As you may know, the king of my reading existence – in the physical realm, anyway – is Richard Sprent. This bespectacled gentleman has been kicking ass and throwing books at my face since I was about 7. Ably manning the Ellison Hawker Bookstore for approximately a billion years (Ladies, he’s married, but not really that old), Sprenty will probably be around at the Heat Death of the Universe, still convincing people that what they really need is another trade paperback to fill out their bookshelves.
Now, Sprenty has a close to 100% recommendation rate with damn nearly everyone who walks into his bookstore. If he doesn’t know you – even if you’re one of those customers who goes, “Oh, I really like that book with the blue cover” – he’ll know what you need, and what you should read.
I’ll happily admit to being more widely read than most people you’ll come across in a day. I easily plough through most books in an afternoon. Neal Stephenson’s about the only author whose works will take me an entire weekend. So Sprenty has a challenge with recommending more stuff to me. His job’s becoming even harder, now that I’ve got the Internet to hook me up with hundreds of like-minded people – I don’t think my library card’s ever been as full.
So when one of my favourite smart people in the whole world, Stephen Menenenenendianian, whose intellect dwarfs both yours AND mine by an order of magnitude only measurable in scientific notation, recommends a book, I’m pretty much obliged to read it.
So I wandered into the store and spoke, innocently,
“Sprenty! What’s this I hear about Atlas Shrugged?”
He paled and looked over the rims of his glasses at me, eyebrows raised, muppet-like.
“I’m not sure if it’s your thing, Pip.”
Really? A conflict of opinions between two of my favourite Electric Gentlemen?
“But… Smart people like it!”
“Nevertheless…”
Chastened, cautioned, I bought the book regardless and took it home.
I opened it up and read the first few paragraphs.
I looked at the remaining ten million pages.
I put the book down again and didn’t touch it for some months.
Then, the other week, I picked the book up again. Too many serendipities in my life were happening for me to ignore the fact that I was obviously fated to read Atlas Shrugged again. So I started, and pushed through the incredibly slow, dull, dense opening, only to discover…
That the entire book was written in that style.
Mark my words. This is not some hyper-dense, information-packed but still enjoyably-fast-paced novel of the newer speculative fiction’s generation.
This is slow, grey, dull, Eastern European, We’re-All-Going-To-Starve-To-Death-On-A-Diet-Of-Starchy-Foods sort of novel.
Is it well written? Pretty much, no. The words were so laboriously thunked into the page that I found myself reading far, far slower than I have done since about the second grade. For some writers I slow down my admittedly frenetic pace of reading because of the sheer lyricism of the prose. Patrick Rothfuss is a good example of where I happily spent three days reading The Name Of The Wind, simply because I was enjoying it so much.
Atlas Shrugged is more like having each. individual. word. smacked into your head.
With a lump of industrial clay.
That’s not to say there are moments of poetry there.. But they don’t have the lyrical, rhythmic quality that makes reading a glide. They leap out at your eyes and stab your brain, each sentence and declamation demanding attention. A rushing, exhilarating ride on a train takes fifteen pages of careful, laborious description of the protagonist’s reaction to each new observed phenomena.
The story, though, is intense and amazingly well-plotted. You can pick up the irresistible, immutable themes of the book within the first twenty pages. But you’l push yourself through the rest of the book – with the same gritty determination as the leading characters, who will do things beyond the limits of human endurance because that is what they are driven to do.
Rand, unsubtly – but, strangely enough, without causing irritation – also uses the entire book as a platform for expounding the ideas of her Philosophy, Objectivism. It’s less painful than reading through Bertrand Russell, but only barely.
Rand’s writing is this weird, compelling balance between sheer terribleness and hypnotism. Her gaunt, sparse, bleak world is perfectly suited by her writings, and the depressing industrial meltdown (and admittedly invigorating final Act) are at once both mind-melting and comfortable. We know that there aren’t going to be any segues into colourful romances or petty distractions. All of the main characters in the book are heroic juggernauts, approaching their world with views that are both alien and perfectly, rationally understandable.
I gave a week of my life to the book.
I’m going to go read it again.
I’m not recommending it if you want to be entertained.
Hell, if you want to be challenged, go read something else, as well. There are tons of books out there that present information just as challenging, hard-hitting, philosophical, whatever – whatever you want in a book, there’s a better one out there.
But Atlas Shrugged is like a literary Russo-American Philosophical Zombie.
It keeps plodding after you.
The moans over your shoulder are reminding you it’s there to be read.
And once it’s got you, it feeds on your brains.
It’ll force you to re-evaluate your world.
And that’s a good thing, right?
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