Steven Godin's Reviews > Anthem

Although the concept for Anthem sounded promising, and with Rand being super smart, supposedly, by the time I reached the last page, put the book down on the table, went to make a coffee, before gazing out the window, Anthem had already started its lightning quick journey of escaping my thoughts, scampering off to the nearest forest, where hopefully it gets mauled to death by a big grumpy bear. What a complete load of tosh.

So then, this is some sort of stupid future, where all sense of the individual is annihilated in deference to the collective state and each man's role in that society is assigned to him. Even some words have been completely obliterated from the language, and all citizens carry a designation such as 'Equality 7-2521', in this case, the name of our protagonist, who we learn right away was probably unfairly assigned to the duty of street sweeper for the great collective. In this setting, mankind’s reverence for a collective yet compartmentalized society has plunged him back to the dark ages, as all knowledge of the age before was destroyed and society’s new structure continues to keep men floundering in ignorance. 7-2521 is a bit of a rebel, a dystopian luke skywalker and a bit of a muppet, who goes against the values of his society when he finds a secret lair belonging to people from the time before, and resolves to learn its forbidden secrets. Also in this time his newfound wisdom and courage causes him to flirt like Casanova with an attractive girl he calls 'The Golden One'. He starts developing some much forbidden feelings for her. In other words, he wants to jump in her pants. Our hero flees to the dangerous wilderness, quickly followed by his beloved, and they start their new lives together. Yawn.

It falls flat on its face for several reasons, not least because Rand's writing style seems incredibly tedious and pretentiously boring. Also the story just isn't convincing at all, we're expected to believe that the main character is familiar with such complicated terms and expressions which should be unknowable to someone with that kind of background. It's absurd that he's able to pick up books, read them, and understand with little to no problem. Maybe he was a book junky in a previous life, who knows, who bloody cares!

As for Rand's spewing, she preaches with a sense of disregard; her efforts have been rewarded calling her a visionary, when she is clearly doing nothing more than following a trend to bash communism, socialism, and any political theory that does not promote capitalism and competition. Obviously Rand's own position in Soviet Russia comes into play, fair enough, why wouldn't it.
A Utopian society as fundamentally evil as this because it suppresses technology? What Rand forgets is that a society's worth should not be judged solely on technological advances and science.
The world is a little more complicated than that to just go lumping things into straightforward categories.

Weak philosophically and written with mediocre literary finesse, I really don't know what all the fuss is about. I regret having wasted my money on it.....Hang on?.....I didn't, did I. Yes!, that's right - It was borrowed! That's the one and only only positive.