A review by duffypratt
Anthem, by Ayn Rand
1.0
This is a terrible book. It doesn't work as a story, or as literature, or as philosophy, or in any conceivable way. The ideas are simple, stupid, and stultifying.
Start with the world. It's a dystopia. The key characteristic of the world is that everyone works perpetually for the common good, and for nothing else. In the process of doing this, somehow, the world has abandoned all technology, to the point where the candle is considered a great invention. The book takes place in the distant future, and there are unmentionable times. And how did we get from there to hear? Well, we won't mention that. Nothing is offered as a plausible, or even an implausible, explanation for this change. Except that somehow, we are supposed to accept that this is the inevitable result of what would happen if people started cooperating with each other.
Now the characters. There are none. There are a couple who come close. The first person narrator comes the closest. He wants to be a scholar, but instead is assigned to street sweeping. He takes off from the community each night to spend time alone writing this book inside a tunnel of some sort (probably an abandoned subway tunnel). No-one ever seems to notice that he has take off and that he is not participating in the community endeavors, whatever they are, because we have no idea of what they are.
There is also his girlfriend. She is notable only because she absolutely worships him. Why? We have no idea.
During the book, he "discovers" electricity and tries to show it to the scholars so he, too, can become one. They reject him, torture him, and he runs away. The girlfriend follows him. All of this is conveyed with zero tension, zero drama, zero believable action. He runs into the forbidden forest. There he encounters .... nothing dangerous. Nature poses no threat at all to him. He doesn't have to actually do anything to prevail. Everything comes easily.
Once off on their own, they find a library. He learns that there used to be a word "I", and it changes his world. He now understands that his own personal happiness is the most important thing. The only end that is worth pursuing. And he intends to spread this new word to like minded thinkers, and to his "friends." Who will his friends be? People who worship his ideas, just like his girlfriend, and thus worship him, again like his girlfriend.
There is nothing in this book which suggests that surviving in a state of nature might be difficult. There is nothing to suggest that people might have to compete with each other for limited resources, and that, to accomplish that end, they might join together to co-operate with each other against their common enemy. Those difficulties are ignored because they would not fit nicely with the simple-minded "philosophy" that's being propounded.
Finally the guy names himself Prometheus, and his girlfriend Gaia. Prometheus, presumably, because he is bringing the fire and light to humanity. And Gaia because she will be the mother of the new earth. The Prometheus allusion was already so obvious that I groaned when it was made explicit. But Gaia? She was the mother of Prometheus, so in this book, we are to conclude that the narrator is sleeping with his own mother? Moreover, in the Greek myths, Gaia basically goes to perpetual sleep, and Prometheus is left chained to a rock with his liver eaten daily by vultures. These are the icons we should aspire to? Even the myth comparison only works on the most superficial level, and falls apart when looked at from the Wikipedia level of depth.
Finally, for the first ten chapters, this book employs its own sort of newspeak, being written in a language where the first person singular has been abolished. This makes the book entirely annoying to read, but that one detail is the only way that the language has changed as a result of hundreds or thousands of years of collectivism. Worse, the elimination of those words has done nothing to eliminate the ideas that underly them. The narrator still knows how to refer to himself individually, and to others. It's just slightly more awkward. In contemporary english, we use the word "you" interchangeably to refer to the singular and the plural, and it causes little to no confusion. Getting rid of "I" and using "we" to refer to the plural or the individual would not cause any great shift in people's ways of thinking. In a limited way, we already do that with the word we: monarchs typically refer to themselves as "we" when speaking officially, as a kind of recognition that the monarch is both the individual and the state at the same time. No one has any problem dealing with that. So even the central conceit of this book is an abject failure. We are not amused.
Start with the world. It's a dystopia. The key characteristic of the world is that everyone works perpetually for the common good, and for nothing else. In the process of doing this, somehow, the world has abandoned all technology, to the point where the candle is considered a great invention. The book takes place in the distant future, and there are unmentionable times. And how did we get from there to hear? Well, we won't mention that. Nothing is offered as a plausible, or even an implausible, explanation for this change. Except that somehow, we are supposed to accept that this is the inevitable result of what would happen if people started cooperating with each other.
Now the characters. There are none. There are a couple who come close. The first person narrator comes the closest. He wants to be a scholar, but instead is assigned to street sweeping. He takes off from the community each night to spend time alone writing this book inside a tunnel of some sort (probably an abandoned subway tunnel). No-one ever seems to notice that he has take off and that he is not participating in the community endeavors, whatever they are, because we have no idea of what they are.
There is also his girlfriend. She is notable only because she absolutely worships him. Why? We have no idea.
During the book, he "discovers" electricity and tries to show it to the scholars so he, too, can become one. They reject him, torture him, and he runs away. The girlfriend follows him. All of this is conveyed with zero tension, zero drama, zero believable action. He runs into the forbidden forest. There he encounters .... nothing dangerous. Nature poses no threat at all to him. He doesn't have to actually do anything to prevail. Everything comes easily.
Once off on their own, they find a library. He learns that there used to be a word "I", and it changes his world. He now understands that his own personal happiness is the most important thing. The only end that is worth pursuing. And he intends to spread this new word to like minded thinkers, and to his "friends." Who will his friends be? People who worship his ideas, just like his girlfriend, and thus worship him, again like his girlfriend.
There is nothing in this book which suggests that surviving in a state of nature might be difficult. There is nothing to suggest that people might have to compete with each other for limited resources, and that, to accomplish that end, they might join together to co-operate with each other against their common enemy. Those difficulties are ignored because they would not fit nicely with the simple-minded "philosophy" that's being propounded.
Finally the guy names himself Prometheus, and his girlfriend Gaia. Prometheus, presumably, because he is bringing the fire and light to humanity. And Gaia because she will be the mother of the new earth. The Prometheus allusion was already so obvious that I groaned when it was made explicit. But Gaia? She was the mother of Prometheus, so in this book, we are to conclude that the narrator is sleeping with his own mother? Moreover, in the Greek myths, Gaia basically goes to perpetual sleep, and Prometheus is left chained to a rock with his liver eaten daily by vultures. These are the icons we should aspire to? Even the myth comparison only works on the most superficial level, and falls apart when looked at from the Wikipedia level of depth.
Finally, for the first ten chapters, this book employs its own sort of newspeak, being written in a language where the first person singular has been abolished. This makes the book entirely annoying to read, but that one detail is the only way that the language has changed as a result of hundreds or thousands of years of collectivism. Worse, the elimination of those words has done nothing to eliminate the ideas that underly them. The narrator still knows how to refer to himself individually, and to others. It's just slightly more awkward. In contemporary english, we use the word "you" interchangeably to refer to the singular and the plural, and it causes little to no confusion. Getting rid of "I" and using "we" to refer to the plural or the individual would not cause any great shift in people's ways of thinking. In a limited way, we already do that with the word we: monarchs typically refer to themselves as "we" when speaking officially, as a kind of recognition that the monarch is both the individual and the state at the same time. No one has any problem dealing with that. So even the central conceit of this book is an abject failure. We are not amused.