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.