Just where does one begin with this book? With this hailed piece of literature that has been famous for fiftyish years or so(I can't be accurate for sure, Rand is old and dead so being accurate isn't a priority). One of the most important books ever, perhaps, they may say. They being book people I would suppose. They also being all the great anti-Statists of her time and ever since, ourselves now included. Where to begin, I dare say? I know exactly where to begin, therefore completely contradicting my previous stance: we start at the beginning.
The book is good, to a point; it features strong idealistic characters that stop at nothing to achieve their goals. It has evil bureaucrats aplenty, crony capitalism and the most handsome man in the world. The three or so main characters are so over-developed it's almost a wicked act to have scribed it. Dagny Taggart, Francisco D'Anconia and Hank Rearden are all terrific characters and I love them to death. I feel like they are brethren of mine or even the closest you can be to a fellow kin without actually crossing that barrier, for they are not real. They start off interesting and intriguing and they achieve to the best of their own great ability, all the while sticking it to the man and making exuberant sums of money. But after about five hundred pages of "she stared at him blankly" it in a way loses its zest. Alright, I get it: the main three stare blankly at the evil guys. No need to perpetuate it any further.
The book is great for about seven hundred to eight hundred pages, then slips into the category of good. Ironically, the point at which we finally find out the mystery of John Galt is near the point at which the story started to drag. There are some terrific speeches and lines about earning profit and disbanding government and the like, but Galt's speech in the latter part of the book made me bathe three times intermittently while reading it. The chapter of the book should be renamed from "This is John Galt Speaking..." to "Objectivist Theory and Epistemology: Why Ayn Rand--I Mean John Galt is the Perfect Essence of Human and Why You Must Strive to Be Like The Man Who Feels No Guilt or Pain or Fear."
In the beginning I was caught up in the enormous scale of the book, but then it settles in to the mind that the scope is rather not that enormous at all, and the book is quite simple at it's core: the best in all of us. The best in all of us, which is perfectly fine, I just don't need a twelve hundred page book to get the point to me. I picked it up rather early on. It is an all-around good piece of work and worth reading and it may be deserving of all the infatuation it receives, but I have grown rather tired of Ayn Rand after reading god knows how many of her books now. The lady at the local Warden's Books suggests pretty imperatively that I need to give Anthem a look. I doubt I'll be taking her up on that. Rand is a great place to start if you are ready to liberate your mind from the shackles of a tyrannical State, but I don't think I'll be ordering that poster anymore.
I rate unto this book a Seven Point Five out of Ten. (7.5/10)
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