bobbyw24
Banned
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- Sep 10, 2007
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Objectively speaking, Rand’s opus is a literary disaster.
One of the unlikely beneficiaries of the current financial crisis is the estate of Ayn Rand. Sales of Atlas Shrugged, her dystopian classic, have soared in the past year. The book has been solidly in the Amazon bestseller list and briefly edged into that of the New York Times. Not bad for a novel published in 1957. And especially impressive for a work that—viewed purely as literature—must be accounted a disastrous failure.
Pace, all you Randians: I am one of you. I have a small picture of the lady on my desk in the European Parliament, next to a signed photograph of Margaret Thatcher, a bust of Thomas Jefferson, and a silver medal from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The most pleasing compliment paid to me as a politician was when some conservative students started selling a T-shirt with the slogan “Who is Dan Han?”—a reference to the famous opening line of Rand’s magnum opus, “Who is John Galt?”
Rand was a visionary, and her critique of the corporatist order was eerily apt. She argued that her book was prophylactic: a portrayal of a future she wanted to avoid. In some ways, it worked. Very few people argue, nowadays, that economies should be run on the basis of state planning or that socialism is inevitable. In other ways, her analysis of the business-political order—the monopolistic instincts of industrialists, the favoring of back-room deals over open competition, the way party politics punishes integrity and promotes moral cowardice—is eternally true.
In the institutions of the European Union, which were designed by and for bureaucrats and lobbyists, I see Randian scenes being played out every day. Conversations are conducted on the basis of unstated ententes, and directness is considered the height of bad taste. Slogans about the welfare of the citizen are trotted out without thought or meaning, while unspoken plots are hatched against the public weal.
Never mind the EU. Who can meet the directors of a mammoth multinational without thinking of Rand’s description of a company board: “Men who, through the decades of their careers, had relied for their security on keeping their faces blank, their words inconclusive and their clothes impeccable”?
Yet there is no getting away from it: the book simply doesn’t work as a novel. At this stage, I should insert a spoiler warning: the rest of this article will make no sense unless I give away what the book is about. Then again, as we shall see, one of the flaws of Atlas Shrugged is that it is poorly paced. You can see every twist in the plot coming hundreds of pages before you reach it.
Let’s start with the most basic problem. Atlas Shrugged is too long. Way too long. Its point could have been very adequately made in 200 pages rather than the 1,168 of my Penguin edition. Now you might argue that some books need to be long. A novelist who sets out to create a plausible universe, and to people it with developed characters, must give himself room, be he Tolstoy or Tolkien. But there is nothing especially developed about the characters in Atlas Shrugged. They are all more or less interchangeable, speaking in dissertations and behaving in set patterns.
It’s true that the reader travels a long way, morally and politically, between the covers. In the opening pages, we
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/dec/01/00024/
One of the unlikely beneficiaries of the current financial crisis is the estate of Ayn Rand. Sales of Atlas Shrugged, her dystopian classic, have soared in the past year. The book has been solidly in the Amazon bestseller list and briefly edged into that of the New York Times. Not bad for a novel published in 1957. And especially impressive for a work that—viewed purely as literature—must be accounted a disastrous failure.
Pace, all you Randians: I am one of you. I have a small picture of the lady on my desk in the European Parliament, next to a signed photograph of Margaret Thatcher, a bust of Thomas Jefferson, and a silver medal from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The most pleasing compliment paid to me as a politician was when some conservative students started selling a T-shirt with the slogan “Who is Dan Han?”—a reference to the famous opening line of Rand’s magnum opus, “Who is John Galt?”
Rand was a visionary, and her critique of the corporatist order was eerily apt. She argued that her book was prophylactic: a portrayal of a future she wanted to avoid. In some ways, it worked. Very few people argue, nowadays, that economies should be run on the basis of state planning or that socialism is inevitable. In other ways, her analysis of the business-political order—the monopolistic instincts of industrialists, the favoring of back-room deals over open competition, the way party politics punishes integrity and promotes moral cowardice—is eternally true.
In the institutions of the European Union, which were designed by and for bureaucrats and lobbyists, I see Randian scenes being played out every day. Conversations are conducted on the basis of unstated ententes, and directness is considered the height of bad taste. Slogans about the welfare of the citizen are trotted out without thought or meaning, while unspoken plots are hatched against the public weal.
Never mind the EU. Who can meet the directors of a mammoth multinational without thinking of Rand’s description of a company board: “Men who, through the decades of their careers, had relied for their security on keeping their faces blank, their words inconclusive and their clothes impeccable”?
Yet there is no getting away from it: the book simply doesn’t work as a novel. At this stage, I should insert a spoiler warning: the rest of this article will make no sense unless I give away what the book is about. Then again, as we shall see, one of the flaws of Atlas Shrugged is that it is poorly paced. You can see every twist in the plot coming hundreds of pages before you reach it.
Let’s start with the most basic problem. Atlas Shrugged is too long. Way too long. Its point could have been very adequately made in 200 pages rather than the 1,168 of my Penguin edition. Now you might argue that some books need to be long. A novelist who sets out to create a plausible universe, and to people it with developed characters, must give himself room, be he Tolstoy or Tolkien. But there is nothing especially developed about the characters in Atlas Shrugged. They are all more or less interchangeable, speaking in dissertations and behaving in set patterns.
It’s true that the reader travels a long way, morally and politically, between the covers. In the opening pages, we
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/dec/01/00024/
in any religious sense-
