Atlas Shrugged - chapter 2

He turned sharply and walked on. As the road came closer to his house, he noticed that his steps were slowing down and that something was ebbing away from his mood.

Atlas Shrugged, chapter 2.

This really should be something about The Island of the Day Before, but I left the book in the wrong house (how's that for weird and privileged) and so I pushed through chapter 2 of Atlas Shrugged in which we meet Henry Rearden, the man who Dagny Taggart turns to in her time of industrial need. Like Taggart, he is driven by a need to advance, to profit, and sees family as an appendage that has to be borne like a sack of flour on his back. He has a similar approach to philanthropy as our heroine, but will - out of a sense of familial duty - lend his feckless brother money that he never expects to be returned. Oddly, this act of generosity is bad tempered and goes to suggest (in a universal way) that money spent on a 'cause' is invariably money wasted.

Anyway, let's forget about the politics for a moment, and think about the writing. I've already mentioned that it feels like a draft version that needs editing, but I'm starting to think this dispassionate approach is part of the stylistic world-building that Rand is attempting. She is constantly telling us what is going on, rather than showing, and this adds to the detachment we are forced to feel from the characters and events.

It also leads to overblown sentences like the above. In this scene Rearden has just stopped at the top of a small rise (The dark road had risen imperceptibly to the top of a hill) and looked back over what he has created. It's a scene designed to show us the scope of his ambition and the journey he has taken from scratching around for funds to king of the hill, and yet there is no joy - even though we're told just a little earlier that he is 'always hungry for a sight of joy' - no satisfaction. The prose is lumpen as Rand tries (and fails) to tell us what he is feeling, rather than showing us. The turn above, from the joy of creation to the expectation of disappointment in family should be a pivotal moment, but it just rolls on.

"He turned sharply and walked on. With every step closer to home, Rearden's pace slowed and his mood soured."

That's sharper, clearer and better (I'm so arrogant in my writing!) and actually provides more information than the long-winded juvenile original, where we're supposed to be inside Rearden's head - we're noticing things with him - yet we're also external to the event.

Now I'm not saying that Rand is not human, sub-human or less than human – in fact she puts her finger on a very real human desire for more. What the first two chapters of this book say to me is that she doesn't understand the way humans work, she does 'get' emotion and so can only Pritt Stick the notion of emotion onto her characters, rather than have them actually experience something.

There's another book in which this is also a problem. 50 Shades of Gray demonstrates the same lack of depth in the characters, and the same method of highlighting the thoughts and feelings of people we're supposed to care about. (Ana felt a deep sense of erotic charge, etc). But there's a big difference. 50 Shades of Gray understands it is not a good or significant book; it knows its limitations and works within a set of conventions that would never lead a person to alter their lives to emulate the characters (well, not any sane person). Atlas Shrugged is heavy with its own sense of importance. The prose is thick with portentous visions that are supposed to hail man's achievements and his decline into caring. The characters are meant to inspire readers to change and yet it all means nothing.

It's like listening to someone talking in their sleep.

Reading has always provided an opportunity to experience things that are beyond your situation, or even beyond the realms of possibility. A good book should feel real, significant and enlightening. A good book should feel.

The book is now so toxic and so lacking in joy or emotion that I've actually stopped pulling my Kindle from my pocket in the mornings because I know it's on there and is the first thing on the screen. One morning, I even spent the six minutes of my train journey looking at old text messages (most telling me about the cost of calls in various countries) rather than go back to the book.

Chapter 2 is as far as I got before, so I will push on.

Atlas Shrugged - Chapter 1

"I don't see why we should want to help one man instead of a whole nation."
"I'm not interested in helping anybody. I want to make money."

Declaration of interest

I am not coming to this book cold. In fact, as an inveterate and passionate lefty, I'd say my antipathy towards Atlas Shrugged it pretty much guaranteed. It is, after all, the book that appears to inform the ideologies of the new American right, which posits that 'rational self-interest' is the ultimate goal of man. To me this makes the book an attempt to find a rational philosophical basis for selfishness. And, of course, there isn't one.

A world full of people who only watch out for themselves would end up with - I don't know - 50 per cent of the wealth of a country like the USA being 'owned' by 400 people. That sounds like a prelude to revolution to me.

So, with my interest declared, you can take these reviews - and I imagine there will be a lot of them if I ever manage to finish the book - as you find them. My politics will colour my impressions, just as yours will colour your acceptance or denial of the points raised. We'll get used to it.

In Atlas Shrugged  a group of people (I imagine modern Americans would call them wealth creators) who are tired of taxation and government regulation holding them back decide to go on strike to agitate for better conditions. And so a revolution is launched from the top tier of society against the tyranny of the collective good. Of course, the argument would be that a society of strong self-interested individuals would not need regulation as the market, aspiration and profit would define what stood and what fell, and for those unable to provide for themselves and their families... tough. Obviously, I'm nowhere near this part of the book yet, but the notion that a proprietors strike would cause any problem (unless of course they forced the hand of real wealth creators - workers and consumers - to withdraw their labour in sympathy) to production is bizarre indeed.

Chapter 1

And so, to the book itself. I have finished chapter 1 my first impression is that, in some ways, this is a draft. Like the equivalent of the director of a play blocking out the players before deciding out exactly how and why they should be in those positions in the first place. As though the author has written out approximations of what the characters need to say in order to advance the plot, but then forgotten to go back and make each one a distinctive voice.

This is a big problem because there is an awful lot of dialogue that is unattributed as characters talk, but for the most part you don't realise who is supposed to be talking. Everyone speaks with the same dead cadences. It's so bad during an exchange between the woman (our focalizer) and her father, it becomes necessary to go back over the text, counting opening speech marks.

And the words of these speeches lack depth, emotion, humanity. I don't know if this is an attempt at stylistic sympathy or simply bad writing, but it reads badly and is probably the reason I've never got beyond the first few chapters. It might also be just because Rand was writing in her non-native English, but then, perhaps a native speaker editor could have improved things during the drafting process.

There's also some stuff going on with generation and gender. Miss Taggart and Mr Rearden are the young thrusting industrialists who want to remake the world in the name of profit (Taggart's wealth is inherited, but I don't think Rand is particularly concerned with the notion of meritocracy) and personal advancement. While James Taggart and Rearden's family (all just useless appendages hanging from the scrawny carcass of his mother) are the old guard who are tethered to the idea of looking after either family and community in Rearden's case, or country and workers in Taggart's case. It is the dedication, hard work and willingness to 'take risks' that elevate our two heroes above their feckless families and drive them towards whatever is coming up.

There was an odd formality in the way male characters are discussed here with both James Taggart and Eddie Willers always given full titles, but then Miss Taggart called 'she'. This tallys with the idea of Taggart as the focalizer, but she is not in the initial scenes and so the jump to her on the train (surprise! she's the daughter of the owner) is clumsily done.

And what of John Galt? The first appearances are a rhetorical device that could - I imagine - be construed to mean almost anything and nothing. The characters may have said: how long is a piece of string. Except we know that he is set to be a catalyst of some kind in the coming revolution. As a set up for an enigma, I don't know if it feels so hackneyed because it is, or because I understand that is Rand's intention, or because I know I'm going to hate what he stands for. It will be interesting to find out, but I'm going to predict that he's probably Owen Kellogg.

Ayn Rand and Umberto Eco - I will beat them.

Each year there are two books that I try, and fail, to read. These books are usually measured out in the stuff I will pick up to read or housework I would undertake rather than going back to them. They are probably at opposite ends of the ideological - and maybe even quality - spectrum, but both have so far proved to be unreadable.

I fail for different reasons: The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco is (as far as I can tell for the 34 pages I've managed to read) a dense, rich confection of thoughts, ideas and complex sentences that is, nonetheless, dull beyond comprehension. The second book is Atlas Shrugged by smokey sixties psychopath Ayn Rand, which appears to be naive, slow-witted and clunky.

Because I like doing difficult things - and because I'm now old enough to start thinking about actually being dead - I have decided to read these books together, alternating chapters - that way, each book might serve as displacement activity for the other - and writing down my thoughts, fears, and plans to burn both books once I've finished. In fact, the Rand book is on my Kindle, so I don't even get the pleasure of burning it.

This is, then, a one-man book club that will focus only on two books - both shit in their own way - and will attempt to think, and possibly over-think the meaning of them.

Some posts will deal with a chapter, some might deal with more or less, and some might just tackle an idea or thought that the books address (or fail to address) in detail.