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Sunday 27 May 2012

Another view of Ayn Rand

After reading the Coffee House discussion on the timeliness or otherwise of "Atlas Shrugged" - a book I've never managed to finished - I dug out Whittaker Chambers' famous critique, published in National Review more than half-a-century ago:

Somebody has called it: "Excruciatingly awful." I find it a remarkably silly book... Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the "looters." These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labour, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality...

Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal... From almost any page of "Atlas Shrugged", a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"

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