Atlas Shrugged is a brick of a book. No publisher would touch it today, for it is too long, too deep, and not written for a 20-something woman with a tenth grade reading level. If you like your literature in advertisement-style sound bites with head banger music in the background, don’t read this book. But if you want to read a masterpiece written by a woman who could barely control her primal scream under a veneer of exquisite literature, Atlas Shrugged is for you.
Ayn Rand was a citizen of communist Russia who witnessed the economic and social devastation caused by Marxism. After emigrating to the United States, she wrote her bitter masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, as an homage to freedom and capitalism. The book retains its relevance because the insipid do-gooders in the story who lead the world into darkness are prescient in their use of the same mealy-mouthed vocabulary of altruism that many well-meaning politicians use today. Today, religious conservatives read the Bible, while true economic and amoral conservatives read Atlas Shrugged.
But while the book is a political tour de force, it achieves its influence because it is such a thrilling story, written with great verve. The story focuses on Dagney Taggert, the beautiful and brilliant railroad executive, whose railroad is falling apart due to the lack of qualified employees and equipment. Hardworking people have disappeared, gone to start their own society in a secret corner of the world under the leadership of the mysterious John Galt. As the engineers, teachers, construction workers, and entrepreneurs disappear, civilization is left to nincompoops who believe that the world owes them a living, and who impose increasingly desperate obligations and taxes upon the remaining pillars of industry like Taggert. Finally, Taggert throws in the towel to join Galt, one more victim of the vampire-like authorities in their relentless need for one more source of production to suck dry. Meanwhile, the government also seeks to find Galt and to kill him, for his creed of hard work and honest profit threaten those who would demand that those who work hard support those who don’t.
Ayn Rand was a woman possessed and she wrote like one. The prose may be a little purple by today’s standards, but the sense of gloom, the character development, and the mystery of John Galt are rendered with uncommon virtuosity. The ultimate resolution of Galt’s whereabouts and the plot dénouement are a little abrupt, as if Rand realized she had screamed herself out and it was time to wrap it up, but the book nevertheless leaves you exhausted and fulfilled. Atlas Shrugged will bowl you over like one of Dagney Taggert’s freight trains.
Reviewed by Richard H Dickinson, author of the excellent novel, Acts of Honor
Published by Signet Books - Mass Market paperback - 978-0451191144 - $8.99
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