that each paragraph will merely repeat the previous one, with new bursts of rhetoric, new insults (some not so new: the words "looter" and "moocher" are used so often that by the end of the novel they have become technical terms), and new outbursts of spite that the author could not bear to leave out.

The ironic high point, for me, comes midway through Book 3, Chapter 2, when it's Richard Halley's turn to talk his throat dry. His speech is an expression of hatred for artists whose works merely issue from them as expressions of feeling ("like vomit from a drunkard"), who don't realise the iron discipline required to turn their impulses into a coherent, beautiful work. So where's Rand's "iron discipline"? Her novel, which began promisingly enough, had hundreds of pages ago been ruined by her unwillingness to cut a single. Whenever she must choose between expressing her credo (by writing yet more words) or living up to it (by crafting a good novel), she opts for the former.

I meant it when I said it began promisingly enough. There's a tantalising mystery (which is later dragged out long past the point where even the dullest reader has guessed it all and wishes to move on), a dark, detailed, fantastic vision of a decaying society, characters that look as though they might be worth following, and Rand does a good enough job of treating the things she loves - furnaces, girders, railways, engines - as elements of romance. But the worthwhile elements dissolve into nothing until nothing is left but the endlessly repeating rhetoric.

Oh, and the love scenes. They're ... I was about to say Victorian, because of the way Rand's lovers spend pages on end doing nothing but "being in love" and striking attitudes at one another. (Rand disguises her starchiness by throwing in the occasional graphic half-rape, but fools no-one.) But this would be unfair to Victorians. Shortly before reading "Atlas Shrugged" I'd re-read George Gissing's "New Grub Street", and I was surprised by how plausible the talks between lovers were, how the professions of love vary from one another and how unafraid the author is to come to the point. Gissing's book was written 70 years before Rand's. The truth is that perceptive writers have NEVER written love scenes as stodgy as Rand's. They can scarcely be read, even for curiosity's sake.

Perhaps my comments will strike you as beside the point: many people, after all, consider Rand's book less valuable as a work of fiction than as a work of philosophy. They're wrong. Another respect in which Gissing scores over Rand is in his ability to express opposing points of view - Rand merely knows how to gather all the viewpoints she disagrees with and the traits she considers vices together, so that no character may have one without also having all the rest. Nobody is in favour of income tax without also denying elementary principles of logic, doubting the existence of an external world, and having a whining voice, shifty eyes and an ugly face to boot. And the wonder is that Rand is, by her lights, more or less honest. She thinks that all the details of her political and moral philosophy really DO follow, as a matter of logic, from such banal and uncontroversial trivialities as "everything is identical to itself".

My star rating is subjective. I wouldn't have guessed this from the opening chapters, but the book really is unbelievably bad ... and yet this in itself is a reason to read it, just as it's a reason to read Lewis Carroll's "Sylvie and Bruno". By all means read this book, and "Sylvie and Bruno" as well. They're ... ahem ... unique.