davywavy | Classic Literature.

Many years ago as a pretentious, up-myself student (as opposed to the pretentious, up-myself worker I am these days), I set out to read a class of books I defined as "All those books which everyone has heard of but nobody has ever actually read" - the great classics of world literature whose titles everyone knows but which never get picked up. I constructed a little fantasy in which I would be holding court in the kitchen at a student party: "War and Peace?", I would say with a dismissive wave. "I've read it. It was crap" or "The Brothers Karamazov? Pfft", I would give a disparaging gesture. "Now there's a book I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy". In my mind's eye, the girl I'd be talking to would be so impressed by this display of erudition and cynicism that she'd take her top off.
Of course, it never worked out like that - these things never do - but this initial plan eventually resulted in my realising that some books are classics because they're actually a pretty good read and so whilst I can, with all truth, say "Les Miserables? I wouldn't bother if you know what's good for you" (because it is a painful slog), I can wholeheartedly recommend anything by Alexandre Dumas or Honore de Balzac because they're both cracking writers. I sometimes wonder if this is why, unlike most of my gamer pals, I never got into books with titles like My character is way cooler than yours: Volume thirteen of the quests of Xx'axx de'G'axx'x the albino Drow psionic monk ranger with two scimitars.

One thing that's enjoyable about ploughing my way through the Penguin Classics shelf at Waterstones is seeing how genres of literature developed; take for example, the genre of future dystopias like Brave New World and >1984. Some people claim that the first in this genre was We (1921) by Yevegny Zamyatin (It's unreadable, don't bother), although I'm inclined to give that honour to Eugene Richter's remarkably prescient 1891 book Pictures of the socialistic future, which foresaw Stalinism decades before anyone else.
The thing about reading books like this is not just to see what they got wrong (Isaac Asimov once critisised 1984 for getting the date wrong...) but what they got right. Brave New World gets it bang on with consumerism to drive economic growth, and 1984 saw the rise of a political class and the creation of a meaningless political language to control thought processes ("We have a passionate commitment to drive change processes through tough targets") with remarkable clarity.

This brings me, rather neatly I think, to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Despite being written in the 1950's, it's a book which has had a lot of press lately. It is widely regarded as the most influential book on economic philosophy written in the USA in the twentieth century and deserves reading just to understand the influence and message it has carried to policy makers. Moreover, sales have trebled to 150,000 a year since the economic crisis and bank bailouts began so people plainly still see something in it. Newsnight dedicated a slot to it last week in which Rosie Boycott and a couple of less famous commentators demonstrated that they hadn't actually read it but felt comfortable pretending that they had because it's such a thick book that they didn't expect anyone else would either. And a thick book it is; at over 1000 pages of small print it's easily heavy enough to prop open a particularly heavy door or balance up the wobbliest table in your house. If the sort of social breakdown which Rand predicts within it actually takes place, you could easily use it to club your neighbours to death and then use it as fuel for a roaring fire to cook them over.
Now, I'm always a bit leery about thick books ever since that time I read Mein Kampf and found it was just like The murder of Roger Ackroyd - you read hundreds of pages and then find out at the end that the narrator was the murderer all along. However, I persevered and read it - mainly so you lot don't have to, I think.
Atlas Shrugged is the story of Dagny Taggart, the owner of a transcontinental railway in a rapidly economically and socially collapsing USA, and her struggles to keep the railway going as thought and human industry slowly vanish. First up, it has to be observed that Dagny Taggart is the biggest Mary Sue character I've encountered since Bella Swann. She's super talented and clever and able and beautiful and she runs the bestest railway in the whole wide world and all the other industrialists fancy her. She's such a teenage wish-fulfilment character that I'm just surprised that she doesn't have violet hair and a psychic wolf as her best friend.

As the book goes on, it becomes apparent that society is collapsing because the great minds and innovators are going on strike - withdrawing their ingenuity and dedication in silent protest at high taxation and the expansion of the state, and without their productive ability society is collapsing. In short, it's a thousand page long peaen to individualism and meritocracy and in that it's unobjectionable and even accurate. However, as a philosophical screed it falls into several traps.
The first is one that Plato fell into many years ago. Much of Plato's writings consist of a series of dialogues between Socrates and other people in which Socrates' philosophy is outlined by means of the famous "Socratic Dialogues". Unfortunately, Plato doesn't do himself any favours by having Socrates only argue with morons, meaning that there's no sense of any challenge to his ideas and resulting that I immediately disagree with them on general principle. A summary of Socratic dialogue might be:
One day, Socrates was out walking when he met Stupidus.
Socrates: Hail Stupidus
Stupidus: What-ho Socrates. I was just saying that I have proven that Black is White.
Socrates: Nonsense. It is obvious that Black is Black and White is White.
Stupidus: Darnit, you're right. I hasn't thought of that.
Greek Chorus: Ha ha, everyone laugh at Stupidus. What a belmer.
Rand falls into the same trap of making her villains so objectionably stupid and evil that there's no real feeling of challenge as the mighty industrialists out-think and out-argue them at every turn.
Secondly, Rand makes a number of statements that just plain aren't sustainable - for example, the assertion that the USA is the only nation is history to have been created through reason rather than conquest and through trade rather than looting. I rather suspect that this is a statement that the Sioux Nation might take exception to.

In all, it's less a novel and more a philosophical statement; the characters in it - Dagny Taggart, John Galt, Wesley Mouch, are no more real people than are Snowball and Napoleon the pigs in Animal Farm. However, there is one prediction that Rand got utterly, astoundingly right. As I read, I realised that Atlas Shrugged is an astonishingly prescient description of the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy. As the government seizes more property, the productive members of the economy (the farmers) remove their services (move to Mozambique and Tanzania). In panic, the government passes a series of laws resricting movement and banning people from putting up prices in order to fight inflation, until the end effect is a reversion to a subsistence economy, looting, banditry and the black market which the government blames on wreckers and traitors rather than their own hamfisted policies. The parallels are astonishing and the predictions of the effects of Zimbabwean economic and social policy are 100% accurate. I was genuinely surprised, as it's rare any predictive dystopian novel calls something so well.
So there you have it; Atlas Shrugged isn't a parable about our own economic crisis and the bank bailaouts, for all that some commentators say that it is. It's a parable about someone elses crisis and how predictable it really was. For that alone, it's worth reading.

In the light of all the above erudition and cynicism, I don't suppose any of my lady readers would care to take their top off?