... In what was probably an attempt to rid the world of Ayn Rand, I suspect. I couldn't complete even the first third of this painfully obvious and obscenely arrogant novel two years ago when I first endeavored it. But I saw it on the shelf last week at the local library in audio-book form. This version was also abridged, so I went ahead and picked it up.
The abridged version is a bit of a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because the reader is not subjected to Rand's attempts at erotica and romance with her automaton heroin, Miss Dagny Taggart. However, the reading of the abridged version comes at the price of not fully understanding which character is which and who does what. But this disadvantage is offset in its severity by the fact that it doesn't matter what the characters are doing because they are all the same. Actually they are one of two: either a leech or an industrialist. The upshot of the book is that the industrialists fight a world besieged by Marxist ideology and philosophy. The leeches (or looters as she calls them) foster the adoption of Marxism and carry out its practical implementation. The industrialists, one by one, tire of being victimized by the leeches and decide to "shrug". By "shrug", Rand means they simply don't engage in commerce any longer. Because these 20+ American industrialists decide to disengage themselves and horde their talent, the economy crumbles.
As a believer in the virtue of capitalism, I agree with at least some of the basic premises the book subscribes: individualism, money as a source of good and not evil, Marxism being liberty's antidote. But my God, the way Rand goes about telling it in this fictionalized waste of 900+ pages... Maybe her ideas were radical in 1957, but in 2006, all but the most leftist Marxist would disagree with 80% of her founding sentiments.
I won't go into the details just what annoys me about this book, but if anyone has read or reads it, share your thoughts, please. Did any of those of you who read it find Dagny to be a complete moron for not figuring out what was going on in the world well before her plane crash? Oh, for those who didn't read it: yes, the railroad Heiress apparently knows how to pilot planes. We don't learn this until she's actually ready to take off. Because like most of us, knowing how to pilot small aircraft is incidental and not really worth mentioning. Did anyone else find it absurd that the world would just cease to function without a handful of talented and industrious people? I am surely not being overly-optimistic when I say that there would be scores of people to take their places - people who step up to the plate, rise to the challenge, and spout off cliche after cliche.
Oddly enough, as much as I hate the condescending tone of Rand, I wouldn't dissuade anyone from reading it. After all, it is the fictionalized explanation for her philosophy: objectivism. Which is a pretty cool philosophy, as far as philosophies go.
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3 comments:
I don't know what to say... Who is John Galt?
Read "The Fountainhead" good stuff.
So I never followed up. I had wondered while reading it if Rand would redeem herself and have regular every-day people recreate their own world, as would surely happen in the real world. It never did in Rand's novel though. Instead, society collapsed into anarchy without the captains of industry to save them, and save them they eventually did.
This is just about the dumbest book I have ever read. It is nothing less than amazing to think that there are scores of people out there, some of whom I respect and admire, who think this thing is the cat's meow. Blech. Just awful.
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